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Here’s a question in return: Guess who’s looking to recover from the collapse of the Russia-collusion theory? A “source”* tells me that this is more an exposé of MSNBC’s desperation than of actual reality. I’m betting that my source is more solid than Lawrence O’Donnell’s, but YMMV.Even Business Insider treats this with asbestos gloves, calling O’Donnell’s report “rumor” rather than, y’know, news. And the reaction from Rachel Maddow pretty much emulates what everyone else thinks of O’Donnell’s report: BREAKING: MSNBC reports that Donald Trump obtained business loans by having Russian oligarchs as co-signers: "The source close to Deutsche Bank...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Abraham Lincoln. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and is credited for keeping the union together, and for doing away for the Declaration compromise, slavery, that allowed the country to form in the first place. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the...

Police say a man in Washington reported his truck was stolen — as he happened to be nearby allegedly robbing a store himself. William Kelley called authorities on Sunday around 6 a.m. to report that he left his keys on the seat of his red 1992 Chevrolet pickup truck in Kennewick, a city roughly 140 miles southwest of Spokane, and "someone just stole it." Kelley said he saw a man riding a bicycle who "discovered the keys and then threw his back bike in the bed of the truck and fled," according to a Facebook post from the Kennewick Police...

The controversial way America elects presidents is barreling toward a crisis point. A federal court ruling has spotlighted the confounding nature of the system, which twice in the last five elections put presidents into office against the wishes of the majority of American voters. Under the Constitution, the voters who select a president every four years are, in fact, picking a party-chosen slate of electors pledged to that candidate. The presidential candidate who wins a state’s popular vote gets all its electors — except in Nebraska and Maine, which split the electors by Congressional districts. These electors formally select the...

OKLAHOMA CITY - A local news anchor issued a tearful on-air apology to her co-host after she compared him to a gorilla on television. USA Today reported that KOCO morning show host Alex Housden, who is white, made the racist comparison of co-anchor Jason Hackett, who is black, to a gorilla in a segment about one of the animals at the Oklahoma City Zoo. The Washington Post reported that Housden was specifically reporting on Fin, the zoo's baby western lowland gorilla, who was seen taking selfies during an Instagram takeover by one of his caretakers. "As you can see, Fin...

ATLANTA, GA—CNN host Brian Stelter blamed President Trump for the network's falling ratings Sunday, accusing the president of killing millions upon millions of people that otherwise might have tuned into CNN. "If Trump weren't killing off most of America by the millions, we'd still have a pretty solid viewer base," Stelter bellowed at the three viewers watching Reliable Sources. "Airports, lobbies, waiting rooms, and gas station pumps are now playing CNN to absolutely no one, since Trump has killed them all." A guest on Stelter's show suggested that Trump has killed more people than Hitler, Mao, and Stalin put together,...

Having destroyed discipline, central banks have no way out of the corner they've painted us into. It was such a wonderful fantasy: just give a handful of bankers, financiers and corporations trillions of dollars at near-zero rates of interest, and this flood of credit and cash into the apex of the wealth-power pyramid would magically generate a new round of investments in productivity-improving infrastructure and equipment, which would trickle down to the masses in the form of higher wages, enabling the masses to borrow and spend more on consumption, powering the Nirvana of modern economics: a self-sustaining, self-reinforcing expansion of...

Why does most of Africa stay poor while other parts of the world prosper? People blame things like climate, the history of colonialism, racism, etc. But I say Senegalese businesswoman Magatte Wade gives the right explanation: too many rules. “Once you hire someone, good luck getting rid of them for any reason,” Wade complains. Her government must approve every firing. “Then the tax code is so complicated… worth at least two or three truckloads of paper.” Wade started a lip balm company. Some of her ingredients are not made in Senegal, so she imports them. To “protect” Senegalese manufacturers, the...

As a teenager, Nate Oyloe was attracted to other boys. Hoping to change his sexual attractions, he sought therapy.  Today he is happily married to a woman.  Most people would be glad that Nate has achieved the life he wanted.  But not everyone is.  Lawmakers in his home state of Minnesota recently passed a law banning the kind of therapy Nate received to help him overcome his unwanted same-sex attraction. To date, twenty states and many cities have made it illegal to offer therapy for minors unless it affirms the LGBT agenda -- and several more are considering similar...

Remember when Joe Biden praised Barack Obama as "clean" and "articulate"? The same questions could be asked of Joe himself. We already know that he's not articulate, But now the Democratic presidential frontrunner is facing new questions about just how clean he is as a new report comes out from Politico, suggesting that Joe's brother Jim used claims of access to the then-vice president as a selling point for gaining business partners. Joe Biden’s younger brother told potential business partners that the former vice president would help their firm land business with court systems and would incorporate their health care model into his 2020...

