Donald Trump is acting like a dictator by blocking critics on Twitter, law scholars say  Oh, I think that dictators do stuff more evil than blocking someone on Twitter.

It’s been one year since the US election – Donald Trump has done absolutely nothing since becoming President  Then what are you complaining about?

Former ‘Believer’ Host Reza Aslan Claims Trump Is a Cult Leader  As opposed to Obama (um…um…um) who was merely the Magic Negro.

Here Are The Top 5 Hate Crime Hoaxes Since Trump Got Elected

Trump is not invited to our next climate change summit, says France  I’m sure he’ll be devastated.

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A Qatar Airways flight had to make an emergency landing after a female passenger found out her husband was cheating on her mid-flight, reports the Hindustan Times.

The unidentified Iranian woman reportedly used her husband’s fingerprint to unlock his phone while he was asleep, before becoming incensed by what she found on the device.

Flight attendants were unable to calm the woman as she repeatedly hit her husband, causing the pilots to make the decision to make an emergency landing in India on 5 November.

Imagine if he’d had the new iPhone X.

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In an appearance on TBS’s “Conan” on Thursday, Kunis revealed that she’s been making monthly donations to Planned Parenthood in Pence’s name for months. The actress’s prank on the vice president led to an immediate reaction from Pence and pro-life supporters and has now resulted in a boycott of Jim Beam, which Kunis serves as a spokeswoman for.

What goes around comes around.

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I had this morning’s post all planned and then I read the business section for the Dallas Morning News. There, on the front page, was an article that had to be addressed. Barnes & Noble is opening a new store in Plano, TX (north of Dallas). That wouldn’t normally be news except for the type of store it is. This is one of their new Barnes & Noble Kitchen stores. Yes, you read that right — B&N “Kitchen”.

Here’s the basic premise. It is still a bookstore. Kind of. This 10,000 square foot store will still sell books. However, it will be stocking 17,000 titles as opposed to the 35,000 – 50,000 titles in its other stores. There will be no music in the new “kitchen” although you will still be able to buy art supplies and journals. (There is nothing in the story about whether you will find all the other non-book items you find at most B&N stores). The big change, however, is in the “kitchen” part of this store. There will be seating for 178 diners inside and on a patio. It will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner and they are considering doing a Sunday brunch as well. Let’s not forget the bar either. You will be able to order wine or locally brewed beer, among others.

They need to do something.

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These things happen. Those horns are there for a reason.

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Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, walked out of Congress’ moment of silence for the victims of the Texas church shooting on Monday.

Keepin’ it classy.

“I am heartbroken about the children and the adults that were killed in the worst mass shooting in Texas history this Sunday,” Lieu stated. “My colleagues have a right to do [a moment of silence] and I myself have participated in many of them.”

“I cannot do this again. I have done too many moments of silences,” he asserted. “What we need is we need action, we need to pass gun safety legislation now.”

Lieu called for a universal background check, a ban on bump stocks, and a ban on assault rifles.

Except that this shooter passed the background check (because the Air Force screwed up), didn’t use a bump stock, and actual assault rifles are controlled as automatic weapons.

Those who depend on the government for their safety wind up in the ground.

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Well, let’s see whether he shows up. That’ll tell us.

In the Good Old Days, the first thing a Turkish Sultan did on succeeding his predecessor was have all of his brothers strangled. Maybe the Saudis are adopting that practice.

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Pushback on the explicit anti-white racism that permeates the Crustian media these days.

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Notice that there aren’t any people getting arrested for threatening to Kill All Black Police.

I wonder why that is?

Alex Tubarrok fires it up.

In a stunningly original paper Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem A. Co?ar, and Ali Hortaçsu use the gravity model of trade to infer the location of lost cities from Bronze age Assyria! The simplest gravity model makes predictions about trade flows based on the sizes of cities and the distances between them. More complicated models add costs based on geographic barriers. The authors have data from ancient texts on trade flows between all the cities, they know the locations of some of the cities, and they know the geography of the region. Using this data they can invert the gravity model and, triangulating from the known cities, find the lost cities that would best “fit” the model. In other words, by assuming the model is true the authors can predict where the lost cities should be located. To test the idea the authors pretend that some known cities are lost and amazingly the model is able to accurately rediscover those cities.

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My guess is: Another excuse to play the Victim Card. But that’s just a guess.

