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Dueling Democrats Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders were at a dead heat during the Iowa caucus, but their numbers were even closer at a Polk County precinct. Delegates with Des Moines’ Precinct 70 sided with Clinton after breaking a 61-61 split with a coin toss, Univision reported. Caucus rules allow for a coin flip to decide a victor in case of a tie. CLINTON, SANDERS IN TIGHT CONTEST AS IOWA CAUCUSES OPEN The coin landed heads-down in favor of Clinton at the Weeks Middle School gymnasium. “That’s how it works,” one voter sporting Sanders stickers said. “It was very,...

Democrats in chaos: Hillary and Bernie are left in limbo as poor staffing at Iowa polling places means caucus winner won't be declared until later today Iowa's Democratic faithful will have to wait until Tuesday to find out who won their presidential caucuses, as state party officials botched the event and can't determine who won in nine of the 1,681 voting precincts. Poor staffing led to questions at caucus sites scattered all over the state, leaving liberals with egg on their faces - and casting a cloud over the results although Hillary Clinton has already claimed victory. When counting stopped...

Jeff Kaufmann: When I talk about intensity, Im talking about, were now getting about 100 phone calls and hour into RPI (Republican Party of Iowa)… To put that into perspective, we get usually 5 or 6 an hour normally. This is beyond the pale… A lot of Democrats and Independents are asking about changing their vote to Republican. The Secretary of State’s report last week indicated over 3,000 people have done that already. I think we’re going to see a little bit of a surge that way. Kuafmann credited the Trump and Rand Paul campaigns for this surge in new...

Since joining the Trump campaign as a national spokeswoman in November, Katrina Pierson has served as an attack dog of sorts for Donald Trump, attempting to expose his critics and opponents as faux conservatives who are simply pulling the wool over the eyes of the American people. And yet, Ms. Pierson's own statements reveal she is a self-proclaimed devotee of Malcolm X (whom she has referred to as her "idol") and has a history of attacking conservatives as racists, sneering at Christians who are unable to "handle the truth" and mocking candidates who open up about their faith on the...

A couple of weeks ago, before a "moderate Muslim" couple lit up San Bernardino, a duo, by the way, that BHO's boys "vetted" to immigrate into the US, I read a column telling Christians not to vote for Trump should he win the GOP ticket because he didn't pass the "Word of God" litmus test. The Christian writer said evangelicals shouldn't support The Donald primarily because Trump mocked the disabled NYT reporter Serge Kovaleski. That, for said writer, was a holy deal breaker. He also pointed out that Trump was cocky, cheeky and braggadocious and that, my dear brethren, was...

John McCain was in a reflective, wisecracking mood Wednesday morning in Washington, but even in his most upbeat moments, he couldn’t find much kind to say about Senate colleague Ted Cruz. The GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee told reporters at a press breakfast that he wanted to “accentuate the positive” in the 2016 race. He tiptoed around real estate tycoon Donald Trump’s steely grip on the Republican presidential primary. When asked about the possibility of Trump becoming the party’s nominee, he emphasized that he’s a loyal Republican. McCain did point out that he had disagreements with Trump. But then, unbidden, he...

(Washington, DC ) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding the Obama Justice Department decision to close its investigation of the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups and other conservative opponents of President Obama’s policies: “President Obama’s IRS was used against his opponents to help him win reelection. So the Obama Justice Department’s decision to shut down its IRS abuse investigation with no prosecutions is as unsurprising as it is corrupt. Judicial Watch’s independent litigation proved the Obama IRS obstructed justice and destroyed evidence. And we uncovered that the IRS and Lois Lerner conspired with the...

By passing automatic voter registration, which places the responsibility for registering on governments, rather than individuals, we could easily boost turnout. Other reforms to make voting easier, such as making Election Day a holiday, non-partisan voter registration drives, and early voting periods, should also be implemented.....GOP politicians like Scott Walker work hard to suppress the vote. New data gives us a good idea why This week the Census Bureau released their data on voter turnout in the 2014 election, and the numbers are abysmal. In 2014, only 41.9 percent of the voting age citizen population turned out, the lowest number...

WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS employees erased computer backup tapes a month after officials discovered that thousands of emails related to the tax agency's tea party scandal had been lost, according to government investigators. The investigators, however, concluded that employees erased the tapes by mistake, not as part of an attempt to destroy evidence. As many as 24,000 emails were lost because 422 backup tapes were erased, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The revelation is likely to fuel conspiracy theories among conservatives who say the IRS has obstructed congressional investigations into the scandal. George...

