ATLANTA, GA—Chick-fil-A corporate headquarters announced Friday that the restaurant will be getting a new mascot in place of the traditional Chick-fil-A cow: a golden calf.
Restaurant patrons will be asked to dance around and worship the golden calf when they enter the restaurant to show their submission to the LGBTQ agenda.
"Take off the body piercings that your LGBTQ+ same-sex partners are wearing, and bring them to me," said Dan Cathy in a solemn ceremony while creating the restaurant's first-ever golden calf this morning. So all the people did so and brought them to Cathy. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a plastic fork. "This is your god, people of Chick-fil-A, who brings you great business and allows you to expand into other markets."
The US federal government is divided up into a variety of institutions, with the three main "branches" of government designed to compete against each other. Theoretically, these three branches were initially thought to place checks on the other branches of government, thus minimizing abuses of power by the federal government overall.
Things haven't really worked out that way. Thanks to the rise of political parties, coordination between the branches — along party lines — has often replaced competition between the branches. Moreover, as political parties vie for the a controlling majority in the various branches, they are loath to limit the power of these institutions lest these partisans limit their own power in the process. Nor do the different branches represent different socio-economic groups in the manner imagined by John Adams in his Defense of the Constitutions.
So weakened had this imagined separation of powers become by the time of the New Deal that Franklin Roosevelt asserted during the days of his court-packing scheme that the various branches of government existed to work together, rather than to mutually obstruct each other. In a 1937 "fireside chat," Roosevelt claimed the federal government is
a three-horse team provided by the Constitution to the American people so that their field might be plowed. The three horses are, of course, the three branches of government – the Congress, the Executive and the Courts. Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not.
President Trump renewed his verbal attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, questioning her mental stability and fitness for office.
"But I have to deal with crazy Nancy, she's crazy as a ... as a bed bug," Trump said during a nearly hourlong interview on Fox & Friends Friday morning. "She is nuts. What she's doing — and she's not talented. She's highly overrated. All she's doing is sitting. She's not doing anything for the people. And now it turns out that the whole impeachment thing is a scam."
Trump was asked by Fox hosts to react to five days of public testimony on Capitol Hill as part of the impeachment investigation into his presidency. Pelosi must now decide if and when to begin formal impeachment proceedings.
A former CIA case agent was sentenced Friday to 19 years in prison for an espionage conspiracy with China.
Fifty-five-year-old Jerry Chun Shing Lee was sentenced in federal court in Alexandria after his guilty plea earlier this year.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, but prosecutors and defense lawyers disagreed about the extent of the crime.
Prosecutors say Chinese intelligence officers gave Lee more than $840,000 and that Lee likely gave them all the information he had from a 13-year career as a CIA case officer. They sought a prison term of more than 20 years.
Defense lawyers say the government never proved that the money came from China or that Lee ever carried out any plans to deliver government secrets.
An Ohio man was arrested last year for holding a shotgun in his home while intoxicated. Unlike this CZ, it was unloaded.
Should gun owners in Ohio be permitted to “carry” their firearms in their homes while intoxicated?
That’s the question at issue in a case headed for the Ohio Supreme Court in February.
Fredrick Weber was convicted in June of 2018 under a 45-year-old law that prohibits Ohio residents from carrying or using a firearm while intoxicated. Weber appealed his conviction to the 12th District Court of Appeals, which confirmed the municipal court’s ruling. Now, on a 4-3 vote, the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.
According to court documents, a deputy and a sergeant from the Clermont County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched to Weber’s home after his wife reported that her husband was carrying a firearm while intoxicated. Even though she told deputies that Weber had put his firearm away, she let them into the home, where they saw Weber coming out of a doorway and holding a shotgun.
The Washington Examiner reported Thursday that Rosemont Capital, a company led by Hunter Biden’s business partners, received $130 million in federal bailout loans while Joe Biden was in office as vice president in 2009.
The Examiner reported:
An investment firm linked to Hunter Biden received over $130 million in federal bailout loans while his father Joe Biden was vice president and routed profits through a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, according to federal banking and corporate records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
Rosemont Capital, an investment firm at the center of Hunter Biden’s much-scrutinized financial network, was one of the companies approved to participate in the 2009 federal loan program known as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF.