John Oliver calls out Donald Trump’s ‘incompetence’ over Russian probe  Even though Trump has nothing to do with it and his name is never mentioned. Pajama-boy Oliver needs to get a real job.

‘Voter Fraud Doesn’t Exist, Trump Made It Up’ Says Chelsea Handler on Netflix Show  Except that it does exist, and Trump didn’t make it up. But lies never stop liberals.

Journalists Slam Trump For Copying Fish Food Dump  Nothing is too trivial for ‘journalists’ who want some excuse to attack Trump.

Trump-Hating Celebrities Can’t Cope with the ‘Orange Nightmare’

CNN Cherry Picks Trump Quotes On Japanese Cars

Paul McCarthy: Going Vegan Is The Best Way To Get Back At Trump’s Climate ‘Madness’  Yeah. You first.

Trump Accused Of Ending A Satellite Program That Congress Defunded Before He Took Office  What does that matter? When in doubt, blame Trump!

Dog owner stunned to discover ‘exact image’ of Donald Trump in her pet beagle’s EAR – Mirror Online

Progressives Are Engaging in Impeachment Fanfiction

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Sky is falling — film at eleven. Women and minorities hardest hit.

Popular Science used to be about science. Now it’s about the Narrative.

Freeberg ponders.

Think about THAT, now. We’re constantly told the democrats are the party of the little guy, of the underdog. The handicapped, who cannot do, couldn’t have done, anything to improve his present circumstances. Well, putting aside the fact that this is exactly how small children argue — “You’re stupid! I win!” — when the time comes for all of their hopes and dreams to depend on making an entire country angry at one guy, they see this as the most promising strategy. Promulgate the notion that he’s stupid, like they did with Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. Convince us he’s stupid, and our anger is automatic. And right, and good, and just.

Think about that…take all the time you need…

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In today’s exciting episode, a proglodyte discovers that not everybody agrees with her political agenda.

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Apparently the Beast is White Privilege or something.

I’m holding out for ‘The floor of the Senate’.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Back in the heyday of the Ivy League Look, when a boy was going steady he’d remove the locker loop on the back of his oxford-cloth buttondown, signalling to other females that he was spoken for.

And how did a female student signal she was taken? By wearing her boyfriend’s college scarf. The practice was especially popular at the two schools that most set the style in campus fashion: Princeton and Vassar.

The illustration does indeed feature a Princeton scarf, presumably on a Vassar girl.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

George W Bush says Donald Trump ‘doesn’t know what it means to be President’  Well, he doesn’t know how to ‘be a President’ like George W. Bush. I call that a feature, not a bug.

Twitter Employee Who Deleted Trumps Account Being Hailed Hero  Because that’s the way the arrested adolescents of the Left think. Sad.

Saudi King Arrests Opponents; Provincial DC Press Blames Trump

‘Trump Must Hang’ Prof To Return To Teaching Classes Next Semester  It’s not as if he did anything bad, like calling for Obama to be hanged.

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A group of students at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, did something so outrageous, so transgressive, that it has roiled the campus and led to newspaper headlines: they posted signs on campusthat say, “It’s OK to be white.”

You might think that in a campus environment where a thousand genders are blooming, you could finish a sentence beginning “It’s OK to be…” in just about any possible manner. But you would be wrong.

Apparently not.

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Jack Miles, a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur “genius” award-winning author, was a contributor to the University of California’s “Bending the Curve” report on climate stability. His forthcoming book is “God in the Koran” (Alfred A. Knopf 2018). 

So what we have here is your basic Child of the Crust.

According to former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, we have only three years left in which to “bend the emissions curve downward” and forestall a terrifying cascade of climate-related catastrophes, much worse than what we’re already experiencing.

These are the famous ‘well, we’ll just fudge the figures until they support our panic attack’ guys.

Realistically, is there anything that you or I can do as individuals to make a significant difference in the short time remaining?

Yeah — don’t believe the bullshit that comes out of the U.N. or any of its transnational catamites.

The answer is yes, and the good news is it won’t cost us a penny. It will actually save us money, and we won’t have to leave home to do it. Staying home, in fact, is the essence of making a big difference in a big hurry. That’s because nothing that we do pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than air travel. Cancel a couple long flights, and you can halve your carbon footprint. Schedule a couple, and you can double or triple it.

I’m on it. Ball’s in your court, AlGore.

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Saudi Arabia deployed its U.S.-provided Patriot missile defense system against a Yemeni missile targeting the capital city of Riyadh Saturday.

