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DES MOINES, Iowa - Gender has loomed over the presidential candidacy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren from the beginning. It's in her comedic retelling of moments when she's been told to "smile more," called "angry" by a 2020 opponent and faced questions from voters who wonder whether she can beat President Donald Trump. At times, she's dealt with it all by tilting toward feminism, giving speeches focused on women throughout history who have effected change in government from the outside in. At other moments, she's glossed over questions that have long plagued women in politics. Now, less than a week before...

January 28, 1915: US Coast Guard is Formed By an Act of Congress Major Dan By MAJOR DAN January 28, 2017 0 Comments On January 28, 1915, an Act of Congress created the United States Coast Guard out of the combination of The Revenue Cutter Service and the US Life-Saving Service. This new branch of the military was placed under the Treasury Department, to be used by the Department of Defense in time of war. Today, this law enforcing and life saving maritime force is under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security, and can be transferred to the...

President Trump signed the SECURE Act this week (January 8, 2020) as part of the government’s spending bill and it will inevitably affect most retirement savers, for better or worse. The SECURE legislation — which stands for “Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement” — puts into place numerous provisions intended to strengthen retirement security across the country. Part of the bill addresses the grim outlook for many workers who don’t have access to workplace retirement accounts. It offers small businesses tax incentives to set up automatic enrollment in retirement plans for its workers, or allows them to join multiple...

“Landlords cannot be allowed to raise rents to whatever they want, whenever they want,” Senator Bernie Sanders boomed on Twitter in November. “We need…a national rent control standard.” Now, his presidential campaign advocates one: under Sanders’ housing proposals, all landlords nationwide would only be able to increase rents annually by one and a half times the rate of inflation or 3 percent, whichever is higher. Assuming the current CPI for Urban Consumers is the inflation measure used, that would mean a rent increase cap today of just 3.4 percent. Given the likely unconstitutionality of a truly national rent control law,...

Level 4: Do not travel to Hubei province, China due to novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China: There is an ongoing outbreak of respiratory illness first identified in Wuhan, China, caused by a novel (new) coronavirus. In an effort to contain the novel coronavirus, the Chinese authorities have suspended air and rail travel in the area around Wuhan. On January 23, 2020, the Department of State ordered the departure of all non-emergency U.S. personnel and their family members. The U.S. government has limited ability to provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in Hubei province. Chinese authorities have imposed strict...

When the New York legislature passed major changes to the state's rent regulations in June 2019, critics warned the new law would reduce investment in, and renovations of, rental properties in New York City. Six months later, those predictions are bearing out. Bloomberg reported this morning that sales of apartment buildings in the Big Apple fell by 36 percent in 2019, and that the money spent on those sales fell by 40 percent. The prices investors were paying for rent-stabilized units—where allowable rent increases are set by the government and usually capped at around 1 or 2 percent per year—fell...

The big news on Sunday was a leak claiming that John Bolton, Trump's former National Security Adviser, has a book coming out that says Trump told Bolton that he wanted to force Ukraine to investigate Biden before releasing security assistance money. Democrats went wild with delight; Republicans opted to ask questions rather than to come up with instant, wrong answers. They were wise to do so. Many people noticed that, despite the Democrats’ immediate insistence that it’s absolutely pivotal to their impeachment case that they question Bolton before the Senate, that wasn’t what they were saying last year. Last...

Here's a tricked out AK47, inspired by the Russian Counter-Terrorist team Alpha. Its not the real deal because its not available in the U.S. This AK is a clone imitation put together by Youtuber Larry Vicker. Vicker used an Arsenal Semiautomatic Bulgarian-made AK. In five-five six. The only reason the five-five six was used is that its what he had on hand. The Russians AK were using five-four-five and Seven-six-two by thirty-nine. Not that they are opposed to five-five six, matter of fact Vicker saw at least one guy was using an M4 in five-five six. Their AKs were five-four-five...

BERLIN (AP) — A man confirmed as Germany’s first case of the new virus that has emerged in central China is believed to have been infected by a Chinese colleague who visited his workplace, authorities said Tuesday. The 33-year-old from the Starnberg area south of Munich is in isolation at a Munich hospital as a precaution, officials in Bavaria said. However, they stressed that his condition is good. The man took part last Tuesday in a training session at his workplace that also included an employee of the same company visiting from China, said Andreas Zapf, the head of Bavaria’s...