The developing story about how the US intelligence and national security agencies may have conspired to influence and possibly even reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election is compelling, even if one is disinclined to believe that such a plot would be possible to execute. Not surprisingly perhaps there have been considerable introspection among former and current officials who have worked in those and related government positions, many of whom would agree that there is urgent need for a considerable restructuring and reining in of the 17 government agencies that have some intelligence or law enforcement function. Most would also agree that much of the real damage that has been done has been the result of the unending global war on terror launched by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, which has showered the agencies with resources and money while also politicizing their leadership and freeing them from restraints on their behavior.
If the tens of billions of dollars lavished on the intelligence community together with a “gloves off” approach towards oversight that allowed them to run wild had produced good results, it might be possible to argue that it was all worth it. But the fact is that intelligence gathering has always been a bad investment even if it is demonstrably worse at the present. One might argue that the CIA’s notorious Soviet Estimate prolonged the Cold War and that the failure to connect dots and pay attention to what junior officers were observing allowed 9/11 to happen. And then there was the empowerment of al-Qaeda during the Soviet-Afghan war followed by failure to penetrate the group once it began to carry out operations.
More recently there have been Guantanamo, torture in black prisons, renditions of terror suspects to be tortured elsewhere, killing of US citizens by drone, turning Libya into a failed state and terrorist haven, arming militants in Syria, and, of course, the Iraqi alleged WMDs, the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. And the bad stuff happened in bipartisan fashion, under Democrats and Republicans, with both neocons and liberal interventionists all playing leading roles. The only one punished for the war crimes was former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed some of what was going on.
The following is an excerpt from Blaze Media’s Capitol Hill Brief email newsletter:
As Congress slogs through more monotonous testimony in the impeachment probe against President Donald Trump, the man at the center of the impeachment narrative — Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — appeared on BlazeTV host Glenn Beck’s program Wednesday night to give his side of the story.
During the exclusive interview, Giuliani told Beck that his initial job in Ukraine was to gather exculpatory evidence counter to the Mueller investigation and report about allegations of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. During that process, he says, he started turning up information about collusion between Democrats and the Ukrainians to influence the 2016 election.
Giuliani also claimed that United States diplomats — including some who have testified against President Trump in Congress’ ongoing impeachment efforts — were doing the bidding of leftist billionaire George Soros in a “massive pay-for-play multimillion-dollar scheme.”
For well over a decade, identity thieves, phishers, and other online scammers have created a black market of stolen and aggregated consumer data that they used to break into people's accounts, steal their money, or impersonate them. In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server, comprising 4 terabytes of personal information—about 1.2 billion records in all.
While the collection is impressive for its sheer volume, the data doesn't include sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or Social Security numbers. It does, though, contain profiles of hundreds of millions of people that include home and cell phone numbers, associated social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github, work histories seemingly scraped from LinkedIn, almost 50 million unique phone numbers, and 622 million unique email addresses.
"It’s bad that someone had this whole thing wide open," Troia says. "This is the first time I've seen all these social media profiles collected and merged with user profile information into a single database on this scale. From the perspective of an attacker, if the goal is to impersonate people or hijack their accounts, you have names, phone numbers, and associated account URLs. That's a lot of information in one place to get you started."
The IP address for the server simply traced to Google Cloud Services, so Troia doesn't know who amassed the data stored there. More
Former Vice President Joe Biden threatened Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for launching an investigation into his activities with Ukraine while in the Obama White House, stating the Republican will “regret” the move his “whole life.”
On Thursday, Graham sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo requesting documents to aid in determining whether Biden pushed for the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to squash a sweeping probe into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy giant where his son, Hunter Biden, served as a board member. The younger Biden was compensated generously, making up to $83,000 a month for several years while on the Burisma’s board.
“Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he’s going to regret his whole life,” Biden told CNN host Don Lemon in a Friday interview in South Carolina. “I say Lindsey, I just — I’m just embarrassed by what you’re doing, for you. I mean, my Lord.” More
Former National Security Council official Dr. Fiona Hill testified on Thursday that President Barack Obama had ignored the “inter-agency consensus” on sending weapons to Ukraine for “political” reasons.
