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The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

I know a lot about Illinois politics. I had an uncle, Jack Hart, who lived in Chicago and voted a straight Republican ticket until his death. Since then, he has voted for only Democrats.

Uncle Jack went to the church of Obama’s famous preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. My uncle could hardly walk from a Vietnam War injury. He said Reverend Wright put his healing hands on his head and said, “Now you will walk.”  The preacher was right; when my uncle went outside, he found that his car had been stolen.

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And there you have it.

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We can only hope.

The 400-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has filed a grievance contending that the work the goats are doing in a wooded lot is taking away jobs from laid-off union workers.

“AFSCME takes protecting the jobs of its members very seriously and we have an agreed-upon collective bargaining agreement with Western Michigan,” said Union President Dennis Moore. “We expect the contract to be followed, and in circumstances where we feel it’s needed, we file a grievance.”

The grievance alleges that the university did not notify the union that it was planning to use goat crews on campus, according to a chief steward report supplied to the Battle Creek Enquirer.

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Letting Democrat kleptocrats run your city will do that.

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Hint: Probably not.

Nuclear weapons such as the W87, W88, B-61 (various versions) and B-83 were designed to be absolutely state of the art in terms of yield-weight ratio, using the technology of the 1970s and 1980s. The expected service life of those nuclear weapons was about 20 years, after which they’d be retired and replaced with more modern ones.

Well, that isn’t happening and no one really understands how keeping these weapons past their expected service lives is affecting their reliability — the high explosive surrounding the plutonium pits keep absorbing radiation.

It can be removed and replaced but the high explosive is literally glued to the pit and sometimes cracks when it’s taken off.

There’s also the question of exposing personnel to additional radiation as a result of americium-241 ingrowth in the plutonium core.

And, of course, none of this can be tested. The Nuclear Matters Handbook also mentions some known safety upgrades that cannot be installed, because no one knows how they might affect reliability.

As a minor aside, it has been well over twenty-five years, since the U.S. tested a weapon with a yield in excess of 150 kilotons, so the secondary designs of existing weapons may well be from the 1960s …

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The District of Columbia Department of Motor Vehicles proudly announces that it has become the first jurisdiction in the United States to issue a gender neutral drivers license. The historic event took place on June 27, when it issued a license to Nic Sakurai with the gender listed as “X.”

An identification card that does not identify. The first step in making voter fraud undetectable. Very cunning, these Democrats.

That sure is a head-scratcher.

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No surprises here. For Democrats, government service is a jobs program, even when they’re not openly corrupt (see POLITICAL MACHINE).

Trump is used to running a business, and in running a business you don’t pay any more salary than you have to.

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The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

Thank God for all the strict gun control laws in Chicago, or the place would look like Texas.

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Today is Kate Steinle Day, the second anniversary of a woman’s murder by a repeatedly deported illegal-alien felon nestled in the warm embrace of San Francisco’s sanctuary policies. But she wasn’t the first American to be killed by sanctuary-city ordinances, not even in San Francisco. In 2008 a Dreamer convicted-felon gang member protected – twice – from deportation by the city’s policies murdered Anthony Bologna and his sons, Michael and Matthew. And in 2010, Drew Rosenberg was run over three times by an illegal alien with Temporary Protected Status who shortly before had been arrested – and then let go by San Francisco police – for driving without a license or insurance the wrong way down a one-way street.

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The United States Department of Agriculture’s Beef Checkoff Program violates ranchers’ First Amendment rights by subsidizing a private company’s marketing campaign, a Montana judge ruled June 21.

The United States District Court for the District of Montana upheld an injunction forbidding the USDA from subsidizing the Montana Beef Council (MBC) with money from Montana cattlemen, according to court documents.

Yeah, the Federal gubmint just LOVES spending other people’s money.

Individual producers pay a tax on each unit they sell, $1 per head of cattle sold for ranchers. That money is used by the USDA and state organizations fund major industry investments. The USDA claims the checkoff programs can provide a a return as high as 1,800 percent in some cases.

I have never known the government to be short of claims. Actual evidence, howerver ….