In 1844, when the Ottoman Empire still controlled the Holy Land, a census was conducted, which revealed that Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem. Where were the "Palestinians"? Where were the Canaanites? The census count reported the presence of three groups in the city: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Canaanites were apparently not present. But suddenly, inexplicably, all Palestinians were spontaneously transformed into Canaanites in 2019, just as quickly as all Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs in Israel were spontaneously transformed into Palestinians in 1967. It took nothing more than the word of Yasser Arafat to create Palestinians out...

Dr. Beth Mynette, a mom from Washington, D.C., is making new bombshell allegations against her soon to be ex-husband, Tim Mynett, and self-proclaimed "intersectional feminist" Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).  The claims made by Beth specifically relate to the intimate relationship between the "colleagues" and how it's destroyed her marriage, according to the New York Post. Beth Mynette alleges that Tim, a political consultant to Omar since 2018, admitted having an affair with the freshman congresswoman to his wife back in April and even declared his love for her.  Despite Beth's attempt to "fight for the marriage" and work things out, her...

On April 25, 2019, Joe Biden declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Seven days later, on May 3, 2019, the Chinese sent a diplomatic cable to the Trump Administration blowing up a 150-page draft agreement that had taken many months to negotiate. The cable was riddled with reversals by China that undermined core U.S. demands. In each of the seven chapters of the trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: theft of intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition...

Morning "Oil for the light." Exodus 25:6 My soul, how much thou needest this, for thy lamp will not long continue to burn without it. Thy snuff will smoke and become an offence if light be gone, and gone it will be if oil be absent. Thou hast no oil well springing up in thy human nature, and therefore thou must go to them that sell and buy for thyself, or like the foolish virgins, thou wilt have to cry, "My lamp is gone out." Even the consecrated lamps could not give light without oil; though they shone in the...

(CNN) — Archeologists in Peru have uncovered the remains of around 250 children sacrificed by the pre-Columbian Chimú civilization. The remains are of children aged 4-12 years old, as well as 40 warriors, sacrificed between the 13th and 15th centuries, according to a video from Peruvian state media agency Andina. The Chimú civilization inhabited northern Peru before they were conquered by the Inca. They built Chan Chan, the largest city in pre-Columbian South America.

Three tiny balls of fur huddle together for warmth inside a cardboard box. The baby cheetahs are just a few weeks old, but they've had a traumatic start to life. A smuggler was attempting to spirit the cubs out of Somaliland, a breakaway state from Somalia, when he was caught red-handed by the authorities. The cubs, who will soon be taken to a safehouse, are the lucky ones. Some 300 young cheetahs are trafficked out of Somaliland every year -- around the same number as the entire population of adult and adolescent cheetahs in unprotected areas in the Horn of...

The on-air numbers weren't down quite as sharply as in recent years, and MTV is touting big increases in social and online engagement. The Video Music Awards fell in the ratings again — but not as steeply as they had in the past couple of years or in comparison to some other recent awards shows. Monday's kudocast on MTV drew 1.93 million viewers and a 0.9 rating among adults 18-49. That's an all-time low for the flagship channel, down from the previous low — set last year — of 2.25 million viewers and a 1.1 in the demo. The VMAs...

For once, I agree with President Donald Trump. At a rally on Aug. 15, he addressed the epidemic of gun violence in the United States by saying, “It’s not the gun that pulls the trigger, it’s the person holding the gun.” He then went off onto the now predictable tangent of proposing the development of new psychiatric hospitals to keep people with mental illness from being “that person.” I am a retired psychiatrist who has evaluated and treated people with every known psychiatric disorder and who has interviewed and prepared comprehensive assessments of convicted felons. I can tell you that...

Should students be denied equal access to education funding just because they attend religious schools? As school children across the nation head back to class, that’s the question America’s courts are facing—including the Supreme Court of the United States. The decisions they reach will have broad implications for the religious liberty of students and families throughout the country. American parents take their children’s education seriously. Voters regularly point to education as a very important issue in many state and local elections, and total taxpayer spending on education is over $1 trillion annually. While the vast majority of children attend public...

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar is denying allegations of an affair with a married Washington, D.C., consultant. The accusations emerged earlier this week in a divorce filing from the man's estranged wife, just over a month after it was reported that Omar had separated from her husband and father of her three children, Ahmed Hirsi. When asked by WCCO if she was separated from her husband and if she was dating anyone, Omar gave a terse and firm reply and declined to entertain further questions about her "personal life." “No, I am not,” Omar said Tuesday. “As I said yesterday,...