Under questioning from Republicans, Hill admitted that she herself had been against giving weapons to Ukraine to help it fight Russian invasion, and that she had written an op-ed in the Washington Post expressing those views.
She also said that the “inter-agency consensus” had actually been in favor of arming the Ukrainians; she herself was not in government service at the time, but working at the liberal Brookings Institution think tank.
Hill noted that President Obama had ignored the “inter-agency consensus” for what she called “political” reasons. She explained that Obama was concerned that arming the Ukrainians could provoke the Russians.
On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who worked for Hill and remains at the National Security Council, testified that President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily withhold aid from Ukraine went against the “inter-agency consensus” on Ukraine, though he also acknowledged that Trump had armed Ukraine while Obama had not. More
Sanctuary states: “How dare you ask us to hold illegal alien child sex offenders caught in our jails! Immigration is a federal issue; don’t waste local law enforcement resources with it.”
ICE: “OK, we will have to do it ourselves and get the illegal alien child sex offenders at the courthouses right before they are released on bond, because that is the last opportunity to ensure they are not needlessly sent back into the communities to re-offend when they can be removed from the country.”
Sanctuary states: “We prohibit the feds from doing enforcement at all, and they will be blocked from our courthouses to ensure the sex offenders are released.”
That is essentially the dialogue that has taken place between ICE and the state of Oregon over the past few months. So much for the excuses of sanctuaries not wanting to get local law enforcement involved in immigration. Now we know it was really all about blocking the feds from doing their job, thereby ensuring that the most dangerous aliens, including sex offenders, are released. Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Martha Walters issued an order attempting to bar ICE from apprehending illegal aliens at courthouses.
President Trump said Friday that he is working on a plan to allow Florida and other states to import less expensive prescription drugs, a promise the administration made four months ago.
"Hard-working Americans don’t deserve to pay such high prices for the drugs they need. We are fighting DAILY to make sure this HAPPENS..." Trump tweeted.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed legislation in June to allow prescription drug importation into the state, breaking with GOP orthodoxy. The measure would require a sign-off from the Trump Department of Health and Human Services.
Director Clint Eastwood delivered yet another understated story about a regular Joe thrust into the spotlight due to unfortunate circumstances, only this time the fake news media gets a serious comeuppance, according to early reviews for the upcoming movie “Richard Jewell.”
Richard Jewell became a national hero during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, when he discovered a bomb planted in Centennial Park. Risking his own life, Jewell successfully helped to evacuate the area, saving countless lives before the bomb detonated. As a result of his heroic feats, only one person died in the blast (a second person later died of a heart attack) while 111 people were injured.
Though first hailed for his triumphant efforts, things quickly turned sour for Jewell the moment the media learned that the FBI was investigating him as a potential suspect, believing he may have planted the bomb himself in order to gain notoriety. As reported by Christian Toto of HollywoodInToto, early reviews indicate that Eastwood provides an unflinching look into the horrific three-month nightmare that Jewell endured until the FBI finally cleared him.
A judge gave Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann the green light to continue in his $275 million libel lawsuit against NBC, according to court documents.
Sandmann became the center of racial controversy after a video of him smirking in front of a Native American man while wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., went viral in January. The teen was labeled as racist in news coverage from several major outlets, including the Washington Post, CNN, and NBC. It was later revealed that Sandmann had done nothing wrong and that circulating videos did not account for the full timeline of events.
The Kentucky teenager’s attorneys filed multi-million-dollar lawsuits against several newsrooms, including a $275 million libel lawsuit against NBCUniversal. NBC tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, but a judge denied their request on Thursday.
A book signed by President Trump in 1987 as “future president” has sold at auction for more than those of former Presidents Harry Truman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter.
The autographed copy of Trump: The Art Of The Deal sold this week for $1,500, surprising Bill Panagopulos, Alexander Historical Auctions president, who expected a top price of $1,200.
He just told us:
“Books signed by presidents are widely desired by presidential autograph collectors. With our sale yesterday of a book signed by Donald Trump for $1,500, his books now far exceed those signed by his predecessors, including Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and especially Jimmy Carter, who has signed so many books, they are hard to sell for over $50.”