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Wouldn’t that be interesting. Leave all the wogs to settle their own problems. What a concept.

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Created in the 1980s, the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline program helps low-income people pay for phone and Internet service.

The federal government reimburses telecommunication companies that offer discounts to eligible subscribers through a fund made up of fees collected from consumers’ telephone bills.

Lifeline paid $1.5 billion in subsidies last year to more than 12 million households. But an estimated 36 percent of the program’s subscribers might be ineligible for enrollment, according to the audit.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Dr. Brian Callister, a doctor in Reno, Nevada, says he had two patients recently who both needed life-saving treatments. “Not palliative care, not hospice, these would have been curative procedures.” One patient, he said, was from California, and the other was from Oregon, which both have passed physician-assisted suicide laws. Instead of offering to pay for their treatments, Callister said the insurance medical directors in both states offered his patients assisted suicide.

Death panels. It’s the only way — to get rid of Californians and Oregonians.

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Sure, the hugely popular augmented reality game was getting kids (and adults!) to roam around outside—probably doing more to get kids moving than Michelle Obama ever did—in the hopes of catching and battling their fictional “pocket monsters,” but Milwaukee County officials were worried about how the game’s popularity was affecting parks and other public spaces. Augmented reality games like Pokemon Go require gamers to be in certain physical locations in order to collect pokemon or complete in-game tasks, and public parks became hot spots for the game’s overlaid reality.

Rather than being thrilled to see people of all ages flocking to places like the city’s Lake Park to enjoy a new form of recreation, though, Milwaukee County implemented new rules requiring permits before anyone could engage in “electronic gaming” in parks and other public spaces.

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Every year, almost every industry improves.

We get more choices—usually better choices, for less money.

“But of all the products we make and the services we provide, there’s one that stands out as an exception,” according to the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson. “One activity in which excellence doesn’t spawn countless imitators or spread on a massive scale: schooling.”

They fail because they are run by government employees, and government employees screw up everything they touch, and politicize what’s left.

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We know that President Obama had it in for Gen. Michael Flynn. The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was a persistent critic of Obama’s feckless policies, especially regarding ISIS. Obama reportedly advised president-elect Trump not to offer Flynn a high level position.

According to this report from Circa, the FBI’s Andrew McCabe also had an ax to grind with Flynn. A few years ago, Robyn Gritz, a supervisory special agent, filed a discrimination/retaliation claim against the FBI. Flynn supported Gritz’s claim. According to Circa, he wrote a letter of support in 2014 on his official Pentagon stationery, backed her in a 2015 public interview, and offered to testify on her behalf. (The FBI opposed allowing Flynn to testify. As I read Circa’s story, it appears that he did not testify.)

Well. So much for that fake news.

Nobody keeps a grudge like a Democrat. Ask any of the Clinton victims.

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California will add glyphosate, the main ingredient in agro-chemical giant Monsanto’s weed spray, to a “list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer,” the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) announced Monday.

…

The science is all but settled on the issue. The Environmental Protection Agency recently published, then removed a report which claimed glyphosate posed no risk to humans.

California bureaucrats: Science deniers.

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Dubbed “the Uber of the skies,” startups like Flytenow and AirPooler aimed to connect pilots whose private flights were not yet filled to passengers eager to reach their destinations without suffering the horrors of commercial air travel. Founded in 2013, the services were a great win-win for both parties: Pilots no longer had to simply eat the cost of empty seats on each trip, and passengers got to enjoy the thrill of small-scale flight for a very affordable price. For the first time, it seemed like consumers would have a real inexpensive alternative to the hell of economy class travel.

That is, until the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) caught wind of all this innovation and decided to quash it once and for all. In a sneaky bid to shut down this kind of arrangement, the FAA decided to expansively interpret its own definition of a “common carriage” operator so that non-commercial small-scale pilots using these services would be legally put on the same level as the big boy commercial flights—with the same expensive regulatory and licensing requirements.

This is why we can’t ever have anything nice.

