Plastic Bag Ban: Terrorists Care More About the Environment Than Women

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. . .As strange as it may sound, the Somali militant group al-Shabaab is actually banning the use of plastic bags out of concern for the environment. . .

According to Metro, Al-Shabaab’s radio station Radio Andalus reported the group’s governor in the Jubaland region of Somalia, Mohammed Abu Abdullah, made the decision. . .

Raffaello Pantucci, counter-terror expert at the Royal United Services Institute, or Rusi, told Metro the move was designed to show the world the group has the ability to govern.

“Other East African governments have banned plastic bags and this ban is al-Shabaab’s attempt to show their people that they too can implement laws and govern like any legitimate ruler,” Pantucci said.

“It’s quite ironic though that the same group has been involved in the banned ivory trade to fund its terror activities across the Horn of Africa.” (Read more from “Plastic Bag Ban: Terrorists Care More About the Environment Than Women” HERE)

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Bricks Through Windows: Anti-Trump Violence Heats Up

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There’s been a storm of left-wing rhetoric and violence ever since President Trump was elected. All those Democrats talking about “resistance.” The antifa riots whenever a conservative speaker opened his mouth, and the destruction of property and rights that followed. Celebrities – remember? – they promised to move to Australia, or Canada or the moon.

It got worse recently when Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., reacting to the eviction of Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders from a restaurant, said: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.” . . .

In Nebraska, the Daily Caller said, vandals threw a brick through the window of the Nebraska Republican Party’s headquarters in Lincoln.

The report said, “Prominent Democrats across the country have been whipping up support for abolishing U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), in an appeal to the party’s left-wing base.”

Kenny Zoeller, the state GOP’s executive director, said: “This destructive criminal activity is disappointing, but unsurprising, given the increasingly radical rhetoric of national Democrat leaders and candidates like Jane Raybould, Kara Eastman, and Jane Kleeb. Violence is the natural result of the left’s statements urging Democrats to literally ‘push back’ on Republicans and ‘resist’ at any cost. Voters face a stark choice between sanity and the rabid, hateful words that sparked this vandalism.” (Read more from “Bricks Through Windows: Anti-Trump Violence Heats Up” HERE)

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Bid to Split California Into 3 States Gains Traction – Could It Really Happen?

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In a midterm season marked by primary upsets and the prospect of Democrats claiming a congressional check on President Trump’s power, another sensational development has been the momentum behind a ballot measure to split up the unwieldy, high-tax state of California. . .

Californians shouldn’t worry about getting their driver’s licenses redone quite yet – the initiative has plenty of hurdles to surmount, even if it beats the odds and is approved by voters in November. . .

“This is about people who want California to be fixed and saved and this is the way to do it,” Grande told Fox News. “We have crumbling infrastructure, dirty water and failing schools. In almost every statistic, 49 states are doing better.” . . .

California’s freewheeling initiative process allows voters to enact a law bypassing the state legislature. However, Article 18 of the state constitution makes a distinction between an “amendment” and “revision” to that document.

That distinction could determine whether Cal3, if successful at the polls, is held up at the state level. While an “amendment” would be a relatively minor change that citizens could enact, a “revision” would be a major change requiring either an act of the legislature or a state convention. (Read more from “Bid to Split California Into 3 States Gains Traction – Could It Really Happen?” HERE)

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Canadian PM Slammed With Sexual Assault Accusation

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While on tour to celebrate Canada Day this past Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denied groping a female reporter who tried to interview him almost two decades ago at the 2000 Kokanee Summit festival. Trudeau’s comments about the allegation of sexual misconduct came nearly a month after the incident was first brought to national attention by Canadian media in early June.

“I remember that day in Creston [the site of the festival] well… I had a good day that day,” Trudeau told reporters in Regina, Saskatchewan. “I don’t remember any negative interactions that day at all.”

Trudeau’s denial marked the first time that he has publicly responded to the accusation, which was originally levied in an editorial in the Creston Valley Advance, a small local paper in the western province of British Columbia. The unsigned article (almost certainly written by the reporter who claimed to have been sexually assaulted) was published shortly after the conclusion of the festival in August. In the piece, the writer provided scant details of the encounter, only obliquely referring to Trudeau “inappropriately ‘handling’ the reporter” and “groping a strange young woman.”

