Illinois Man Jumps Into Moving Car to Save a Stranger’s Life: See the Video

An Illinois man risked his own safety to help a complete stranger suffering a seizure, and it’s all caught on dash cam.

Video from the Dixon Police department shows a car running a red light at low speed, heading into oncoming traffic.

The driver was suffering a seizure. That’s when Randy Tompkins jumpedout of his pickup truck and dove through the passenger window. Tompkins stopped the car in its tracks.

(Read more from “Illinois Man Jumps Into Moving Car to Save a Stranger’s Life: See the Video” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

This Mystery Virus Is Being Compared to One of the World’s Worst Illnesses

A year and a half ago “Full Measure” first reported on a baffling new illness responsible for nightmarish scenarios: a child wakes up and his legs don’t move. Soon, he’s paralyzed from the neck down.

Since then, the number of cases has grown. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it still has no clue what’s causing it—and won’t say much else. One thing we know … the disease mimics one of the world’s most feared illnesses: polio. Today, we continue our investigation into the mysterious outbreak that’s left hundreds of American children suddenly frozen.

The following is Sharyl Attkisson’s “Full Measure” report on this issue.

Christopher Roberts, parent: Carter probably developed the flu-like symptoms on a Saturday morning and within 24 hours of that on Sunday morning we found him on the floor and no mobility on his right side. He was unable to move and he was faintly asking for help.

Carter Roberts was just 3 when he was hit by sudden paralysis that looked just like polio. We first caught up with father, Chris, last year at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where Carter was hospitalized for months.

Roberts: Last night he cried for 25 minutes. Just uncontrollably. He’s in, I think, regular and constant pain. Although he is immobile, he can definitely feel everything all over his body. But then this morning we’ve had a really good day.

CDC gave the mysterious paralysis a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. Myelitis is inflammation of the spinal cord. Doctors told Hayden Werdal of Bremerton, Washington, that he just had a sinus infection—but in 10 days he was paralyzed from the neck down. Mandy Baker was a musical honor student about to start her sophomore year of high school and went from feeling fine to being paralyzed in a single day. Her illness ran up a $3 million hospital bill and treatments not covered by insurance.

As cases piled up in fall of 2014, doctors theorized they were connected to a rare outbreak of a virus called enterovirus, or EV-D68. Unusually high numbers of kids were showing up at ERs with severe breathing problems from EV-D68. Some ended up paralyzed. Within five months, there were more than a thousand (1,153) severe cases of EV-D68 in 49 states, and at least 14 deaths. And 120 known cases of AFM paralysis in 34 states, mostly young children.

The CDC—normally quick to raise alarms and speak on TV when there’s any threat of infectious disease—wasn’t saying much at all this time. They declined our repeated interview requests and instead pointed me to this video that it provided WebMD.

Brian Rha, medical epidemiologist, CDC: Infants, children, and teenagers are more likely to become infected with enteroviruses and become ill.

The video offered little insight. I requested information under the Freedom of Information Act. It took CDC more than a year and a half to begin turning over documents. Internal emails show CDC investigated what could be triggering the AFM paralysis in some kids, including West Nile Virus, insecticides, international travel, and vaccines—particularly oral polio vaccine.

Officials say they still can’t pinpoint the origin. There was one physician in the email exchanges who treated dozens of the paralyzed children—and seemed to be looking at the bigger picture.

Dr. Benjamin Greenberg wondered if we were seeing the 21st-century version of polio … if it is “in the early stages of evolution,” he urged CDC, “we can get ahead of it.”

I recently tracked down Greenberg at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas.

Sharyl Attkisson: What’s the difference between what we’re seeing with these children and polio?

Benjamin Greenberg: Not much—which is interesting.

Greenberg filled in a lot of blanks on the mysterious afflictions … where the CDC would not.

Attkisson: Is it accurate to say this is less contagious than polio?

Greenberg: We don’t know yet. Part of what we’re lacking is the ability to go through a population, and determine who has been exposed to this virus and who hasn’t. We looked at the papers written 100 years ago describing cases of poliomyelitis in the U.S., and we talked to colleagues from around the world who are actually part of teams who treat polio cases. And to all of our surprises, basically what we were seeing was a polio-like illness but not from the polio virus.