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Soon after Imran Awan joined the staff of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in 2005, his brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina, and his brother’s wife Natalia all appeared on other members’ payrolls, supposedly as IT administrators. His best friend Rao Abbas landed on the payroll too. Most of them made salaries ordinarily only chiefs of staff earn, but they were rarely seen or heard from in Hill IT circles.

The crew is now the target of a U.S. Capitol Police criminal information security probe with assistance from other law enforcement agencies as needed. Politico reported the “House staffers are accused of stealing equipment from members’ offices without their knowledge and committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network.”

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Taxpayer-funded bonds sold to raise revenue for parks and schools in cash-strapped Detroit will instead be used to lure its professional basketball team back into the city.

…

Taxpayers are already on the hook for more than $300 million of the $900 million construction cost for new Little Caesars Arena, built to host the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League. The additional spending will make the arena suitable for basketball and help pay for new practice facility and front office for the Pistons.

This is what happens when Democrats run your city.

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How about that great government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Reminder for the dimwitted: When a service is free, the demand increases to infinity — and eventually you run out of other people’s money to pay for it.

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The New Hampshire Senate passed a bill ruling you can freely kill your own child but will get charged with murder if you kill someone else’s kid.

Perhaps the next step is that you can sell kids into slavery as long as they are your own kids.

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More self-segregation. We don’t even have to do anything to keep these proglodytes out of our state.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott was non-plussed over California’s travel ban, relaying though his spokesman John Wittman, “California may be able to stop their state employees, but they can’t stop all the businesses that are fleeing over taxation and regulation and relocating to Texas.”

Indeed. We especially welcome health care providers subjected to the new taxes.

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Sen. Mike Enzi on Wednesday said that Republicans aren’t going to listen to Democrats in their attempt to alter the new Health care bill due to the fact that Democrats didn’t listen to Republicans on Obamacare.

“We’re not trying to give the impression that we’re going to listen to them. They never listened to us,” he told the Washington Examiner.

What goes around comes around.

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The government-provided insurance system is going  broke, so the government taxes the people providing medical services. Yeah, that’s going to work.

Whom will they tax when the providers of medical services decide that they’d rather be practicing in, say, Texas?

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Mystery solved: No, President Trump doesn’t have recordings of former FBI director James Comey.

“With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea … whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings,” Trump said in a pair of tweets Thursday.

Trump did not explain why he made the suggestion that he secretly recorded conversations with his former FBI director in the first place, which came in a May tweet shortly after he fired Comey.

He was yanking the chains of the DemLegHump Media. He does that now and again just to keep his hand in.

Pass the popcorn.

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I guess the whole Free Speech thing still has some friends in high places. Wonder how long it will last.

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A high-level employee at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2014 appeared to give leaders of liberal-leaning groups preferential treatment for posting and publicizing comments on the agency’s public forum for the net neutrality debate.

Details of the highly friendly support were first described by then-The Washington Post’s Nancy Scola, who referred to it as an “unusual collaboration” in an in-depth report on the FCC’s filing system. Those details became significantly more incriminating after Mike Wendy, director of the market-oriented nonprofit MediaFreedom, recently received once-classified pieces of electronic communications years after he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Wendy alleges that, along with other conservative organizations, they were not given the same effortful and enthusiastic treatment their liberal counterparts received.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Well, you don’t want to rush these things.

At least it didn’t take them as long as the telephone tax that was to finance the Spanish-American War.

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Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess introduced a bill in 2015 to place a $25 tax on every firearm sold and a 5-cent tax on every ammunition round sold.

Since the tax took effect, gun violence has risen and gun sales have decreased, leading to a much smaller payout than the city expected, Fox News Reports.

Amazing how that works.

Dave Workman believes the city should have predicted the rise in violence. “All these gun control laws affect the wrong people. The gang bangers don’t go in and buy ammunition at retail, at least not around here. It certainly hasn’t stopped them from getting their hands on firearms.”

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During a multi-year wild blueberry glut, government agencies have been using subsidies and grants to encourage Maine farmers to keep growing the crop. Too bad no one seems to want them. Maine has a glut of the berries, and now the governor of Maine hopes to help sell them off by spending $2.5 million on agricultural marketing.

