Facebook Celebrates July 4th by Censoring the Declaration of Independence

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(Editor’s note: This is yet ANOTHER incident where Facebook has been caught censoring pro-American or patriotic content. See Restoring Liberty’s exclusive July 4th article on this growing problem HERE)

While Americans across the country were gearing up to celebrate Independence Day, the temporary censorship of a Facebook post left one newspaper feeling a little less-than-free to celebrate American independence.

Just days before the July 4th holiday, Texas newspaper The Liberty County Vindicator was posting daily excerpts from the Declaration of Independence in anticipation. . .

After the post was censored, Casey Stinnett, The Vindicator’s managing editor, voiced the paper’s concerns about continuing to post text from the Declaration.

“So, the removal of this morning’s post puts The Vindicator in a quandary about whether to continue with posting the final two parts of the Declaration scheduled for tomorrow and Wednesday. Should Facebook find anything in them offensive, The Vindicator could lose its Facebook page,” he wrote.

An increasing number of publishers have recently faced this very situation. This begs the question: With no telling what will be censored next, how can publishers continue to trust an automated system to decide what news can and can’t be shared? (Read more from “Facebook Celebrates July 4th by Censoring the Declaration of Independence” HERE)

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Trump’s SCOTUS Pick: It’s Down to These Three People

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By Townhall. We have another name to add to the Supreme Court short list: Judge Raymond Kethledge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals…reportedly. NBC News reported on this development. Judges Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, who were supposedly the final two, are also on the list. Kethledge is 51 years old and a graduate of Yale Law School:

President Donald Trump has narrowed his list of contenders to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to three serious candidates, a source familiar with the selection process told NBC News on Thursday.

Those candidates are appeals court judges Brett Kavanaugh, Raymond Kethledge and Amy Coney Barrett, the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said.

Kavanaugh, 53, and Kethledge, 51, are both former law clerks to Kennedy, as was Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, who succeeded Antonin Scalia. Kavanaugh, also a veteran of George W. Bush’s White House, currently serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

(Read more from “Trump’s SCOTUS Pick: It’s Down to These Three People” HERE)

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Trump Completes Interviews of Supreme Court Candidates, as Shortlist Shrinks

By Fox News. President Trump has completed the interview process for Supreme Court candidates after speaking with six judges, a source with knowledge of the selection process told Fox News – with three finalists in particular leading the field.

The president and his vetting team have moved quickly ahead of an expected announcement on Monday.

While liberal advocacy groups and others are gearing up for a major confirmation fight, Trump is charging ahead with an imminent decision to fill the seat of retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, and potentially move the court more solidly to the right.

Fox News is told that Trump has interviewed six candidates: Appeals court judges Brett Kavanaugh, Raymond Kethledge, Amy Coney Barrett, Amul Thapar, Joan Larsen and Thomas Hardiman. The interviews comprised seven conversations – Trump talked to one candidate twice.

Multiple sources indicated Kavanaugh, Kethledge and Barrett are currently the focus of attention. (Read more from “Trump Completes Interviews of Supreme Court Candidates, as Shortlist Shrinks” HERE)

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Eat It, Liberals: Trump Economy Just Received Stellar News

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If Donald Trump wins the election, the stock market will collapse. He doesn’t have an agenda that can create jobs. You all heard the doomsday talk. In the end, three million jobs have been created since Trump was elected. The Dow Jones broke 26,000, and had a 5,000-point surge last year—the largest annual gain ever. All told, the stock market has grown around 40 percent since Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton.

The tax reform package passed in 2017 has laid down a solid foundation for economic growth. Wages are growing. Consumer and small business confidence has reached its highest levels in 10+ years. Unemployment has reached an 18-year low, black unemployment has reached a historic low. The good economic news is pervasive and starting to make Democrats nervous, who thought the tax cuts would be an albatross around the GOP’s neck—wrong. Now, for the second quarter, the economic growth is project to hit four percent. (Read more from “Eat It, Liberals: Trump Economy Just Received Stellar News” HERE)

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Longtime NY Dem Slams Schumer, Defends Trump

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In a social media post responding to a fundraising campaign by US Senate Minority Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), fellow New York Democrat Dov Hikind didn’t hold back. . .

