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(Bold, italics: mine) PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla., June 22 (Reuters) - On the morning before the massacre at Orlando's Pulse gay nightclub, shooter Omar Mateen drastically altered his appearance, shaving his head and face, and seemed agitated and surly, said an acquaintance who saw him that day. Mateen also talked about staying up all night to do online research into anti-psychosis medication, the acquaintance said in a interview. The acquaintance requested anonymity, saying authorities had asked him to keep quiet. The 29-year-old gunman, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, called...

The false narrative emerging from the media seeks to make a few points, all of which are red herrings and straw men designed to take attention from the truth. The shooter, Omar Mateen, was homophobic because he hated gays. Mateen was unstable because he was mean and beat his wife Mateen had too much unfettered access to guns Mateen was not religiously motivated Story after story references these points, and they quote each other liberally (take the pun as you wish).

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with Philip Gordon, who held the Middle East portfolio at the National Security Council from 2013 to 2015 (and before that, served as assistant secretary of state for European affairs) about my Atlantic article, “The Obama Doctrine.” The piece tried to explain how the president understands the world, and America’s role in it. (This week, the president is on a tour of the some of the countries he discussed in the article.) Gordon, a loyal Obama man, is, like his ex-boss, somewhat-to-very fatalistic about the ability of the U.S. to direct the...

Donald Trump is getting some national security advice from Florida Rep. Jeff Miller, a major coup for the candidate and one that could give him some needed gravitas on an issue he’s had problems with in the past. A Trump campaign source confirmed to NBC News that Miller attended Trump’s meeting with national security advisers on Capitol Hill this Thursday. The Florida Republican, who’s retiring this year, is seen sitting at the front of a photo Trump sent out on Twitter after the meeting. It’s unclear whether Miller is officially advising Trump or only attended the one meeting. Miller serves...

The bottom is dropping out for Donald Trump. While Trump was never popular outside of his loyal slice of GOP voters, a raft of new polls show his national position hitting new lows, including with groups that are supposed to form his base. America's widespread loathing for Trump puts further pressure on Republican delegates to deny him the nomination in July if he falls short of a majority, a move that would set off an ugly civil war but that some in the party believe would be necessary to stave off generational damage. A collection of recent surveys by Real...

Add least-popular presidential candidate in modern times to Donald Trump's resume, should he be the Republican nominee. According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, Trump's overall unfavorable rating sits at 67 percent — making him the most disliked major-party nominee in 32 years of polling. Just 30 percent view him favorably. Furthermore, roughly 75 percent of women, 66 percent of independents, 80 percent of young adults and 85 percent of Hispanics view him unfavorably. Nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents also view him unfavorably. Trump's rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has the lowest unfavorable impression among the general...

Glenn Beck, who has been in South Carolina campaigning for Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz this week, called in to his eponymous radio program Tuesday to talk about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. What he said garnered a strong reaction from the media, which he is now calling “outrageous.”Beck’s radio show co-host Pat Gray could not wrap his mind around why God would allow Scalia to have passed away in a moment when the U.S. is so divided politically. Beck, hoping to provide an answer, called into The Glenn Beck Radio Program from the road to explain his...

'Unless I win, I would consider this a big, fat, beautiful--and, by the way, a very expensive--waste of time' Heading into the final days before Iowa's caucuses, Republican front-runner Donald Trump warned supporters that his months of headline-grabbing antics could be for naught if they do not show up Monday night. "You have to get out there and caucus, or we've all wasted our time," Trump said on a tarmac, speaking to supporters who stood in a cold airplane hangar for hours to see the former Apprentice star. It was a rare suggestion from the billionaire that he might not...

Iowa isn't the only state where Ted Cruz has managed to surpass Donald Trump in state-level polls of Republican voters. The Texas senator is edging Trump in California, too, according to a new poll.Cruz leads the outspoken billionaire 25 percent to 23 percent in the latest NBC Bay Area Field Poll of GOP voters in the Golden State. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is third with 13 percent support, while retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson rounds out the top four at 9 percent.According to the poll, Cruz has risen 19 percentage points since October 2015, when he stood at 6 percent support...

During a National Security Council meeting held at the Pentagon on Dec. 14, President Barack Obama told top military officials and other officials he wanted to see a better job of having the so-called "narrative" of the war on ISIS communicated to the American people, a senior defense official told CNN. In a recent interview the President described some of his frustrations about the messaging regarding the administration's moves against ISIS.

s part of his effort to turn things around after his recent pathetic speeches on fighting terrorism, the president met with columnists from multiple outlets. The ground rules said no one could quote him directly — but one of his claims is appalling even when paraphrased. Obama, the Times reported online, “indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments. Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a...