Farmers have been growing wild blueberries in Maine since the mid 1800s. The berries perish quickly, so 99 percent of the crop is frozen, making it easier for a berry surplus to continue from previous years.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

Most of the issue that plague our modern societies stem from the unwillingness of our policy makers to consider the obvious solutions. In the 80’s, we had a bum crisis due to the states being forced to fling open the doors to their nervous hospitals. The former patients had no one willing to care for them and no ability to care for themselves, so they ended up on the streets as bums. The obvious answer was to put them back into the asylums, but that was ruled off limits and we still have a bum problem to this day.

…

The thing is, the Cloud People do not have a bum problem. They “solved” the “homeless” problem by agreeing to use their tax dollars to build flop houses in your neighborhood and they also make sure the bum services industry is located in your neighborhood. You will never see a homeless shelter next to a Starbucks. The cops in Cloud Country are adept at putting the stray bum on a bus and sending him to Dirt Country, where the shelters are located. After all, they are public servants and that is the humane thing to do.

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The highrise in London which recently burned, killing many was so devastating because it was recently clad with exterior insulation material to make it more energy-efficient.

The fire started in a lower-floor kitchen and rapidly spread up the entire building due to a “chimney effect” caused by the cladding.

Insulation keeps heat in. Basically, they converted the building into a giant kiln.

Jeremy Corbyn blames cuts to local council funding for the tragedy, but this cladding was part of a multimillion-dollar renovation.

About 30,000 other buildings around Britain have also been covered with this insulating cladding.

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Well, that’s what happens when your city is run by Democrats. Just ask the people in Chicago, and Detroit, and D.C., and ….

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Does the Environmental Protection Agency care more about its image than it does about the environment?

Its behavior in response to the massive 2015 Gold King Mine disaster in Colorado would suggest a very clear “yes.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is hiding its incredible recklessness in the affair by giving official accounts that are clearly contradicted by ample evidence in the government’s possession.

Government employees skate from things that would put businessmen in prison.

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The head of the Michigan health department, Nick Lyon, was charged Wednesday with involuntary manslaughter and misconduct regarding Flint’s lead-contaminated water.

…

Chief Medial Executive Eden Wells was also charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a police officer. Both are charged in connection with the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in the Flint area that led to 12 deaths after the city’s water supply was switched to the Flint River in April 2014.

…

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has so far charged over a dozen current or former government officials linked to the Flint water crisis.

Not often bureaucrats get tagged for their mistakes, even when those mistakes kill people.

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How about that government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Remember: When the government provides something ‘for free’, the demand for it can never be satisfied.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Senator Barrasso lays it out.

After seven years of Obamacare, it’s important to remember the many ways Obamacare has failed us—and why consumer-friendly, market-driven health care should remain the goal.

Here are five ways Obamacare’s track record shows why expanding government’s role in health care would be an even bigger disaster.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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The oldest commercial wind power facility in Canada has been shut down and faces demolition after 23 years of transforming brisk southern Alberta breezes into electricity — and its owner says building a replacement depends on the next moves of the provincial NDP government.

BLUF: Wind power sucks. It only exists when the government takes money from your pocket and gives it to their cronies in the ‘green’ industry, to use the latter term loosely.

TransAlta Corp. said Tuesday the blades on 57 turbines at its Cowley Ridge facility near Pincher Creek have already been halted and the towers are to be toppled and recycled for scrap metal this spring. The company inherited the now-obsolete facility, built between 1993 and 1994, as part of its $1.6-billion hostile takeover of Calgary-based Canadian Hydro Developers Inc. in 2009.

“TransAlta is very interested in repowering this site. Unfortunately, right now, it’s not economically feasible,” Wayne Oliver, operations supervisor for TransAlta’s wind operations in Pincher Creek and Fort Macleod, said in an interview.

And that tells you everything you need to know about ‘green’ energy.

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Government employees one again set records for incompetence.

County officials, however, had intially planned to tax distributors, who would pass along the cost in the final sale price of a sweetened beverage. Last Thursday cancelled that plan when the Cook County Revenue Department pointed out the sales price would still be subject to a sales tax.