OCEAN CITY — It’s no secret emergence of ride-share programs such as Uber and Lyft have impacted the local taxi cab industry and even the resort’s municipal bus system, but the extent to which remains relatively unknown.
During a Transportation Committee meeting this week, Public Works Director Hal Adkins presented an update on the perceived impact of ride-share programs such as Uber and Lyft, for example, on the town’s municipal bus ridership, and perhaps to a larger extent, the city’s privately owned and operated taxi industry. While the impact is not easily quantifiable from a statistics standpoint, it’s clear the ride-share programs are getting the lion’s share of the resort’s public transportation opportunities.
Under the state’s reimbursement formula, licensed ride-share programs return 25 cents to the town of Ocean City for each transaction that originates in the municipality. However, that formula is based on the transaction alone and does not include the number of passengers. For example, Ocean City gets 25-cents per transaction whether an Uber driver picks up a single passenger or six, according to Adkins.
Sen. Lindsey Graham wants access to phone transcripts between Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine's leader in the month before a top prosecutor, who was alleged to have investigated the owner of the natural gas company that employed Biden's son, was fired.
President Trump and his allies have accused the elder Biden of pushing Ukraine to fire then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to stop him from investigating Burisma Holdings' owner, Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, in an effort to protect his son Hunter Biden.
Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens have become a central tenet of an impeachment investigation.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The exciting new TV show Impeachment Inquiry was poised to take the ratings by storm, promising to eclipse all the other shows in its time slot. But the show will be canceled after one season, like a lot of bad TV shows and also Firefly.
After just five rocky episodes that failed to deliver any major plot twists, producers pulled the plug on the impeachment inquiry due to lack of viewers.
"The showrunners promised all these big bombshells, shocking twists, and startling revelations, but they weren't able to deliver," said one reviewer writing in Hollywood Reporter. "When there are so many better options out there---rewatching The Office, checking out The Good Place, staring at paint as it slowly dries---why would people tune into this tepid, uninspired mess?"
David Holmes, a State Department staffer at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine who Democrats hope will help the effort to impeach President Donald Trump, has a history of bucking authority and was a fixture in the Obama White House.
Photos and articles featuring Holmes have surfaced in the American Foreign Service Association’s (AFSA) Foreign Service Journal and other media reports.
Holmes was featured in a photo in a meeting in the White House with Obama in a bizarre story in the New York Post about White House lawyer Avril Haines, who Obama had named as the deputy director of the CIA. The Post story explained how before her work in the Obama administration, Haines operated a bookstore in Baltimore, where she held erotica readings.
AFSA also used a photo of Holmes seated with Obama on Air Force One.
National Public Radio (NPR) wrote about Holmes and his reputation at the State Department:
“His message was so good and so influential that it went all the way to the secretary of state,” said Eric Rubin, an active duty foreign service officer and president of the American Foreign Service Association.
Rubin, who also received the award in 1994, made clear it is not about whistleblowers, but rather recognizing someone who feels strongly enough to put themselves on record for voicing views on policy that may differ from the administration.
In his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearing on Thursday, Holmes was critical of Trump’s approach to foreign policy that includes involving people who are not part of the “inter-agency” chain of command. More
President Trump made a surprise visit to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Thursday evening with the first lady and conservative actor Jon Voight by his side.
Photos from the president's visit to the base show Trump saluting the flag-draped caskets of David Knadle, 33, from Texas, and Kirk Fuchigami Jr., 35. The two were helicopter pilots killed during a crash in Afghanistan this week.
The Army says it is investigating the incident that led to the two soldiers' death.
Voight was at the White House on Thursday to participate in the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal ceremonies.
Dozens of protesters interrupted Elizabeth Warren's campaign rally at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia the night after the debate, causing supporters in attendance to counter with chants of their own.
The protesters, nearly all black men and women, were all wearing matching black shirts with white lettering that read: 'Powerful Parent Network.' About five minutes into her stump speech, the group began stomping their feet on the rhythmically on the gymnasium risers in the L.S. Epps Gymnasium at the historically black university.
They then began recited several chants, including: 'We want to be heard.'
This prompted the hundreds of others attending the rally in support of Warren to chant back, 'Let her speak.'