The missile was launched by Houthi rebels, an Iranian backed Shiite militia Saudi Arabia is actively fighting in the neighboring gulf country. The missile was reportedly towards an airport in the capital city if Riyadh, spreading panic throughout.

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One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.

Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then “took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy’s parents.”

Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment. But the kids soon found out they would not be allowed to use it, because it was resting on grass, not wood chips. “It’s a safety issue,” explained a day care spokeswoman. Playing on grass is against local regulations.

And then there was the query that ran in Parents magazine a few years back: “Your child’s old enough to stay home briefly, and often does. But is it okay to leave her and her playmate home while you dash to the dry cleaner?” Absolutely not, the magazine averred: “Take the kids with you, or save your errand for another time.” After all, “you want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.”

The principle here is simple: This generation of kids must be protected like none other. They can’t use tools, they can’t play on grass, and they certainly can’t be expected to work through a spat with a friend.

And this, it could be argued, is why we have “safe spaces” on college campuses and millennials missing adult milestones today. We told a generation of kids that they can never be too safe—and they believed us.

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Drafted and enacted in response to the 2007–2009 financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) became law in 2010. Dodd-Frank’s drafters hoped the law would repair the flaws in the financial system that had so painfully manifested themselves during the financial crisis. Rather than addressing the regulatory failures that led to the crisis, Dodd-Frank’s core solution was to shift decision-making from the private sector to regulators—the same regulators whose lapses had contributed to the crisis. Dodd-Frank has been costly in the short term, as any major regulatory overhaul would be. The financial industry and regulators have poured countless hours and dollars into implementing the new law. Of greater concern than these short-term implementation costs are Dodd-Frank’s potential long-run costs. Rather than averting crises, Dodd-Frank’s rejiggering of the financial system has created the preconditions for a future crisis, while inhibiting economic growth and dynamism.

A reminder that government workers are bad at nearly everything they touch, and so ought not to be placed in charge unless there is literally no other option.

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Come to think of it, why would you want to? ‘Hold my beer and watch this….’

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Probably organizing a union.

MSNBC & WaPo: Trump “Wants to Run This Country” Like Communist China  But I thought MSNBC and WaPo liked Communist China? Thomas Friedman certainly does.

Trump Is a ‘Blowhard,’ ‘I Don’t Like Him’ and I Voted for Hillary, George Bush Says in New Book  Which confirms everything that Real Conservatives have always said about George W. Bush.

Reporter who broke Watergate says Trump colluding with Russia would be ‘worse in many, many ways’  Well, actually, no, since ‘collusion’ (for which there is absolutely no evidence) isn’t against the law.

Professor who predicted Trump’s win now certain he will be impeached within a year  Perhaps he’d like to put some money on that.

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They’re still using the Russian Imperial arms, why not have a Russian Imperial family? I doubt that a new tsar could be any worse than Putin.

Actually, the Russian Imperial dynasty was German from the time of Tsar Paul, so they might want to get some real Russians for a change; there are any number of Rurik-descended noble families that would do, such as the Gagarins, the Obolenskys, and the Dolgorukys.

If they want to go with the Hostein-Gottorp-Romanovs, the heir male was Prince Paul Romanovsky-Ilyinsky, son of Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, who died in 2004. His son, Dimitri Pavlovich, an American citizen, would be a good pick.

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Doesn’t surprise me. I like to see what I’m buying, and I imagine other people do too.

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Rene Albert Boucher, 59, was arrested and charged with one count of assault in the fourth degree. Paul, a Republican, suffered minor injuries in the attack, details of which are still unknown.

Kentucky State Board of Election voting records list Boucher as a registered Democrat. A person with the same name also works as an anesthesiologist in Bowling Green.

The brownshirts of the Left are on the march.

Yet Trump is the New Hitler.

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Hey — if the shoe fits….

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Imagine if marathon runners were ranked simply by taking their average time over every course. Some courses are clearly harder than others, and runners can choose which races to enter, so a runner could always improve her ranking by refusing to run on difficult courses. Even sillier would be to rank runners by their average finish position across all races: a world-class professional could just run against high-schoolers and finish first without even trying.

Strangely, the current system for evaluating American college students manages to achieve this extraordinary level of silliness. Since students can select their own courses, and grades from all courses count equally, they are rewarded for taking easier courses and punished for taking harder ones. A first-year student taking introductory English literature gets exactly equal credit as her classmate who precociously jumps into graduate-level literary analysis.