Attkisson: Millions of people had been infected with this EV-D68, but a relatively few actually come down with the paralysis. Do we have any idea why those certain children get paralyzed?

Greenberg: We don’t know that yet, but it’s worth noting that that phenomenon, that the same virus can infect thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people with only a few individuals having catastrophic events from the virus is true for almost every virus in human biology.

At its worst, polio killed 3,000 (3,145) and paralyzed 21,000 Americans (21,269) in a single year back in 1952. In 2014, there were 120 known cases of AFM paralysis in the U.S. In 2015, there were just 21. But last year, the number surged to 138. There have been five confirmed cases so far this year.

Attkisson: Did polio have a pathology that was anything similar to what you’re seeing now?

Greenberg: So if we look at the history of polio, at least in the United States, it started with small outbreaks, and then would disappear for years, and then re-emerge.

Attkisson: Clearly, it’s not a one-time event.

Greenberg: Clearly, as we saw in this last year, we see—we had a spike in cases again. There were about 120 reported in 2014; relative to—monitoring that started in August. In 2016, what we saw is over 130, maybe over 140, cases. And so we know that this virus has the capability, if it is the cause, to come back, and to cause damage.

With CDC saying so little publicly, families struck by the horrible illness have found each other on Facebook. Erin Olivera runs a parent support group. In 2012, she says she noticed her 2-year-old son Lucian crawling oddly; soon he could barely move. In Albany, Oregon, McKenzie Anderson went from having a cold to being paralyzed from the neck down and on a ventilator in 12 days. There’s Sadie Briggs in Oklahoma City, Laura Carton of Oswego, Illinois, and Adrian Dittmar of Seaman, Ohio.

And although CDC told me it has “not received any reports of death in an AFM case…”

The family of 14-year-old Isaac Prestridge of Louisiana says the CDC confirmed to the coroner that AFM was the cause of their son’s death. He got sick last October, complaining of a “weird feeling in his knees,” and died two days later.

Attkisson: Some of these kids die?

Greenberg: “They do. It is—it is a very rare event—to have death related to acute flaccid myelitis; unfortunately, it has happened.”

Attkisson: As a medical outsider, I look and I say more kids have been hurt seriously with this than measles, Ebola, and Zika combined. But you don’t hear anything about it. There’s no emergency funding requests, CDC is not making big public pronouncements. How do you explain that?

Greenberg: So there are some scientist reasons to have priorities around Ebola, measles, and Zika that are very valid. Enterovirus D68 is a common virus with a low rate of causing—significant paralysis or conditions that lead to disability. And so the decisions have been made that, while it is a problem, while it is a concern, it may not garner the level of need that some other public health issues do.

Attkisson: Do you agree with that?

Greenberg: I wish we had the resources to do it all.

Greenberg says there’s reason to hope that AFM isn’t the beginning of another polio. So far, he says, the rate of paralysis after infection seems lower.

Greenberg: The No. 1 question we get asked is about rehabilitation and recovery. Will children get better after the event?

Attkisson: And what’s the answer?

Greenberg: They do. It’s very slow, and it takes a lot of work. When we stay aggressive and we push and we stay with a routine, we’re seeing slowly but surely improvements occur.

Today, Carter is out of the hospital and back at home in Richmond, Virginia. There’s been no improvement in his condition, but he’s considered “stable.”

Roberts: I guess long-term prognosis has varied greatly between the different patients to this point. What I’ve seen, what I’ve read and heard, there have only been two children who have recovered from this, but even then not fully because they’re still demonstrating muscular weaknesses.

Believe it or not, AFM paralysis isn’t a “reportable disease” like West Nile Virus or measles … meaning doctors aren’t required to report cases. Greenberg thinks that should change … in fact, he advocates a broadened surveillance system to track all kinds of sudden paralysis to better find answers as to what’s causing them. (For more from the author of “This Mystery Virus Is Being Compared to One of the World’s Worst Illnesses” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Transgender Athlete Beats Girls but Would’ve Placed Last Against Boys

A transgender high school athlete beat girls in the Connecticut track state championship Tuesday, but his time would have placed him last in the boys’ race.

Andraya Yearwood, a freshman at Cromwell High School, placed first in the girls’ 100-meter and 200-meter dash finals against girls from other schools in the region, according to Turtleboy Sports. But his time would have earned him last place in both boys’ competitions.