Democrats never say they are committed to stopping voter fraud, merely that they're dedicated to "everyone" voting. This smug admission tells you everything you need to know, or in other words, nothing you didn't already suspect. The truth is Voter ID doesn't discriminate against or disenfranchise anyone. How can it when everyone is held to same standard of accountability? If you can't even verify your identity, validate and protect the authenticity of your vote, how are you a victim of anything other than your own ignorance and apathy? People have TWO YEARS in-between elections to get a damn photo ID;...

Vice President Joe Biden once told Chinese President Xi Jinping that U.S. leaders only support human rights as a matter of political optics, and that this makes the United States no better than China, according to a new New Yorker profile of Jinping. The New Yorker relates encounters between Biden and Jinping in 2011 and 2012, when both were vice presidents of their respective nations: Biden told me that Xi asked him why the U.S. put “so much emphasis on human rights.” Biden replied to Xi, “No President of the United States could represent the United States were he not...

On top of an $18.9 million Defense Department grant doled out in Sept. 2010, the Institute received $13.6 million from the Department of Education, according to USASpending.gov. In the 2009 federal budget, another $5.8 million was appropriated through the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services. The state of Massachusetts gave the University of Massachusetts $5 million, earmarked for the Institute. As a senator in 2010, current Sec. of State John Kerry waged an unsuccessful attempt to earmark another $28.9 million for the museum ... the $18.9 million Defense Department earmark was “funneled through the Defense...

“How can you call yourself a Christian, let alone a minister?!” I get asked that question frequently and the questioner is hostile more often than not. Still, I like to answer it if I believe the questioner is sincere. Though I self-identify as a Christian and I am an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I raised eyebrows a few years ago when I posted an article on my website about how my personal beliefs don’t align with those of most Presbyterians. For example, I believe that: - Religion is a human construct - The symbols of faith are...

No matter whom Republicans nominate to face Hillary Rodham Clinton in November 2016, that candidate will start at a disadvantage. It’s not polling, Clinton’s deep résumé or improving state of the economy. It’s the electoral college. Yes, the somewhat arcane — yet remarkably durable — way in which presidential elections are decided tilts toward Democrats in 2016, as documented by nonpartisan political handicapper Nathan Gonzales in a recent edition of the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report. Gonzales notes that if you add up all of the states that are either “safe” for the eventual Democratic nominee or “favor” that nominee,...

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy. “On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged...

At a breakout session during the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, one of us posed a question to the audience: What do members of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have in common?Hint: it has something to do with the 2008 bailout of private banks by American taxpayers. The insidious stink from that sorry episode lingers to this day—on both parties. Now the reasons for outrage over the bailouts were different for each group. For the Tea Partiers it was an unwarranted intrusion into the free market; for the Occupiers a taxpayer-financed gift to wealthy executives they believe caused...

The world’s largest search engine is setting itself up to become the global arbiter of truth online.

The Justice Department is stepping up scrutiny of the increasingly cozy ties between candidates and their outside allies, a move that could jolt the freewheeling campaign-finance atmosphere ahead of the 2016 elections. A rare conviction of a Virginia campaign operative this month is part of a broader focus on cases in which candidates may be violating a federal ban on sharing strategic information with well-funded independent allies, Justice officials said. “The opportunity to commit the crime has increased dramatically,” said Justice spokesman Peter Carr. “Illegal coordination is difficult to detect, which is why we strongly encourage party or campaign insiders...

[Editor's note: The original copy of this article incorrectly identified Rep. Ellison as a Democrat from Wisconsin. The oversight has been corrected, and a formal apology has been sent to the people of Wisconsin.]Forget about the Tuesday following the first Monday of November… Let’s just run an online poll for future public elections. Maybe we can set up a phone bank, kinda like PBS donation drives, for people without access to the internet. Heck, let’s just do a show of hands: Hillary or Jeb for 2016?Okay, that might be a slight over-simplification of what Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) was suggesting, but...

Talk about bad timing. Echo Lake Entertainment is set to release its independent film, Truth, the story of former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s self-destruction. It’s based on the 2006 book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the discredited CBS producer. Mapes documents and defends Rather’s 2004 attempts to use the forged “Killian documents” to portray former President George W. Bush as someone who shirked duty in Vietnam.