Warren gave up trying to speak over the shouting and appeared to want to wait it out.
The American Family Association (AFA) has created a petition that urges Chick-fil-A to return to its support of Christian ministries such as the Salvation Army.
On Monday, Chick-fil-A announced it would stop making donations to Christian ministries such as the Salvation Army, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and the Paul Anderson Youth Home – all organizations that embrace the biblical foundation of human sexuality and marriage between one man and one woman.
“Chick-Fil-A has evidently decided to move away from supporting Christian ministries and side instead with the those who believe biblical teaching on human sexuality are indeed hate groups,” Tim Wildmon, AFA president told Breitbart News. “Make no mistake, this is compilation or in plain English — Chick-fil-A caved to the LGBT stormtroopers.”
The petition asks individuals to sign in order to urge Chick-fil-A “to return to its founding principles of standing beside and supporting those ministries that hold firm to God’s view of marriage as between one man and one woman.” More
SALISBURY – Officials in Wicomico County agreed this week to provide nearly $36,000 in funding to maintain a senior nutrition program.
On Tuesday, the Wicomico County Council voted unanimously to transfer $35,566 from the county’s contingency fund to MAC Inc. Area Agency on Aging to maintain funding for its Senior Nutrition Services program.
“They represent four counties, and there was a funding shortage,” Assistant Director of Administration Weston Young told the council this week. “There was some conversation back in the spring about Wicomico covering the full amount and getting reimbursed from the three other counties, but this is purely for Wicomico County’s portion of this.”
MAC, which stands for Maintaining Active Citizens, serves seniors in Dorchester, Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester counties by providing services that preserve health and independence.
More than 75,000 pounds of salad have been recalled due to a possible E. coli contamination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The Thursday press release stated:
Missa Bay, LLC, a Swedesboro, N.J. establishment, is recalling approximately 75,233 pounds of salad products that contain meat or poultry because the lettuce ingredient may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today.
The products subject to recall bear establishment number “EST. 18502B” inside the USDA mark of inspection. These items were shipped to distribution locations in Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.
The food items were produced from October 14, 2019, through October 16, 2019, and were listed as bowl salads containing romaine lettuce sold at Walmart, Target, and Aldi.
A Rasmussen poll found that voters fear a greater threat of violence from President Donald Trump’s opponents than from his supporters.
“Voters see a bigger threat from President Trump’s opponents over policy issues than from his supporters if Democrats succeed in removing him from office,” Rasmussen observed. “One-in-three still see the threat of civil war in the near future”:
Democrats, the Hollywood elite, and the mainstream media frequently portray Trump and his supporters as intolerant, divisive, and even violent.
According to the survey, however, 59 percent of likely U.S. voters fear it is Trump’s foes who will resort to violence, including 34 percent who are “very concerned.”
SNOW HILL – The Worcester County Commissioners agreed to give $100,000 to local food pantries.
Rather than participate in a state program that would have distributed aid based on zip code, the commissioners agreed to give $100,000 to local organizations that worked to feed the hungry.
“Worcester County can take care of Worcester County,” Commissioner Chip Bertino said. “For the state to come down here and tell us how we’re supposed to allocate, and discriminate against one zip code over another zip code, I just have a real problem with it. I’d just rather us handle it by ourselves.”
At a meeting Tuesday, the commissioners were presented with a request from the Worcester County Department of Social Services to apply to participate in the Maryland Summer SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) initiative. The state program, which requires matching funds from the county, is intended to reduce food insecurity during the months children are not in school. The state has $200,000 set aside to provide SNAP benefits, which would consist of an extra $30 added to EBT cards of participating households in June, July and August and $10 extra in December.
Bertino was quick to express reservations about the program, which he said was based on the unfair funding formula the county was burdened with. He said Worcester County would be required to match 50% of the grant while Wicomico County would only have to match 5% and Somerset would only have to match 4%. He also said he wasn’t sure the extra funding would actually result in more food for local children.
“Would this grant money get to the people we want it to get to?” he said.
Ellen Payne of the Worcester County Department of Social Services said that the funding would be applied to a family’s EBT card.
“One would assume children would get the food but there’d be no way to guarantee what the parent is actually doing with their EBT card,” she said.