Yearwood finished the girls’ 100-meter dash with a time of 12.66 seconds and the girls’ 200-meter dash in 26.08 seconds.

The last-place finishers for the boys’ 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, Shayne Beckloff and Terrance Gallishaw, finished the races in 11.73 seconds and 25.59 seconds, respectively.

“It feels really good,” said Yearwood to The Day. “I’m really happy to win both titles … I kind of expected it. I’ve always gotten first, so I expected it to some extent. … I’m really proud of it.”

(Read more from “Transgender Athlete Beats Girls but Would’ve Placed Last Against Boys” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Kathy Griffin Proves She’s a Low-Rent Bully

One of the enduring life lessons parents used to teach their kids was, “The best way to stop a bully is to fight back.” Time and time again, when you give a bully a taste of their own medicine, they break down and run to their parents. And blame you. Kathy Griffin just proved she is such a bully.

As practically the whole world knows by now, Griffin took part in a video-photo shoot in which she held aloft the severed prop head of Donald Trump. Even after the photos surfaced on TMZ, Griffin stood by her tweets. In a now-deleted tweet, she captioned the photo, “there was blood coming out of his eyes, blood coming out of his … wherever.”

After news coverage of the photos reportedly caused an 11-year-old Barron Trump to scream because he thought someone really hurt his father, his mother, Melania, went on the offense against Griffin, fighting back against her bully tactics. Facing mounting backlash, CNN ­— for whom Griffin has long hosted New Year’s Eve coverage — severed ties with the “D-List” comedienne.

Facing even more backlash from people on both sides of the political spectrum, as well as those in Hollywood, Griffin tried playing the victim card in a bizarre press conference Friday afternoon with her attorney Lisa Bloom.

During the press conference, both Bloom and Griffin tried to paint Griffin as the actual victim here. Griffin cried that “he [Trump] broke me,” with his family’s response to her loathsome behavior. This is a classic bully response. First you attack someone, and when they fight back you run to mommy and daddy – in this case, the press – and blame the person you attacked.

In the end, bullies only win when you let them. (For more from the author of “Kathy Griffin Proves She’s a Low-Rent Bully” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

How Work Requirements, Drug-Free Environment Saved This Single Mom’s Life

It was two years ago when Amber Gann hit rock bottom.

“My oldest daughter had told me, ‘You’re a drug addict, and I don’t want to be with you,’” Gann told The Daily Signal.

Homeless, and also addicted to drugs and alcohol, Gann knew something had to change.

In May 2016, Gann, 36, enrolled in Solutions for Change, a nonprofit serving homeless families that takes a holistic, family-friendly approach to homelessness.

Unlike the federal government’s Housing First strategy for addressing homelessness, which prioritizes getting people sheltered before going after the root causes of why they’re homeless, Solutions for Change requires parents to work and remain drug-free.

But because of these requirements, the program can’t get federal funding.

Gann, having been through government-funded housing programs before where she was forced to live with current drug users, tells The Daily Signal why it took a drug-free environment to get her back on her feet. Watch in the video above. (For more from the author of “How Work Requirements, Drug-Free Environment Saved This Single Mom’s Life” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Ethics Prof. Charged in Deadly-Weapons Assault of Trump Backers

Eric Clanton, an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College (DVC) in Northern California, has been arrested on charges of assaulting numerous individuals with a bike lock at an April political rally-turned-riot spearheaded by the radical-left Antifa organization.

The East Bay Times reports Clanton was arrested Wednesday in Oakland, Calif., “on three counts of suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon that isn’t a firearm and assault causing great bodily injury.”

Clanton remains in a Berkeley jail on a $200,000 bond. He was arraigned Friday at an Oakland courthouse.

On April 15, a conglomerate of Trump supporters gathered in Berkeley for a “Patriots Day” event. Their event was crashed by far-left Antifa protesters, and soon thereafter, the two sides clashed. Twenty-one individuals were arrested, according to police, and six hospitalized for injury.

Clanton, 28, is thought to be the masked individual in the video below who smashed a Trump supporter in the head with a U-lock at the Patriots Day event, giving his victim a large gash.