But in a seemingly damning bit of evidence, the article also suggested that Trudeau acknowledged the grope and apologized to the reporter for assaulting her because she reported for a national newspaper (she was also working for the National Post and the Vancouver Sun at the time), allegedly telling her: “I’m sorry. If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward.” Moreover, according to a recent investigation by the same National Post, the reporter had (and still has) the full faith and credit of her former superiors at the Creston Valley Advance. (Read more from “Canadian PM Slammed With Sexual Assault Accusation” HERE)

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Derp: Leftist Analyst Slams Possible Trump SCOTUS Pick for Hate Group Ties That Aren’t Real

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Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a potential nominee to fill the vacancy that is going to be left by outgoing Justice Anthony Kennedy. She’s going to be torched. For starters, she’s been picked by Trump, which makes her an enemy of the state to liberals. Second, she’s Catholic. Yes, Senate Democrats had an issue with her faith during her confirmation hearing for the seventh circuit. With liberals gripped with fear over abortion rights, you bet the Catholic attacks are coming back.

The Left is gunning for whomever Trump selects, and right now, the person of interest for left-wingers is Judge Barrett. Yet, in their initial attack, they’ve already been clotheslined by reality. Let’s start with the false claim that Judge Barrett has ties to the “hate group” Alliance Defending Freedom. It stems from that terrible confirmation hearing last fall, where Democrats grilled the scary, conservative, and uber-Catholic Barrett. The charge was Barrett didn’t fully vet ADF for it’s alleged support for sterilizing transgender people, or something. Former Sen. AL Franken (D-MN), who resigned in disgrace after he allegedly groped multiple women, lobbed the accusation. It’s pure crap (via National Review):

Franken parroted the Southern Poverty Law Center’s claim that ADF is a “hate group” and faulted Barrett for speaking to ADF’s Blackstone Fellowship program.

[…]

A has-been comic who has evidently lost his sense of irony, Franken faulted Barrett for failing to “vet” ADF even as he failed to vet SPLC’s attack on ADF. For example, Franken quoted and credited SPLC’s claim that ADF “has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of transgendered people abroad.” And he then adopted the charge as his own: “This is a group that calls for the sterilization of transgender people abroad.”

Franken’s claim is flatly false. If Franken or his staff had bothered to click SPLC’s supposedly supporting link, they would have discovered that the European Court of Human Rights case that SPLC was relying on was one that involved the vexing question whether and when government-issued documents should redefine a person’s biological sex to comport with the person’s gender identity.

(Read more from “Derp: Leftist Analyst Slams Possible Trump SCOTUS Pick for Hate Group Ties That Aren’t Real” HERE)

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D.C. Passes Law Requiring People to Buy Health Insurance or Have Their Property Seized

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Just when you think the move for government control of health care couldn’t get any worse, somehow it manages to. Last Wednesday, the District of Columbia City Council approved a requirement for all DC residents to purchase health insurance. The mandate would take effect in January, right when the federal mandate penalty drops to $0, as per last year’s tax law.

The D.C. mandate contains three elements that make it just as bad as, if not worse than, the federal mandate it is intended to replace. . .

Suffice it to say that the district’s individual mandate did not attract much attention. Unlike last week’s initiative vote on raising wages for tipped workers, or the battle over “right-to-die” legislation in the nation’s capital, restoring the individual mandate has slipped below the news radar screen. Some online searching Thursday found no references to the D.C. Council’s mandate vote in the Washington Post, or (but for a brief blurb in Politico) other online news articles discussing recent developments.

A cynic might believe that the D.C. Council acted in such a low-key manner by design. The council did not approve the mandate as a stand-alone bill, but wrapped it into a 297-page Budget Support Act. That bill contains such unrelated provisions as an amendment regarding the Fort Dupont Ice Arena, technical corrections to a supermarket tax incentive program, and amendments regarding civic associations using public schools.

Likewise, a press release by the D.C. Council summarizing Wednesday’s meeting contained not a word about imposing the individual mandate, nor did the council website show any stand-alone votes on the mandate itself. This lack of disclosure pushed me to contact my council member, Charles Allen, to find out what had happened at the council meeting Wednesday. (Read more from “D.C. Passes Law Requiring People to Buy Health Insurance or Have Their Property Seized” HERE)

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Mexico’s New Leftist President Is Not a Threat, but the Collapse of Mexico Is

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Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the Mexican presidency in a landslide election on Sunday. Obrador—or Amlo, as he’s commonly called—is a left-wing populist of the sort common to Latin America. A former mayor of Mexico City who twice ran for president and lost, in 2006 and 2012, the 64-year-old Obrador, who spent decades as a radical outsider in Mexican politics, now finds himself in the seat of power in a country that’s falling apart.

