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Greetings from Houston, where in barely 24 hours on the ground, I’ve already experienced four flash flood warnings and a Vietnamese-Cajun crawfish restaurant. Sometimes I have bad ideas, and we’re going to talk about one of them in this edition of Silver Bulletpoints, in which we cover three topics related to the 2020 primary, each in 300 words or less. Bulletpoint No. 1: Here are the four major meta-messages for 2020 With so many presidential candidates — now 20, by FiveThirtyEight’s count — you could almost sort the Democrats into an NCAA Tournament bracket, with the various candidates seeded into...

For the first time, researchers have performed a version of the famous double-slit experiment with antimatter particles.The double-slit experiment demonstrates one of the fundamental tenets of quantum physics: that pointlike particles are also waves. In the standard version of the experiment, particles travel through a pair of slits in a solid barrier. On a screen on the other side, an interference pattern typical of waves appears. Crests and troughs emerging from each slit reinforce each other or cancel each other out as they overlap, creating alternating bands of high and low particle density on the screen.This kind of experiment has...

Confronting the secularist offensive against traditional Christianity is difficult for Christians in America, because while we have a strong basis in the Constitution for the free exercise of religion as the first of rights, secularists appeal to the Constitutional ideals of freedom and equality in the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. Effectively they say that religious freedom has been amended by the requirements of personal freedom and equality, as implemented by anti-discrimination law and policy and the “right to privacy” discovered by the Supreme Court. That this could not possibly be what the American founders intended by the...

A month ago, he was the hottest Democrat candidate for President. Now he appears to be a flash in the pan. Conservatives largely overestimated what turns out to be a major blowfish. So let’s cast our net and dissect this fish of a candidate named Pete Buttigieg. Pete’s meteoritic rise featured months of being on television steadily building likability among CNN’s most devoted watchers. He has been able to raise large sums of money. Yet in these strengths hides his very weakness. Twitter is not real life. CNN’s ratings are poor. Polls cannot be trusted when a race is competitive....

A massive fire on Thursday destroyed the upstate New York set of a new HBO series starring Mark Ruffalo and Rosie O’Donnell. The upcoming “I Know This Much Is True,” also featuring Melissa Leo and Juliette Lewis, had been filming in a used car dealership in Ellenville before flames tore through the site at 1 a.m. “There’s nothing left,” general manager Chris Busby told the Poughkeepsie Journal. “It’s a huge loss for us and HBO. They are just as heartbroken over this as we are.”

The Senate confirmed Michael Park to be a judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, making him the 39th circuit court judge to be confirmed under President Trump in a process on a record pace that is steadily reshaping the bench. Judge Park joins Joseph Bianco, confirmed earlier this week, on that bench, bringing the number of Republican-appointed active judges on the chief 2nd Circuit panel to six. With two more vacancies by this summer, Mr. Trump will soon have a chance to flip control of the circuit, which currently has seven Democratic appointees. Mr. Trump...

Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro is sending out the goon squad this week to quietly begin rounding up the people who participated in the attempted coup last week. While he’s not yet going after the person who actually sent out the call to revolt, his secret police force started with someone very close to the top. National Assembly Vice President Edgar Zambrano was picked up last night after leaving his office. (Associated Press) Security forces arrested the No. 2 leader of Venezuela’s opposition-controlled congress Wednesday as President Nicolás Maduro’s government began going after foes tied to a failed attempt to stir...

Another seemingly random antisemitic attack took place in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Thankfully nobody was killed, but it was still alarming and part of an insidious, growing trend. A Hasidic Jewish man was walking along the sidewalk in broad daylight on Saturday when an assailant suddenly ran up on him from behind, screaming antisemitic slurs. In a cowardly attack, he swung and viciously punched the Jewish man in the side of the head from behind and then ran away. (CBS New York) The NYPD are looking for the man behind another violent attack in Brooklyn. The incident marks the...

DENVER — Voters in Denver appear to have overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have overturned the city’s ban on camping in public places. As of preliminary results released at 1 a.m. Wednesday, Initiative 300 was headed for defeat with 83 percent of voters saying “no” and 17 percent saying “yes.” Results won’t be certified until later this month.