CONTENT WARNING:

The Berkeley Police Department started investigating the allegations against Clanton in April, according to Golden Gate Xpress, the student paper for San Francisco State.

According to his Diablo Valley College faculty profile (which has since been taken down), Clanton began teaching at the school in 2015 and holds a master’s degree in philosophy. However, the community college district spokesman said that Clanton had not been working this spring semester.

The DVC course schedule shows that Clanton is slated to teach a “Logic and Critical Thinking” class as well as an “Introduction to Philosophy” course at DVC in summer. In the fall, he is slated to teach two “Introduction to Philosophy” classes.

Eric Clanton’s master’s thesis focused on the “intersection of virtue ethics and affective/emotional perception in the context of environmental philosophy,” according to Clanton’s website.

“I am also interested in feminist theory as well as critical and philosophical approaches to prisons and police enforcement,” he adds.

Clanton’s (former) bio at DVC read in part: “His primary research interests are ethics and politics. His work in political philosophy also centers on mass incarceration and the prison system. He is currently exploring restorative justice from an anti-authoritarian perspective.”

Before DVC, Clanton was a lecturer at Cal State, Sacramento, where he taught two classes on ethics. He was also a graduate teaching assistant in the philosophy department at San Francisco State for multiple semesters.

Clanton was allegedly identified as the bike-lock suspect thanks to the work of several dedicated 4chan users, a popular politics message board. Users there say they identified Clanton through a crowdsourced effort that focused on his clothing, skin markings, facial alignments, and other identifying markers. They then compared those criteria with the profile of the masked Antifa rioter.

In a comment to the Diablo Valley College student newspaper on April 20l, DVC spokeswoman Chrisanne Knox said the claims against Clanton were “based on an unsubstantiated allegation from unknown sources.”

Requests for information from various officials at Diablo Valley College were not returned. (For more from the author of “Ethics Prof. Charged in Deadly-Weapons Assault of Trump Backers” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Reagan: ‘Pray That No Heroes Will Ever Have to Die for Us Again’

This Memorial Day, in honor of those who sacrificed their lives in service to their countrymen, it is worth listening to President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 remarks at Arlington National Cemetery.

Take a momentary break from cookout planning and Memorial Day shopping to read along with President Reagan’s words and reflect on the Americans who died in faraway places so that we might live in freedom today.

Today is the day we put aside to remember fallen heroes and to pray that no heroes will ever have to die for us again. It’s a day of thanks for the valor of others, a day to remember the splendor of America and those of her children who rest in this cemetery and others. It’s a day to be with the family and remember. I was thinking this morning that across the country children and their parents will be going to the town parade and the young ones will sit on the sidewalks and wave their flags as the band goes by. Later, maybe, they’ll have a cookout or a day at the beach. And that’s good, because today is a day to be with the family and to remember.

Arlington, this place of so many memories, is a fitting place for some remembering. So many wonderful men and women rest here, men and women who led colorful, vivid, and passionate lives. There are the greats of the military: Bull Halsey and the Admirals Leahy, father and son; Black Jack Pershing; and the GI’s general, Omar Bradley. Great men all, military men. But there are others here known for other things.

Here in Arlington rests a sharecropper’s son who became a hero to a lonely people. Joe Louis came from nowhere, but he knew how to fight. And he galvanized a nation in the days after Pearl Harbor when he put on the uniform of his country and said, “I know we’ll win because we’re on God’s side.” Audie Murphy is here, Audie Murphy of the wild, wild courage. For what else would you call it when a man bounds to the top of a disabled tank, stops an enemy advance, saves lives, and rallies his men, and all of it single-handedly. When he radioed for artillery support and was asked how close the enemy was to his position, he said, “Wait a minute and I’ll let you speak to them.”

Michael Smith is here, and Dick Scobee, both of the space shuttle Challenger. Their courage wasn’t wild, but thoughtful, the mature and measured courage of career professionals who took prudent risks for great reward—in their case, to advance the sum total of knowledge in the world. They’re only the latest to rest here; they join other great explorers with names like Grissom and Chaffee.

Oliver Wendell Holmes is here, the great jurist and fighter for the right. A poet searching for an image of true majesty could not rest until he seized on “Holmes dissenting in a sordid age.” Young Holmes served in the Civil War. He might have been thinking of the crosses and stars of Arlington when he wrote: “At the grave of a hero we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight.”