Hikind has been a New York State Assemblyman since 1983, so he’s no stranger to the political game. But since announcing that he will soon be retiring from public office, the public servant evidently felt he had nothing to lose by telling his own party how he really feels.

Hikind then spells out a litany of glaring omissions in the mailer, such as how well the economy has been performing, and how much the US relationship with Israel has improved. He also criticized Schumer for his efforts to “fully villainize the current administration.”

Some real zingers fired by Hikind are in the closing of the lengthy post, where he fires at Schumer: “You ask for a contribution, but the Democratic Party — which I am a lifelong member of — is currently betraying the ideals that our party once stood for: American values.

“You yourself proposed that Representative Ellison head the party, but you must surely know that Ellison has stood with our nation’s leading hate monger Louis Farrakhan. (Read more from “Longtime NY Dem Slams Schumer, Defends Trump” HERE)

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EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt Resigns Amidst Ethics Questions

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By The Blaze. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt tendered his resignation on Thursday.

President Donald Trump announced in a tweet that he had accepted Pruitt’s resignation and that he thought Pruitt had done an “outstanding job.”

Pruitt has been part of the Trump administration since the beginning. He had recently faced questions about his spending habits at the EPA, which included purchasing a $43,000 secure phone booth without congressional approval, and allegedly using agency resources to find a $200,000 job for his wife.

The EPA is currently facing 13 separate federal inquiries into allegations of mismanagement and irresponsible spending practices.

On May 1, two of Pruitt’s employees at the EPA resigned during this ongoing ethics investigation. The staffers did not give reasons for their resignations. (Read more from “EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt Resigns Amidst Ethics Questions” HERE)

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EPA Leader Scott Pruitt Resigns After Scandals Engulf His Agency

By CNBC. . . President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday that he has accepted Pruitt’s resignation. Trump said that the agency’s deputy administrator and former coal industry lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler, will become the acting head of EPA.

The departure follows months of scrutiny that gathered momentum following reports that Pruitt had rented a Capitol Hill condominium linked to an energy lobbyist on favorable terms. The revelation exacerbated concerns about the high cost of Pruitt’s travel and security detail and triggered a flood of allegations that Pruitt fostered a culture of workplace retaliation, wasteful spending and self-dealing at EPA.

The steady flow of negative news stories prompted multiple government investigators to open several inquiries into Pruitt. His EPA now faces about a dozen probes into its spending, ethics and policy decisions.

“It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it as a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also because of the transformative work that is occurring,” Pruitt said in his resignation letter. (Read more from “EPA Leader Scott Pruitt Resigns After Scandals Engulf His Agency” HERE)

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CNN Host Proclaims ‘National Emergency’

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July started with a lull. On the Monday before Independence Day, the news network morning shows led with the oppressively hot weather. The normal feverish panic about living in Donald Trump’s America was missing for a few hours.

You can count on CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter to stay true to the trash-Trump parade. At the liberal Aspen Ideas Festival, he interviewed Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron. Stelter claimed to speak for the crowd when he began asking: “Are we living through a national emergency? And if so, how in the heck should journalists be covering it that way?”

Baron replied that it isn’t his place to answer that. His newspaper’s role “is to cover very aggressively this administration as we would cover any other administration.” He claimed, “We’re not in the business of sort of characterizing the era.”

This is preposterous. The Post greeted the Trump presidency by posting a new motto on the front page each day: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It sells T-shirts with the motto to other liberals. By contrast, during Barack Obama’s presidential transition in 2009, the Post promoted to national editor a journalist who wrote gushy captions for a coffee-table book titled “Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs.”

Most Americans would suggest that the Dow Jones Industrial Average being up 5,000 points since President Trump’s inauguration and the unemployment rate being 3.8 percent is not a national emergency. But then again, most Americans aren’t journalists.

The silliness continued. Stelter told Baron, “The media critique from the left is that this is a crisis and thus journalists have to cover it differently than Bush or Obama or other past presidents.”

