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Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell said on Friday that Barack Obama has acted more like a dictator than a president, and that President-elect Donald Trump should make it a priority to “restore the rule of law.” “We have been living under a dictatorial tyrant for the last eight years,” Mitchell said at the Conservative Women’s Network event, co-hosted by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “And one of the most important things that Donald Trump can do as president is to restore the rule of law,” Mitchell said. …

President-elect Donald Trump said he had narrowed his choices for a potential Supreme Court nominee to “three or four” candidates and that a decision would be coming “pretty soon,” Politico reports. Said Trump: “They are terrific people, highly respected, brilliant people and we’ll be announcing that pretty soon too.”

President-elect Donald Trump is set to meet Friday with North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a red-state Democrat, which could put Senate Democrats at a further disadvantage if she were to join the Trump administration. Heitkamp told CNN Thursday she has no inkling of what the meeting may be about, but said she was open to discussing serving in a Trump administration. News of the meeting set off a panic among top Democrats, some of whom began to privately make the case that Heitkamp should stay in the Senate rather than give up a seat that would likely be a GOP...

President-elect Donald Trump spoke Friday with Taiwan’s president, a major departure from decades of U.S. policy in Asia and a breach of diplomatic protocol with ramifications for the incoming president’s relations with China. Trump spoke by phone with Taiwanese President Tsai Ying-wen, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said. The conversation was first reported by the Financial Times and the Taipei Times. The call is the first known contact between a U.S. president or president-elect with a Taiwanese leader since the United States broke diplomatic relations with the island in 1979. China considers Taiwan a province, and news of the official outreach...

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) came out against Donald Trump’s selection of retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for secretary of Defense, saying she would not support a necessary congressional waiver to allow him to take on the role. Gillibrand is the first lawmaker to oppose waiving the prohibition on former military officers heading the Pentagon less than seven years after retiring. “While I deeply respect General Mattis’s service, I will oppose a waiver,” she said in a statement. “Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and I will not vote for an exception to this rule.”...

U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), a senior member of the U.S. Senate Energy Committee and co-chair of the bipartisan Senate Manufacturing Caucus, and Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Commerce, Environment, and Foreign Relations Committees, along with an additional 20 Senators, today urged President Obama to consider the impacts on American manufacturing and families that rely on natural gas for heat when looking to approve new natural gas export facilities. To read the full story, click the link below for details: http://oilandgasrepublic.com/2014/05/21/usa-senators-urges-president-obama-to-consider-impacts-of-natural-gas-exports/

Don't know about link rules regarding AOL, so I'll just use the link.

"This is one of our chief challenges today, is to manage information and to do it in a way that average folks at home can know what's real and what isn't, what's true, what's false, and try to build consensus around a common set of understandings," Kerry said during the Mediterranean Dialogues Conference in Rome. "Technology has brought the world closer, yes; but it's also enabled bigots and demagogues to spread messages of divisiveness and hate with the click of a button, with the push of a finger." . . . "There are some truths, folks. Hard sometimes for people...

Documents release at link.

Bravo for the forward-looking team at Commentary. Unburdened by illusion that Donald Trump can or will “turn this thing around,” they have proceeded straightaway to the next important conversation: What comes next for America’s battered Republican Party? Noah Rothman writes: “Reunification and a recapitulation of something resembling a national governing coalition must be the foremost priority.” That’s clearly true! How to do it? Rothman’s answer is to try to reconstitute conservatism as it used to be, refined by the famous “autopsy” of 2013. The problem is that pro-Trump Republicans may not agree that Trumpism failed. They may not be amenable...

Republicans have a problem. Their plan to repeal and replace Obamacare won’t work unless they repeal first because Democrats will not be motivated to work on a replacement. However, since Republicans don’t have a replacement bill ready, it could be some time before a replacement, especially one that requires Democratic support, is in place. The current plan to solve this problem is being called repeal and delay, i.e. repeal Obamacare but phase it out over several years so Congress can work on the replacement.As Ed highlighted earlier today, repeal and delay has a big problem. Specifically, once the GOP...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- An estimated $108 billion in student loans will be forgiven in the next two decades as a growing number of borrowers seek income-driven payment assistance programs, the Government Accountability Office said Wednesday. The GAO, in a report to Congress that analyzed the cost of income-driven repayment plans, found some $29 billion more in student loans will be discharged due to borrower death or disability. Overall, the sum is double the amount estimated by the U.S. Department of Education, the report found. The GAO criticized the department for underestimating the cost of the repayment plans and...

New York City to pay friends and families of homeless people to help them People who take in homeless people can receive up to $1,800 each month The plan is part of the city's new 'Home for the Holidays' program Department of Social Services says it will save the city money on shelters

CINCINNATI—Vice President-elect Mike Pence said Thursday that the incoming Trump administration is planning a burst of activity that would take aim at the gridlock in Washington, pressing forward with its goals to overhaul the tax code, health care and immigration laws.

Senate Republicans have agreed to a deal that strips an amendment protecting religious freedom for faith-based organizations from a defense spending bill, making the measure more favorable to signature by outgoing resident Barack Obama. Obama threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) if the bill included the Russell Amendment, which applies religious freedom exemptions to federal grants and contracts. The NDAA is an annual piece of legislation that addresses Department of Defense budget and expenditures. The Russell Amendment restated current United States law via the First Amendment. The measure would have protected, for example, faith groups that run...

The institutional left’s funding behemoth W.K. Kellogg Foundation has partnered with and given major donations to George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Tides Center as part of its massive push to promote a far-left agenda. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is the nonprofit arm of cereal and sweets giant Kellogg’s, based in Battle Creek, Michigan. The Kellogg Company is chiefly known for its breakfast brands, including Special K™ cereal, Eggo® waffles, and Pop-Tarts®; but its namesake nonprofit W.K. Kellogg Foundation is one of the largest institutional funders in the world and is the seventh largest philanthropic foundation in the United...

H.R.6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, passed in the House of Representatives on November 30. The legislation deals with a number of intelligence-related issues, including Russian propaganda, or what the government calls propaganda. Section 501 calls for the government to counter “measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.”

The government suspended naturalization ceremonies and banned officers from approving any new applications for citizenship earlier this week after realizing its background check system was broken and ineligible people may have been slipping through, a key congressman revealed Friday. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, whose office was tipped off to the monumental error, said he was stunned by the problem — and also by the fact that the administration never bothered to inform him of it. ... At this point we are not confident that proper FBI Name Checks have been run on certain ELIS cases. At this point...

Rep. Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., introduced legislation this week aimed at changing airport security screening procedures for transgender people. . . . Rice and other Democrats said machines require screeners to select "male" or "female" in order to configure the scanner for each person. "This protocol may be well-suited to screen some cisgender passengers, but they do so at the expense of singling out transgender or gender nonconforming individuals whose physical appearances may not necessarily match their biological sex," Democrats wrote. "Cisgender" is a term that refers to anyone who isn't transgender.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump spoke on the telephone on Friday with Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte and invited him to the White House next year during a "very engaging, animated" talk, an aide to Duterte said. The call lasted just over seven minutes, Duterte's special advisor, Christopher Go, said in a text message to media. The conversation came amid tension and uncertainty between the United States and the Philippines after months of anti-American rhetoric from Duterte, fueled by his anger over the Obama administration's concerns about his deadly war on drugs. Though Duterte has spoken of his optimism for better ties...