The FBI has taken heat for failing to immediately classify the San Bernardino shootings as terrorism, but a new report shows that FBI reluctance could have been due to external pressure from the White House. A source told Jack Murphy of SOFREP that the FBI instantly believed the shooting, which left 14 dead, to be a clear act of terrorism. The White House, however, didn't feel the same way and quickly moved in to squash the terror classification. This source added that as soon as the shooting took place, Obama convened a meeting with the National Security Council and the...

The elder Mr. Farook forced his family to move out of their home in 2006, Ms. Farook said in court papers, but he continued to harass her. “My husband is mentally ill and is on medication but is also an alcoholic and drinks with the medicine,” she said. The marriage was formally dissolved this year. Around Christmas one year, Mr. Venegas recalled, the father asked where he could buy a goat; he especially wanted a pregnant animal, saying that goat fetus was a delicacy. Mr. Venegas helped him get two. They ate one, and the family kept the other alive...

...The proportion of Republican voters favoring Mr. Carson rose to 23 percent from 6 percent in the previous CBS News poll, which was taken just before the first televised Republican debate in early August. Over that same period, Mr. Trump made modest gains, to 27 percent from 24 percent.

As part of announcing his 2016 presidential candidacy, Jeb Bush released a video entitled "Making a Difference." The video spotlights how Bush's work as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007 affected four people: a low-income student, a low-skilled worker, a mother whose child is disabled and a woman who was the victim of domestic violence. "My core beliefs start with the premise that the most vulnerable in our society should be in the front of the line, not the back," Bush says in the video. "The barriers right now on people rising up is the great challenge of our...

Full title..."Not how they roll: Pentagon asks media to scrap old footage of ISIS columns" ISIS may be on the move, but not the way you see on television, claims the Pentagon. Footage of the menacing, black-clad terrorist army rolling across the desert in long convoys predates U.S.-led air strikes that have forced the jihadists to travel more discreetly, say senior State Department and Pentagon officials. They have asked television networks to stop using stock footage that makes the terror army seem more mobile - and more formidable - than they say it actually is. “One Toyota speeding down the...

While there's been a lot of talk about the "Francis Effect," it's worth pondering, on the Holy Father's seventy-eighth birthday, the Francis Filtration. About a year ago, I suggested to one of the top editors of a major American newspaper that his journal's coverage of things papal left something to be desired, as it seemed based on the assumption that Pope Francis was some kind of radical wild-man, eager to toss into the garbage bin of history all those aspects of Catholic faith and practice that mainstream western culture finds distasteful. My friend replied, in so many words, look, you...

Furious Dish Network, Inc., customers are dropping the service, demanding refunds and besieging Dish with angry calls and emails after Fox News was dropped over a contract dispute. On Dec. 21, fans of the immensely popular Fox News, among the 14 million Dish subscribers, awoke to find out that their favorite network had been blacked out, Mediaite reports. To date, 178,000 complaint calls were made through a toll-free line Fox set up, and 140,000 emails have deluged Dish, but the dispute remains ongoing, Variety reports. The squabble involves "carriage fees" paid by providers to networks for programming. Dish claims that...

From the moment liberal blogger Ezra Klein launched Vox as an "explanatory journalism" project, it has exemplified the prevailing conceits of the modern American Left. Sometimes useful, frequently ideological, and more than occasionally embarrassing, the work of Vox's self-stylized wonks is required reading among those news consumers whose unshakable faith in their own intellectual superiority is a boundless source of smug satisfaction.  Klein's latest dispatch serves up a delicious premise to these eager members of the so-called "reality-based community:" President Obama's health care law has been a big success in the real world (Vox has offered countless variations on this same argument), yet it remains unpopular in many quarters...

President Barack Obama met with over a dozen prominent columnists and magazine writers Wednesday afternoon before calling for an escalation of the war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, in a primetime address that same night. The group, which met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in an off-the-record session, included New York Times columnists David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Frank Bruni and editorial writer Carol Giacomo; The Washington Post's David Ignatius, Eugene Robinson and Ruth Marcus; The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins and George Packer; The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart; The New Republic's Julia Ioffe; Columbia...