Baron acknowledged the Post is “more blunt about calling out falsehoods” than it was previously “because there are so many of them and they’re so blatant.” Then he added: “Steve Bannon tried to call us the opposition party. We don’t see ourselves as the opposition party and we’re not inclined to embrace the notions of some people who would like us to be the opposition party. We’re an independent news organization. We’re independent of all parties and all ideologies.”

Baloney. Baron simply cannot believe that, unless the Kool-Aid is stronger than we thought. Wouldn’t it be fun to find out just how many Washington Post reporters and editors voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump? If a single Trump voter could be found in the newsroom, that would be a surprise. How “independent of all parties” would the Post look then? We found in 2016 that among the Post employees who donated to candidates for federal office in recent years, 15 donated only to Democrats and one advertising sales manager gave to $200 to former Gov. Mitt Romney.

Stelter kept pestering Baron from the left in Aspen: “Your famous line is that ‘We’re not at war; we’re at work.’ … But if one side is at war and the other side is a pacifist, doesn’t the pacifist lose?”

This may be the one occasion where liberals discuss the benefits of war and the pitfalls of pacifism!

“It’s not the way that I would frame it,” Baron explained. “[W]e have the greatest credibility when we do our jobs honestly, honorably, accurately, fairly, diligently, energetically, unflinchingly.”

Our media have shunned any notion of objectivity under Trump. Activists like Brian Stelter keep urging top editors to oppose, rebel and resist, and they wonder why their own approval ratings continue to sink lower, and lower, and lower. (For more from the author of “CNN Host Proclaims National Emergency” please click HERE)

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Strzok Gets the News He’s Been Dreading

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By Conservative Tribune. Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte issued the subpoena to force Strzok to appear before both the House Judiciary and House Oversight and Government Reform committees.

The hearing will focus on Strzok’s work on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Strzok’s attorney, Aitan Goelman, said on Monday that his client had retracted a previous offer to testify publicly.

Goelman cited a closed-door interview on June 27 with the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees as evidence that Republicans were setting “a trap” for the embattled FBI agent.

“Having sharpened their knives behind closed doors, the committee would now like to drag back Special Agent Strzok and have him testify in public — a request that we originally made and the committee denied,” Goelman said in a letter first reported by CNN. (Read more from “Strzok Gets the News He’s Been Dreading” HERE)

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FBI’s Peter Strzok May Ignore House Subpoena, Says His Lawyer

By Washington Examiner. Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who vowed to “stop” President Trump from winning the 2016 election despite being part of a federal investigation into his campaign, may not show up to testify next week despite being subpoenaed.

“My client will testify soon, somewhere, sometime. We just got this subpoena today, so I don’t know whether or not we are going to be testifying next Tuesday in front of these two particular House subcommittees,” Aitan Goelman, Strzok’s attorney, told CNN’s Chris Cuomo.

Goelman said he could not automatically respond “yes” because the two “have come to the conclusion, forced to come to the conclusion, that this is not a search for truth, it is a chance for Republican members of the House to preen and posture before their most radical, conspiracy-minded constituents.” (Read more from “FBI’s Peter Strzok May Ignore House Subpoena, Says His Lawyer” HERE)

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Dems Slam SCOTUS Pick Amy Coney Barrett for Her Faith, but Here’s What They’re Really Worried About

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The Blaze. Amy Coney Barrett’s religious faith was the topic of much “concern” during her confirmation hearing for the federal bench. Case in point, you may recall last year when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) said to the then-judicial nominee:

Why is it that so many of us on this side have this very uncomfortable feeling that — you know, dogma and law are two different things. And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.

Now that Barrett is being considered by President Donald Trump to replace Anthony Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court, progressives are once again using a “religious litmus test” to discredit the conservative candidate. But they’re real concern lies in Barrett’s pro-life stance at a time when the landmark 1973 abortion ruling Roe v. Wade is in danger of being overturned.