All of these men were different, but they shared this in common: They loved America very much. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for her. And they loved with the sureness of the young. It’s hard not to think of the young in a place like this, for it’s the young who do the fighting and dying when a peace fails and a war begins. Not far from here is the statue of the three servicemen—the three fighting boys of Vietnam. It, too, has majesty and more. Perhaps you’ve seen it—three rough boys walking together, looking ahead with a steady gaze. There’s something wounded about them, a kind of resigned toughness. But there’s an unexpected tenderness, too. At first you don’t really notice, but then you see it. The three are touching each other, as if they’re supporting each other, helping each other on.

I know that many veterans of Vietnam will gather today, some of them perhaps by the wall. And they’re still helping each other on. They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam—boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.

And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong.

That, of course, is the lesson of this century, a lesson learned in the Sudetenland, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Cambodia. If we really care about peace, we must stay strong. If we really care about peace, we must, through our strength, demonstrate our unwillingness to accept an ending of the peace. We must be strong enough to create peace where it does not exist and strong enough to protect it where it does. That’s the lesson of this century and, I think, of this day. And that’s all I wanted to say. The rest of my contribution is to leave this great place to its peace, a peace it has earned.

Thank all of you, and God bless you, and have a day full of memories.

“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends,” John 15:13. To the men and women who have died to preserve the liberties that every American enjoys today, thank you. We remember. (For more from the author of “Reagan: ‘Pray That No Heroes Will Ever Have to Die for Us Again'” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Meet the Unsung Heroes of the US Border Patrol

Deep inside the U.S. Border Patrol is a little-known elite team called the Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit. Since its creation nearly 20 years ago, BORSTAR has largely flown under the radar.

“Most people don’t realize that the Border Patrol has paramedics, search and rescue capability,” says John Welter, a BORSTAR agent in the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol. “But a lot of times our guys put themselves in a lot of danger, and you end up almost in as bad a shape as the person you’re trying to rescue.”

BORSTAR initially was created in 1998 to provide Border Patrol the ability to search for and rescue its own agents caught in dangerous situations on the job, and to respond to a growing number of deaths among illegal immigrants.

The team has expanded to become the only national law enforcement search-and-rescue unit that can conduct tactical medical training for federal, state, local, and international government agencies.

Hear from Welter, one of the team’s agents, on why it’s sometimes a “selfless, thankless job”—but also a rewarding one. (For more from the author of “Meet the Unsung Heroes of the US Border Patrol” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

How a WWII Veteran Grappled With the Horrors of Combat to Resume Life Back Home

Carl Lavin was in high school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. At 18, the Ohio native decided to join the Army. From there, his life would be forever changed, as he went on to fight as a foot soldier with the 84th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge.

In a new book, “Home Front to Battlefront,” Lavin’s son, Frank, tells the story of how his father grappled with the horrors of combat during World War II to discover truth and meaning back home. Watch the video to hear his story.

(For more from the author of “How a WWII Veteran Grappled With the Horrors of Combat to Resume Life Back Home” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

GOP House Candidate Body Slams Reporter

The race to fill Montana’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives took a violent turn Wednesday, and a crew from the Fox News Channel, including myself, witnessed it firsthand.

As part of our preparation for a story about Thursday’s special election to air on “Special Report with Bret Baier,” we arranged interviews with the top two candidates, Republican Greg Gianforte and Democrat Rob Quist. On Wednesday, I joined field producer Faith Mangan and photographer Keith Railey in Bozeman for our scheduled interview with Gianforte, which was to take place at the Gianforte for Congress Bozeman Headquarters . . .

During that conversation, another man — who we now know is Ben Jacobs of The Guardian — walked into the room with a voice recorder, put it up to Gianforte’s face and began asking if he had a response to the newly released Congressional Budget Office report on the American Health Care Act. Gianforte told him he would get to him later. Jacobs persisted with his question. Gianforte told him to talk to his press guy, Shane Scanlon.

At that point, Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him. Faith, Keith and I watched in disbelief as Gianforte then began punching the reporter. As Gianforte moved on top of Jacobs, he began yelling something to the effect of, “I’m sick and tired of this!” (Read more from “GOP House Candidate Body Slams Reporter” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.