A tax on a tax is illegal in Illinois.

Oops. (Well, so are guns, but that doesn’t stem gun violence among the underclass.)

When the county made the soda tax a line item at the point of sale it ran afoul of the Department of Agriculture, which advised it was against federal law to tax transactions paid for with benefits from its Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) program.

The SNAP waiver exempts roughly 873,000 Cook County residents from the soda tax.

Oops again.

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Under the Bank Secrecy Act, financial transactions of over $10,000 trigger bank reporting requirements. If there are multiple transactions of just under $10,000—by a business, for example—the IRS may become suspicious that there is nefarious activity occurring.

That suspicion can result in assets being seized from innocent Americans. As the House Committee on Ways and Means reported last year:

Current law allows the Federal government, including the IRS, to use civil procedures to seize assets the government believes are involved in illegal activity without ever having to prove that the owners of the assets actually were engaged in criminal activity.

Current law circumvents ancient concepts like due process and innocence until guilt is proven. The federal government then places the burden of reclaiming the assets on the citizen it targeted.

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President Trump has made some outstanding appointments (although one of the best, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, recently offered to resign in the face of criticism from the president). Right now, my favorite Trump appointee is U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.

In the tradition of our best U.N. ambassadors — Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick — Haley has been a powerful voice against U.N. hypocrisy. Most notably, she has denounced U.N. hypocrisy regarding Israel.

In addition to denouncing hypocrisy, Haley has moved to counter it. She has warned that the U.S. will pull out of the abomination known as the U.N. Human Rights Council unless it mends its way, in general, and alters its anti-Israel stance in particular. She has noted that the Council allows obvious human rights violators to remain members — e.g., Cuba and Venezuela — while chronically condemning Israel.

Say what you will about Trump, his appointments so far have been entirely satisfactory.

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And probably raaaaaaacist.

Participation in the food stamp program plunged by 85 percent in 13 counties in Alabama after officials required that recipients must work, look for work, or get approved job training, a state agency says.

In those 13 counties, enrollment in food stamps dropped over four months from 5,538 able-bodied adults without dependents to 831 such recipients.

Statewide, a total of 13,663 able-bodied adults without children or other dependents were enrolled in the food stamp program before the change implemented Jan. 1, according to the Alabama Department of Human Resources, the news site AL.com reported.

As of May 1, that statewide number had dropped to 7,483, the agency said.

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Journalists like to talk about “evergreen” topics, and is there anything more evergreen right now than the anarchy at Evergreen State College? The college is back up and running again, but not until after a student mob took it upon themselves to roam the campus with baseball bats smashing windows of science buildings, because science, with its dedication to objectivity and standards and all, is oppressive.

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Democrats never think that the rules, or even common courtesy, apply to them.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) brutally suspended Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) from speaking during the Senate Intel hearing when she refused to let assistant attorney general Rod Rosenstein answer any questions.

Rosenstein was trying to explain why special counsel Robert Mueller cannot be fired by the president when Harris cut him off.

“Sir, if I may, the greater assurance is not that you and I believe in Mueller’s integrity…it is that you would put in writing an indication based on your authority as the acting attorney general that he was full independence,” she said.

Rosenstein looked annoyed during her entire question, and started to respond, “He has the full independence as authorized by those regulations,” before Harris stopped him again.

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The Connecticut legislature unanimously passed a bill Tuesday increasing penalties for hate crimes, changing intimidation based on bigotry or bias from a misdemeanor to a felony.

The penalty increase also affects hate crimes against houses of worship and classifies a first-degree hate crime as anything inflicting “physical injury” based on bigotry or bias, lowered from the previous “serious injury” standard, the Wall Street Journal reports. Those convicted of hate crimes will face one to 10 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine. Lawmakers said the changes are a response to the growing rate of hate crimes across the country.

Funny how ‘antifa’ thugs never get charged, or even arrested, for ‘hate crimes’ (as opposed to, I suppose, ‘love crimes).

Better learn to love Big Brother … or else.

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But, according to Democrats, illegal immigrants don’t get food stamps or any other form of welfare because they’re, you know, not eligible.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.