Fill in the blank on your playing cards at home. How do you finish this sentence? “The next president should be _______.”If you happen to be New York Times “State of the Art” columnist Farhad Manjoo, the answer comes to you fairly easily. The next president should be a woman. And in a long, winding column lacking almost anything by way of specificity, he describes why electing a woman – any woman – is not only the moral thing to do but the one clear path to victory for Democrats. Here’s a small sample. Today, gender politics are at the...

It’s really annoying when people take their dogs out for a walk and don’t clean up after them, isn’t it? Being a dog owner/walker myself, I always make sure to bring a plastic bag along with me to clean up after Jake and I have pointed out to others that they should do likewise when I see someone being negligent. And yet, not everyone is so responsible, but what do we do about it? One apartment complex in Pennsylvania has come up with a rather unique solution. They’re building a DNA database of all the dogs that live there so...

A Zillow survey released ahead of Mother’s Day shows 21.9 percent of millennials are still living at home, a jump of about 9 points from the same group in 2005. That’s more than one in five of the nation’s 24-to-34-year-olds, roughly 10 million working age Americans, the survey found. Riverside and Los Angeles are among the cities with the highest share of millennials at home, along with Miami and New York. A much larger share of those living with mom are employed than in 2010...

California Democrats, especially those with ties to the influential LGBTQ and Hollywood communities, are finding themselves torn between a home-state senator they love, Kamala Harris, and an out-of-state suitor who has suddenly captured their attention, Pete Buttigieg. It’s a dynamic that’s unsettling the Democratic presidential primary in California — home to an early 2020 March contest that offers a mother lode of nearly 500 delegates. No two candidates are crowding each other quite so closely here, or elbowing each other quite so aggressively, in the pursuit of some of the party’s most generous and influential donors. Buttigieg, the mayor of...

The pompous toad who now runs the House Judiciary committee, Jerry Nadler, has declared that the United States is now in the midst of a Constitutional crisis. Here is his hyperbolic rant: During a press conference after the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt on Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) stated that we “are now in a constitutional crisis.” Nadler said, “We’ve talked for a long time about approaching a constitutional crisis. We are now in it. We are now in a constitutional crisis. … Now is the time of testing...

Is Hillary Clinton running a non-campaign campaign for president? The twice-failed Democrat presidential candidate isn’t interested in discussing an endorsement for 2020, and sources close to Clinton have repeatedly said she hasn’t closed the door on a rematch with President Trump. Then on Wednesday, just days after wrapping up a national speaking tour with husband and former president Bill Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state headed to the first 2020 primary state of New Hampshire to lecture about her decades of experience in world affairs as a career politician. ~snip~ There was also plenty of loaded language to suggest Hillary hasn’t...

A newborn girl has been found alive inside a garbage bin after passers-by heard its cries, authorities say. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office in the US state of Florida says two people walking at an apartment complex near Boca Raton heard crying coming from the bin and found the baby Wednesday morning (local time).

1860 - While off the Isle of Pines near the south coast of Cuba, the screw gunboat Wyandotte captures the slaver William, which carries 570 Africans.

President Donald Trump plans to nominate acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan to formally take over the top spot at the Pentagon, the president's spokeswoman said Thursday. Shanahan, a former longtime executive at the aerospace giant Boeing, needs Senate confirmation for the post most recently held by James Mattis. "Acting Secretary Shanahan has proven over the last several months that he is beyond qualified to lead the Department of Defense, and he will continue to do an excellent job," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote on Twitter.

The Alabama Senate delayed until next week a vote on a bill to ban abortion after an uproar over a key amendment. The Senate abruptly removed a rape and incest exception from the bill without allowing a roll call vote on that decision. The move shocked Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, who had just said at the Senate mic that he wanted a roll call vote on every question concerning the abortion bill. Singleton and other Democratic senators strongly objected to Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, who presides over the Senate, for his quick gavel on tabling the rape and...

Authorities apprehended a suspect late Wednesday after police discovered over 1,000 guns at a mansion in Los Angeles’s Holmby Hills neighborhood. The Los Angeles Police Department took Girard Damien Saenz, 57, into custody Wednesday night after a group of local and federal agents seized a stash of more than 1,000 firearms of various sizes, makes and models from the home, according to NBC News. Police are holding Saenz for suspected selling and lending of assault weapons as well as illegal transport of the weapons, according to a police spokesman, Lt. Chris Ramirez, NBC reported. “We recovered over a thousand weapons...