During his populist campaign, the silver-haired Obrador railed against the corruption of incumbent President Enrique Peña Nieto and his the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which Obrador denounced, not without good reason, as a “mafia of power.” Indeed, under Peña Nieto Mexico’s economy has stagnated and crime has spiraled out of control. It’s not a stretch to say the intertwined crises of poverty, corruption, and crime have driven Mexicans in desperation to elect their first leftist president since 1934.

Conservative media in America have greeted the news with alarm. Writing here at The Federalist on Friday, Helen Raleigh warned that Obrador’s “radical ideas will spell trouble for both Mexico and the U.S.,” citing his affinity for socialist dictators like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. His positive view of illegal immigration to the United States could precipitate “a surge of illegal crossings at our southern borders.”

Concerns about Obrador and the border are especially acute among conservatives. Victor Davis Hanson declared last week in National Review that Americans should be concerned about Obrador because he is “anti-American” and will position Mexico as an “aggressor” by promoting the notion that Mexicans have a “human right” to illegally enter the United States.

Beyond illegal immigration, conservatives fear Obrador’s socialist tendencies. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal warned Friday that an Obrador victory would cause Mexico to “slide backward,” undoing the economic progress of recent decades and undermining Mexico’s rising middle class. Fears of a leftist Mexican president have been echoed by The Daily Caller, Fox News, and even Sen. John McCain. (Read more from “Mexico’s New Leftist President Is Not a Threat, but the Collapse of Mexico Is” HERE)

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Uh-Oh: Here’s How Many People Say They’re Extremely Proud of Being American

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According to Gallup, which has asked the question of Americans since 2003, the number of Americans who are “extremely proud” or “proud” of being American has hit a record low.

The poll says that 47 percent of people are “extremely proud” of being American. Another 25 percent say they are “very proud” of being American. . .

The decline is due at least in part to many Democrats changing their opinion about their pride in being American. Last year, 43 percent of Democrats said they were “extremely proud” of being American, but that percentage dropped by 11 points to 32 percent this year. . .

Whether Democrats’ recent dip in pride has something to do with President Donald Trump, it isn’t hurting his personal approval rating. A different Gallup poll shows that 45 percent of the public approves of the president, tying for the highest percentage of his term thus far.

Another poll showed that more than two thirds of Americans found the policy of family separation at the border “unacceptable.” Trump ended the policy soon after the poll was published. (Read more from “Here’s How Many People Say They’re Extremely Proud of Being American” HERE)

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Pastor: Keep Killing Babies Because I Hate Trump

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For the latest misadventures in “absolute NeverTrumpism corrupts every bit as much as absolute AlwaysTrumpism,” I give you Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile.

The headline of his piece in the Washington Post is “Overturning Roe v. Wade isn’t worth compromising with Trump, my fellow evangelicals.” He leads it off by imploring that “we are going to give an account to God for our complicit silence before the immoral policies and actions of the Trump administration.”

Already, the pastor’s point of view is plagued by an idolatrous level of concern for Trump, to the point of insisting that his fellow evangelicals snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on the issue of life. Which just so happens to be the pre-eminent moral concern of the Word of God, but other than that, no big thang.

Anyabwile is so blinded by his anti-Trump idolatry that he’s urging the very “complicit silence” he condemns when it comes to stopping America’s infanticide holocaust. Ironic, I know, but this is the age of self-refuting arguments and the death of self-awareness, after all.

This pastor is urging believers to explicitly disobey the Word of God when it says “rescue those being taken away to death and hold back those being led away to slaughter.” This pastor is urging believers to side with those whose “hands shed innocent blood,” which the Scriptures also say are among those things “the LORD hates.” And he’s doing so from a platform that frequently gives space for trolling God and His love, like its recent headline “why can’t we hate men” and last Christmas when it again questioned whether Jesus Christ ever existed.

On second thought, maybe this is the proper platform for Anyabwile’s idolatrous polemic, because whether he knows it or not, he’s trolling God, too. It’s just that the Washington Post is more honest about it.