In the form of Don Lemon, Rick Wilson, and Wajahat Ali, the unholy trinity of CNN, the New York Times, and Never Trump got together Saturday to mock Trump supporters as illiterate rubes. At first, the only thing notable about the segment was how so much failure was able to fit on a single TV screen. Don Lemon is one of the lowest rated anchors in all of cable news. Never Trumper Rick Wilson is the far-left media’s trained pet. The New York Times Wajahat Ali is — okay, I don’t know who that is.

Thanks to a 4-hour documentary about herself, which premiered to great Progressive buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, Hillary’s in the news again. More than that, she’s doing so at a time when Democrats are panicking about Bernie’s increasing lead in New Hampshire and the general pressure he’s putting on “mainstream” candidate Joe Biden. Sane Democrats strongly suspect that, while Bernie’s manna for the base, most Americans are not going to vote for candidates who still adore socialism despite the Gulags, the reeducation camps, and those nasty National Socialist gas chambers. Because of the buzz, a scrubbed, buffed, injected,...

Is the era of Big Judicial Activism over? It might just be. Supreme Court Justic Neil Gorsuch, in a ruling about denying green cards to migrants who come here to be "public charges," something that's plainly laid out in U.S. law as illegal, threw in a special warning to activist judges, all leftists, who have been beavering away to rule from the bench, warning them that he's tired of their shenanigans. It's a specter to behold - a big lion on the Supreme Court who not only cares about rule of law, but is now warning the leftists out there...

About 4,515 cases of the illness have been recorded across the country, including almost 1,000 people in critical condition, according to state media. Though the number of cases appears to have risen quickly, from 2,887 on Monday, this was likely to be due to better reporting, and the numbers remain small compared with the population.

The last time Republicans held a majority on this state's Supreme Court was in the 1920s.  Its Court of Appeals has never had a Republican majority. The last time Republicans held a majority in both houses of the state Legislature at the same time was 1930.  In the 89 years from 1931 to the present, Democrats have held a majority of both houses of the state Legislature for 79 of the 89 years. Since 1931, Democrats have held the governor's office for 69 of the 89 years.  Even when a Republican has been governor, his powers have been greatly limited because he...

Contrary to the expectations of many environmental scientists, a new model has predicted a likely boom in tropical phytoplankton abundance as the century progresses. Phytoplankton anchor the aquatic food web. Most scientists assumed this community of photosynthesizing bacteria and plant-like diatoms would struggle in the tropics as the oceans become increasingly stratified, with heavier cold water situated deep beneath the surface and lighter warm water isolated on top. "All the climate models have this mechanism built into them, and it has led to these well-established predictions that phytoplankton productivity, biomass and export into the deep ocean will all decline with...

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, President Donald Trump again talked positively about negative interest rates. That's not a very good idea considering negative interest rates are a warning signal of deflation, which can be as bad for an economy as runaway inflation. But Trump was right to herald this era of low nominal interest rates and inflation. If you want to understand how the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen from a low of 800 to a high of 29,000 in four decades, look at the Federal Reserve's graph of the 10-year treasury rate showing...

The masked woman nervously approaches her target, shuffles into position and then unleashes a flurry of lashes -- proving herself as the newest member of the first female flogging squad in Indonesia's Aceh province. The new recruit initially needed some coaxing to punish the offender -- an unmarried woman caught in a hotel room with a man. Such behaviour constitutes a morality crime in Aceh, the only region in the world's biggest Muslim-majority nation that imposes Islamic law -- known as Sharia.

In recent years, the "Not The Onion" moments from leftists have been coming at us so fast it seems like they're being fired from a Gatling gun. Today's example is a politician from Quebec named Luc Ferrandez, who seems to have found the silver lining to the Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. From The Post Millennial: Quebec politician and radio talk show host Luc Ferrandez has suggested that the coronavirus has had one “positive” outcome for the city of Wuhan, China—it’s reduced the carbon footprint. On Saturday, he tweeted: “Wuhan. No automobile traffic. No air flights. The only city on...

From 1934 we have Hold Him Down by the Sons of the Pioneers. THE WESTERNER https://thewesterner.blogspot.com/

Senate Impeachment Trial LIVE - day 7