Meanwhile, progressive politicians such as Nancy Pelosi are more than happy to profess their own devout religious beliefs when pandering to religious groups. On today’s show, Pat Gray and Stu Burguiere filled in for Glenn Beck, to discuss how the Left will conveniently use religious faith against conservatives, then turn around and play the part when it serves them, as Nancy Pelosi did in this bizarre exchange:

They ask me all the time what is your favorite this, what is your favorite that, what is your favorite that. And at one time, what is your favorite word. And I said, my favorite word, that is really easy. My favorite word is the word is ‘the word.’ And that is everything. It says it all for us. And you know the biblical reference. You know the gospel reference, ‘the word.’ We have to give voice, to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the word.

(Read more from “Dems Slam SCOTUS Pick Amy Coney Barrett for Her Faith, but Here’s What They’re Really Worried About” HERE)

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Millions in Ads Pour in Ahead of SCOTUS Nomination Fight

By ABC News. President Trump will announce his nominee for the next U.S. Supreme Court Justice this Monday and already outside groups from both sides of the political aisle are committing millions of dollars in advertisements surrounding what is expected to be a lengthy and rancorous confirmation battle.

Two groups, the conservative Judicial Crisis Network and the liberal Demand Justice, have both pledged over $1 million in their respective fights to either encourage support or encourage opposition to whoever emerges as Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement from the bench last week after over 30 years of service. (Read more from “Millions in Ads Pour in Ahead of SCOTUS Nomination Fight” HERE)

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Getting It Done the Right Way — 14k Legal Immigrants Will Become Americans on Independence Day

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About 14,000 legal immigrants … officially [became] American citizens on Independence Day, participating in naturalization ceremonies at 27 different locations nationally.

“When oath ceremonies are tied to the Fourth of July, it’s a message that immigrants believe in this country,” Joshua Hoyt, executive director of National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), told ABC News. “It’s a beautiful and emotional thing.”

Hoyt added that NPNA supports naturalization as being “good for the immigrants, their communities, and our nation,” while contributing to “higher incomes” and “social cohesion,” according to ABC News.

The Fourth of July falls less than a month after multiple immigration-based incidents have occurred among policy changes. President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration has caused protests, online campaigns and even personal attacks on administration officials, even though Trump signed a June 20 executive order to keep families of illegal border-crossers together as they await prosecution.

Legal immigrants, however, after going through all the lawful motions to achieve citizenship, are able to participate in the patriotic ceremonies where new Americans are officially sworn in together. (Read more from “Getting It Done the Right Way — 14k Legal Immigrants Will Become Americans on Independence Day” HERE)

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How Do Americans Truly Feel About Abolishing ICE?

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More bad polling news keeps streaming in for a Democratic Party increasingly embracing more radical left positions. Amid polls showing that the Democrats’ plan to block Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee doesn’t sit well with a majority of Americans, another poll on a hot button election year topic didn’t go the way the “future of the party” would’ve hoped.

The #AbolishICE movement, promoted by several high-profile Democrats, including rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is not something many Americans feel they can get behind. Though HuffPost hasn’t given up on the possibility that the movement might catch on, the outlet found in its new poll that “abolishing ICE isn’t very popular (yet).”

The radical hashtag movement, HuffPost explains, grew into “a key policy plank in the biggest political upset this election cycle” with the upset victory of Ocasio-Cortez, who says that we have a moral obligation to shut down the immigration enforcement agency. “Morally, we need to abolish ICE,” said the self-styled Democratic Socialist. “We are now at a moral crisis with the development of what’s going on at the border. Pushing for an immediate stop to that if we haven’t done it by November is absolutely a No. 1 priority.”

After witnessing her rather stunning victory over the incumbent many assumed would be “Nancy Pelosi’s successor,” many progressives have concluded that her radical call to end immigration enforcement as we know it might be the key to that longed-for “blue wave” in November. But how do Americans feel about the hashtag campaign-turned-progressives’ “No. 1 priority”? Not so great. HuffPost reports:

Opinions on ICE as an agency are mixed: Just 37 percent of those surveyed said they have a favorable opinion of the agency, and 39 percent said they have a negative opinion. But the public appears far from eager to get rid of the agency. Just 21 percent of respondents said they support abolishing ICE, while 44 percent said they oppose it, with 35 percent undecided. Nearly 3 in 10 Americans polled said they strongly oppose the idea.

(Read more from “How Do Americans Truly Feel About Abolishing ICE?” HERE)

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