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Rev. Cliff Wall is an elder in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church and serves as the pastor of Clarksbury UMC in Harmony, NC. He also preaches several revivals at other churches each year. Rev. Wall and his wife, Christi, have been blessed with six children. This article originally appeared on his blog, Wall to Wall Faith, Hope, and Love. Reposted with permission. UM Voices is a forum for different voices within the United Methodist Church on pressing issues of denominational concern. UM Voices contributors represent only themselves and not IRD/UMAction. In my last article, I...

President Trump kicked off a new battle with Congress on Monday by releasing his fiscal 2020 budget plan seeking billions more in funding for a border wall and controversial work requirements for Americans collecting a variety of welfare benefits .Both proposals are sure to face resistance from Democrats, especially coming off a partial shutdown triggered by a border wall dispute that only ended when Trump declared a national emergency over immigration -- a step being litigated in the courts and challenged in Congress. The requests are part of the president's $4.7 trillion budget plan. Meanwhile, the budget aims to implement...

The Pentagon inspector general is investigating allegations that a two-star Army general is retaliating against active-duty Green Beret instructors under his command who have voiced concerns over his lowering of standards for Green Beret candidates, three sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News. The allegations involve Army Maj. Gen. Kurt Sonntag, who is commanding general of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center (SWCS) where Green Berets are selected, trained, and graduated. Breitbart News spoke with more than a half dozen current and former Green Beret instructors and several others in the Green Beret community,...

If you're 16 in this country, you can drive, get a job and pay taxes — even marry or buy a gun, in some states. But you can't vote in national elections. Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is trying to change that. The freshman lawmaker introduced her first amendment in Congress Tuesday. It's a proposal to lower the national voting age from 18 to 16. Pressley's amendment is being added to a sweeping, election-reform bill in the House of Representatives. That bill is in the hands of the House Rules Committee, chaired by Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern. And in Boston, city...

"The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2019 is 0.2 percent on March 11, down from 0.5 percent on March 8," the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta reported on Monday. "After this morning's retail sales report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the nowcast of first-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth declined from 1.5 percent to 1.0 percent."

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, complete with lei, took the stage at SXSW in Austin to do her first town hall as a presidential candidate Sunday night on CNN. The 37-year-old Iraq War veteran is running for president and would be the youngest, first woman, and first Hindu president in our nation’s history. Many pundits have placed Gabbard in the center or even right of the Democratic Party. If so, the center or right of the Democratic Party is pretty leftist. Her first question was about American intervention in the rest of the world, and how she could be against American...

Questions still remain regarding the double fatal collision at Torrey Pines Gliderport on Saturday afternoon. The two certified pilots were flying their paragliders when they collided into each other, fell into a cliff, and died, authorities said. Many who were at the Gliderport said Saturday's weather conditions were absolutely perfect, so they do not believe the incident was weather-related. Both men were certified pilots, one with an advanced certification. They both were aware of the rules -- to keep a safe distance between each other, and that the glider along the ocean needs to make way for the one flying...

A good rule of thumb is that the more pious the progressive, the worse the hypocrisy. And behind every successful glass ceilling breaking Dem running on feminism and fumes, is a creepy male aide. Senator Kamala Harris had her #MeToo problem. Now it's Senator Gillibrand's turn. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), one of the most outspoken advocates of the #MeToo movement who has made fighting sexual misconduct a centerpiece of her presidential campaign, spent last summer pressing legislators to update Congress’ “broken” system of handling sexual harassment. At the same time, a mid-20s female aide to Gillibrand resigned in protest over...

It looks like he might and he’s doing it his own way. Andrew Yang is among the crowd of Democrats running for the nomination for President in 2020. His key issue is called a Freedom Dividend. Yang proposes a $1,000 guaranteed payment to every adult in America. It’s his take on a Universal Basic Income.Yang is not a politician. You, like me, have probably never heard of him even though he’s been running for a year. He’s never held elected office. He doesn’t think that’s a strike against him, however, because President Trump also isn’t a traditional politician. He...

Making the click-through worthwhile: Presidential candidate Kamala Harris laments that the country has not had an honest conversation about race for a long time, Does the 2020 Democratic crew sound like a return to normalcy? Last week, Kamala Harris declared, “For too long, frankly in our country, for too long we have not had these honest discussions about race. We’ve just not.” ..................................................... Really? After Charlottesville, Ferguson, Baltimore’s riots, Ralph Northam, Jussie Smollett, Roseanne Barr, Kanye West’s various rants, Philando Castile, #BlackLivesMatter, the Dallas police shootings, the Charleston church shooting, the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina state-capitol...