College grade-point averages (GPAs) are not merely a matter of pride. Medical schools, law schools and consulting firms, among other popular post-graduation destinations, have strict GPA cut-offs; any student who fails to make the grade will struggle to have their application even seen by a human. From an individual student’s standpoint, it’s completely rational to optimise for GPA, even at the expense of other considerations. From the university’s point of view, though, that expense is vast.

The problem with any system of grading is: Who’s doing the grading, and on what basis?

American military schools solve this problem by separating the teaching and the testing. Tests at the end of every two or three week Unit are standardized and are created and graded by a special testing group who build tests based on individual questions that have been used in past tests and which have values associated with them as to predicted performance, e.g. a question is historically gotten right by 64% or 73% or 45% of test-takers; tests are built from questions whose average predicted success rate equals the desired passing score. New questions are constantly being created and their initial values are derived from performance in tests to which they are added but in which they are not counted ‘for real’.

The closest approach to this in modern academia are the various ‘aptitude tests’ like the SAT and the ACT and the ‘gateway tests’ used by British-format school systems, such as the GCSE, O-Level, and A-Level exams. Attempts are being made to do something like this in the United States but are hitting rocks and shoals because (a) tests of absolute achievement allow teachers themselves to be evaluated for effectiveness, and teachers resist this to their least breath, and (b) such tests are subject to capture by political groups who want the educational system to indoctrinate students with their preferred political agenda and so write tests that reward that indoctrination.

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Science is not always your friend.

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I got a heads up about the comparison at a 2015 dinner, when I heard a congressman complain about the members of the House’s rambunctious and very conservative Freedom Caucus. “Right-wing Marxists,” he called them. Aha, I thought. That’s me.

WSJ’s WH Reporter Bashes Trump for Not Calling for Execution of Already-Dead Las Vegas Shooter

President Trump’s Twitter Account Disappears…Then Comes Back

Nearly half of Americans think Donald Trump committed a crime during the presidential campaign  According to ABC, and they wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Trump-Russia probe: Judge orders Paul Manafort to stay under house arrest and await trial date  Except, of course, that it isn’t ‘Trump-Russia probe’ except in the minds of proglodyte journalists.

Ivanka Trump ‘greeted with half empty-room’ while giving Tokyo speech on women’s empowerment  Which wouldn’t be ‘news’ if her name weren’t Trump.

Donald Trump tweets ‘Pocahontas’ racist slur about senator Elizabeth Warren  The term is ‘Fauxcahontas’ in reference to her BOGUS claim of scraeling ancestry. But it’s Trump, and OF COURSE everything he says is a ‘racist slur’, including Good Morning.

Report: Michigan Mayor Calls Trump ‘Pathetic Excuse’ For President, Kneels In Front Of Students  Give that guy a Pussy Hat.

Rosie O’Donnell Admits: ‘I Spend 90% Of My Hours Tweeting Hatred’ At Trump

Keith Olbermann: Bin Laden Did Less To Hurt America Than Trump [VIDEO]  And Keith Olbermann is more full of hot air.

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Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you wish America had a system like that?

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Obviously Reality doesn’t read the correct news media.

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Thugs will be thugs.

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I guess that a scientific consensus isn’t enough when it contradicts the Narrative.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren said she agreed with the suggestion, after a report claimed that Ms Clinton had controlled multiple aspects of the party’s infrastructure.

Former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Donna Brazile wrote in a report for the Politico that Ms Clinton’s campaign had assumed control of key fundraising aspects of the party before she went on to defeat Bernie Sanders.

But you knew that.

This will not, of course, prevent Hillary from getting tongue-baths from feminists and proglodyte journalists, but at least the truth is out there.

Read it.

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

Police arrest men for marching girl naked through village in Pakistan

Libyan armed group refuses to extradite brother of Manchester bomber to UK  And, indeed, why would they?

Manchester attack: British police granted arrest warrant for bomber Salman Abedi’s younger brother

The Gaza Underground

NYC Terror Suspect Had Been Planning Attack For Close To A Year

Father Demands Extreme Vetting After Terrorist Murdered His Son In NYC  Good luck with that.

NYC Terrorist Told FBI He ‘Felt Good About What He Did’

Stop Denying the Obvious. Terror Attacks Are Motivated by Radical Islam.