In case you’re wondering why I’ve used the terms “idolatry” or “idolatrous” several times already, it’s because I’m trying to drive the point home this is idolatry. Whenever we permit anything other than God to determine for us what is right or wrong, we are practicing what the Bible calls idolatry, which is a fancy, stained-glass word meaning “worshipping or following after a false god.”

Anyabwile is saying not to explicitly do what God says is right here, because Trump. In other words, he is the NeverTrump version of heretical clowns like Paula White, peddler of the fake so-called prosperity gospel and a documented fraud, who has sadly found some renewed legitimacy through her ability to shamelessly shill for Trump.

I’m sure Anyabwile would agree with me about the likes of White, all the while missing the plank in his own eye. See, God doesn’t permit us not to do what’s right because it may cause us to align with and/or work alongside those we find questionable, repulsive, or offensive. Quite the contrary, God works through sinners all the time — because all of us are sinners.

Sure, plenty of Christians twist this teaching every election season when they compare their favorite misbehaving politicians favorably to King David, all the while conveniently leaving out details like David’s peccadilloes that caused the death of his child, a civil war in his kingdom, and persistent strife in his family. So, yes, God loved and used David. But no, David’s sins did not go unpunished, and often the consequences were suffered by others, too.

Because God can walk and chew gum at the same time, he can use problematic people while simultaneously holding them accountable for their misdeeds. His people, bought by His blood and guided by His Spirit, should be able — and definitely willing — to do the same.

Abraham Lincoln is considered by many to be among America’s greatest presidents. He also was far from perfect. For much of his political career, he was in favor of letting slave states remain so, and during one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates he said the following:

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

And yet, despite these statements, we still call Lincoln the “Great Emancipator.” Why? Because he was. The same guy who said those dreadful things also lost his life in the cause of freeing the slaves.

Human nature is a complicated thing. We are all made in the image of God, and yet are all capable of falling very far from God at any given moment (or a lifetime) as well. This is why we all need the Savior. Great men sometimes fall. Bad men sometimes rise. Heroes of the faith like David and Samson had licentious blind spots. Powerful preachers like Spurgeon save souls one minute and struggle with depression the next.

The one constant here is God — the same yesterday, today, and forever. And that is why imperfect people can perform, by His grace, His perfect and pleasing will. Both the just and the unjust alike, as Christ said, are loved by God enough to each be tools of His love and mercy at any given time.

And if it is a profane man like Trump, who would be among the least likely politicians we could ever imagine to appoint the Supreme Court that ends America’s greatest moral evil, then by all means blessed be the name of the Lord. For all such blessings really flow from Him anyway, not from a politician.

A pastor, like Anyabwile, should know this. (For more from the author of “Pastor: Keep Killing Babies Because I Hate Trump” please click HERE)

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State Department Employee Pleads Guilty to Producing Child Pornography

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An Alexandria man pleaded guilty today to production of child pornography.

According to court documents, over at least a two year period, Skydance MacMahon, 44, conspired with an adult in Canada to produce over a thousand sexually explicit images and videos of minor children in Canada. These images and videos were produced at the direction of MacMahon using Skype and hidden cameras. MacMahon distributed these image and video files to other users and consumers of child pornography by providing access to the files on his cloud storage services and also by directly sending the files to other users. In addition to the child pornography images and videos MacMahon himself created, he also received and possessed thousands of images and videos of child pornography.

During the time he committed these offenses, MacMahon was a Digital Media Administrator at the Foreign Services Institute of the U.S. Department of State in Arlington.

MacMahon pleaded guilty to conspiring to produce child pornography and producing child pornography. He faces a mandatory minimum of 15 years and a maximum penalty of 60 years in prison when sentenced on October 12. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after taking into account the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.justice.gov/psc.

G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Nancy McNamara, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and Steve A. Linick, Inspector General for the Department of State, made the announcement after U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga accepted the plea. Assistant U.S. Attorney Whitney Dougherty Russell is prosecuting the case.

Significant assistance was provided by the FBI’s Cincinnati Field Office, the U.S. Department of State Office of Inspector General’s Cyber Forensic Division, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Halifax Regional Police, Crown Prosecution Service, Special Prosecution Section, the Nova Scotia Public Prosecution Service, the Arlington County Police Department, and the Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.

A copy of this press release is located on the website of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Related court documents and information is located on the website of the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia or on PACER by searching for Case No. 1:18-cr-261.