NEWTOWN, Ohio (WKRC) — The season of Lent means Christians are fasting and giving up certain pleasures or vices. One Ohio man is taking a page from history. For 46 days, Del Hall is drinking only beer. “I’m going to have all styles of beer,” the Fifty West worker said about the fast. Beer will be the only thing on Hall’s menu and he won’t have solid food until Easter Sunday. Hall says he’s taking a nod from monks in the 1600’s that would fast during the season by a bock beer diet. “Being master brewers, they decided they would...

Axios published the results of a Harris poll Sunday which found that Millennials and Gen Z are more “embracing socialism.” Actually, the poll didn’t ask about any particular definition of socialism, it simply asked if respondents would prefer living in a socialist country. Nearly half of Millennial and Gen Z respondents said yes. Does that mean they want the U.S. to be more like Sweden or Cuba? My guess is the former though I’d bet money fewer than 1 in 10 could explain the difference.Most of the rest of the questions were about policy positions including “Abolishing ICE” and...

Cristhian Rivera, the illegal alien on trial for murdering University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts in August of last year, has asked for a change of venue. He claims that the likely jury pool won’t constitute a “jury of my peers.” “How can a jury of white corn farmers fairly assess the fate of a Latino immigrant?” he asks. “They don’t know what it is like to trek hundreds of miles to secretly cross the border. They don’t know what it is like to work at menial jobs for low wages? They don’t know how difficult it is for a...

DENVER -- A foundation is focused on driving clunkers off the road in hopes of ushering in cleaner air in Colorado. The Colorado Automobile Dealers Association started the Clear the Air Foundation in 2007. It's focused on cars that are more than 15 years old. Mark Zeigler, the Director of the foundation, said it's focused on these cars because they emit 100 times the pollution of new cars. Since it's inception, the foundation has pulled 4,000 clunkers off Colorado streets, with the goal of removing 650 cars a year. The foundation takes clunkers from dealerships for free and sells the...

President Donald Trump was not amused with the jokes about his slip-up when he called Apple's CEO Tim Cook "Tim Apple." "I quickly referred to Tim + Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words," Trump wrote in a tweet Monday defending the phrase. "The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!"

FULL TITLE: INSANE VIDEO! Democratic Socialism In AOC’s Own Words: We Don’t Want To Take Over EVERY Form Of Production – We Just Want To Tell Every Workplace How To Operate ==================================================================== Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted herself again, and this one is for the record books. Watch as she explains Democratic Socialism. I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing it below for closer examination. "“We should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government.” @AOC explains why she is in favor of democratic socialism at #SXSW #tictocnews" " Ya know just as there’s all this fear mongering that...

AFP reported Friday that the jihadists straggling out of the last stronghold of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria remain defiant, still vowing to murder Americans. In fact, this has been their longstanding plan, as revealed in a guide to destroying the United States that the jihad group published in its heyday, back in 2015. The AFP report quoted one woman leaving the tiny remaining ISIS domain declaring, “The caliphate will not end, because it has been ingrained in the hearts and brains of the newborns and the little ones.” Another exclaimed: “We have left, but there will be...

The fight over statehood for the District of Columbia has been going on for as long as most you can probably remember. And in all that time, nothing has come of it. While DC residents do have some non-voting voices in the House, they don’t have full membership in the democracy club, leading to cries of taxation without representation. But what to do about it? The Constitution specifically sets aside room (up to ten miles square) for a federal capital and specifies that it will fall under the control of the federal government. Just converting the whole joint to a...

If you find it difficult to grasp how a handful of leftwing extremists managed to win last week’s battle with the nominal leadership of the Democratic Party over a House resolution originally written to condemn anti-Semitism, Margaret Thatcher explained the phenomenon four decades ago: “The one thing about leftwing politicians is that they are always fanatical. They never let go. It’s their religion.” She was describing how the Labour Party had been destroyed from within by a small minority of radicals. Thatcher eventually exploited this process, led the Conservative Party to victory over Labour, and became Prime Minister for eleven...

In an interview that aired on Fox News Sunday night, lawyer L. Lin Wood said he is filing a lawsuit against CNN Monday or Tuesday for more than $250 million over the news outlet's alleged “vicious” and “direct attacks” on his client, Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann. On Twitter Saturday, the lawyer suggested that the amount could be around $275 million. CNN needs to write on the chalk board 275,000,000 times “We will never again falsely attack, vilify, or threaten a minor child.” https://t.co/bTCMoBjnHM — Lin Wood (@LLinWood) March 10, 2019 Wood, an Atlanta-based attorney who specializes in...