Muslim father ‘ordered’ by judge not to impose Islam on his children

Terror In Tribeca: The West Vs. Islam Is A Civilizational Clash

Saudi-led airstrike kills 21 in attack on crowded market in Yemen

Egyptian lawyer says it’s a national duty to rape girls who wear revealing clothing like ripped jeans

Wife of Chechen volunteer soldier accused of Vladimir Putin assassination plot murdered in Ukraine

Foiled Plot in Miami Is 99th Terror Plot Against US Since 9/11

Thwarted Terror Attack in Germany

NYC Attacker Is Uzbek Immigrant Believed To Be Loyal To ISIS

France Ends State Of Emergency After Two Years Of Terror  A bit premature, I think.

Islamic Jihad in Manhattan

Truck Driver Kills 6 NYC Pedestrians in ‘Deliberate Attack,’ Screams ‘Allahu Akbar’

Home Office plan to give jihadis council houses and support part of ‘overdue’ strategy to combat terrorism

Lee Rigby killer has been converting other prisoners to Islam, say intelligence officials

Syrian Kurds ask UK to take back alleged British Isis fighter ‘Jihadi Jack’

US Picks Off 11 ISIS Leaders In A Single Month

Pakistan bride accidentally poisons 15 family members in bid to kill new husband

Syrian Man Arrested In Germany For Planning ‘Serious Terror Attack’

Muslim woman gave baby daughter up for adoption for fear of suffering ‘honour-based violence’ from family

The Islamization of Textbooks in Romanian Secondary Schools

The Toronto Star Doubles Down on the Doubletalk

Israel Kills 7 Palestinian Militants as Gaza Tunnel Destroyed

The Tragedy In Yemen: The Rest Of The Story  Why the Saudis don’t just annex that place and be done with it I don’t know.

US Forces Capture Militant Instrumental To Benghazi Attack  Was she wearing a pantsuit?

Report: A Kidnapped American Is Dying In The Custody Of Afghan Militants

Nobody Knows What To Do With Captured American ISIS Fighter  Something lingering, I fancy, with boiling oil in it.

Alessandro Meluzzi: The Entire Islamic World Has Reached a Boiling Point

Shootout at a Disco in Hamburg

’60 Percent’ Of Taliban Income Comes From Drug Trade, And Business Is Booming

Beatings, death threats and rejection: Woman tells of harrowing life as lesbian Muslim in Pakistan

Mogadishu attacks: Death toll from Islamist car bombing and siege of hotel in Somalia rises to 25

Al-Qaida Ramps Up In Africa Amid Second Deadly Car Blast

French police ‘tear-gassing refugee children and tearing up tents’ near former Calais Jungle site as government condemns abuses

Swedish Policeman’s House Shot up by High-Caliber Weapons

First American Citizen To Be Convicted Of Joining ISIS Gets 20 Years

Mogadishu bomb: Gunfire heard inside hotel near presidential palace after blast in Somali capital

Libya: Residents in Tripoli drill through pavements in desperate bid to find water

ACLU on Sharia: Don’t Worry, Be Happy

In Egypt, Modernity Does Not Include Civil Rights for Christians

Girl Allegedly Assaulted For Not Wearing Hijab In Public

10 DAYS OF HELL: 60 ISIS Terrorists Obliterated By US

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Well, I’m certainly glad that’s the most important problem they have.

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Now if only the New York Times could figure out what his motivation was….

Chelsea Handler Promotes Petition To ‘Impeach Trump’  You still need a reason, girl, and the fact that you hate him isn’t enough.

Michelle Obama just gave Donald Trump some Twitter advice  I’m sure Trump is going to rush to take advice from Michelle Obama.

Greatest threat to building peace in Iraq is not Isis – it’s Donald Trump picking a fight with Iran  Trump, of course, is not ‘picking a fight with Iran’; Trump is merely pulling the curtain back from the fights Iran is already picking with everybody else. Trump’s only crime is Noticing.

Biden: ‘Charlatan’ Trump Threatens ‘Invisible Moral Fabric’ Of America  And yet he keeps getting good stuff done. Not bad for a ‘charlatan’. (Write this down: A Democrat is concerned about the ‘moral fabric of America’. That’s gotta be a first.)

Actor Demands Congress Remove ‘Cancer’ of Trump from ‘the Body of Your Country’  Uh, yeah, we’ll get right on that.