Sunday, April 19, 2026

Christie Looks, Acts Unhealthy in Boozy Colbert Interview

Ben Sellers
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0

‘Before we get to that, are we drinking tonight or not?’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) At the conclusion of his segment Tuesday on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie quipped offhandedly that the appearance could signal the launch of a potential 2020 challenge against President Donald Trump.

“Guess what. Tonight, the beginning of the comeback, baby,” he said. “Here it is, on the ‘Stephen Colbert Show.’ You’ve done it.”

But poor decisions hinted more that it could be the beginning of the end for Christie, a one-time presidential advisor who somehow still claims Trump is a personal friend, despite promoting a new book that torches the White House.

Christie, who underwent bariatric weight-loss surgery in February 2013, has regained some of his girth and appears to have rejected the lifestyle changes that come with the invasive procedure.

As Colbert opened the interview asking about his new book, Christie replied, “Before we get to that, are we drinking tonight or not?”

Enabler Colbert then acquiesced, “Your folks told me that you wanted a cocktail, and so we asked, and you wanted tequila. … This is that liberal George Clooney tequila—I hope you don’t mind.”

Christie replied: “If it gets me loaded, I don’t care. Liberal, conservative, who cares?”

As it did for Democratic 2020 candidate Elizabeth Warren, who sought to contrast herself with the teetotaling Trump by chugging a beer on New Year’s Eve, Christie’s mixing of booze and politics could easily backfire.

But unlike Warren’s stunt, Christie’s consumption could also be life-threatening.

While it is unclear whether Christie still has a lap-band around his upper stomach or if he underwent another surgery to remove it, the blog BariatricEating.com says the procedure dramatically changes one’s ability to process alcohol.

“Your prior experiences with alcohol are no longer valid as things change with your bariatric surgery,” it says. “Without a handbag sized stomach for digestion, the cocktail dribbles directly into the small intestine and is sucked into the bloodstream at almost full proof. You can get deliriously sloppy and dangerously drunk in seconds.”

Christie did two full shots before the commercial break, with Colbert joining him for one.

Afterward, they returned from break with glasses full.

BariatricEating.com goes on to say that drinking alcohol, specifically shots, can be potentially fatal for those who have undergone the surgery.

“Never drink alcohol unless you are with someone with whom you can trust with your life. Period. Your Match.com date does not qualify. Things can go very wrong with alcohol and if you are alone or with someone who does not understand your surgery, it may place you in grave danger. Never do a shot or feel pressured to keep drinking as alcohol poisoning can kill you.”

Colbert, whose radical left-wing politics figure prominently into interviews, made clear that he was not the guy Christie should trust with his life, interspersing caustic bombs of thinly veiled contempt and even asking the governor, “Who likes you?”

“You do. You do, Stephen. You do. Come on,” Christie said, while raising his glass for the third shot.

“More of this and I might,” Colbert replied.

Colbert, after downing his second tequila shot, pressed the question by reminding Christie that he left office with only 15 percent approval.

“Who’s your constituency?” he asked. “The people who don’t like Trump don’t like you because you support him and helped him get elected. The people around Trump probably don’t like you too much cause of your damn book. And the people in your home state are like, ‘Uh, there’s the door.’”

Christie eventually stumbled into a cogent response, saying he wasn’t concerned by approval ratings.

“After eight years, if they don’t want to kick you out then you didn’t do anything significant,” he said. “Then all you did was kiss rear end for eight years and try to get everybody to love you. I didn’t care if everybody loved me. I cared about being respected and doing the job.”

But Christie’s efforts at maverick posturing seemed to run counter to his obsequiousness toward Trump, as Colbert observed in an earlier question, pressing him on his supposed ongoing friendship with the president despite being passed over for a post in the administration.

“How do you be friends with someone who shows no personal loyalty to you?” Colbert asked.

“I don’t engage in friendships to get things out of it,” Christie said. “… I understand that there are times when things happen in politics where you’ve gotta be a big boy, pull your pants up and walk away.”

“Because you just got spanked?” Colbert replied.

Christie reportedly was vetoed for consideration in early Cabinet posts and Trump’s recent chief-of-staff opening by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

While a U.S. attorney, Christie had prosecuted Kushner’s father, Charles, in 2005 for 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering.

“It’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted,” he told Margaret Hoover on PBS’s Firing Line Tuesday.

A subsequent plea deal resulted in Charles Kushner spending 14 months at a federal prison facility in Alabama, as well as being disbarred in New Jersey.

Christie’s latest antics, which included telling Colbert that he would have been a better president than Trump, are likely to make him even more toxic to the chief executive and his supporters.

However, he may have made at least one friend in the process.

After flipping each other the New Jersey “state bird,” Colbert told Christie, “This is more fun than I thought it would be, by the way.”

Old Photo of Soot-Covered Miners Triggers Race-Obsessed Patron

Ben Sellers
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0

‘Blackface is only a glimpse of a larger issue…’

Welsh coal minors in the early 20th century enjoy a pint in this image that some have accused of being racially insensitive. / IMAGE: public domain/fair use

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama was said to have ushered in America’s post-racial era, perceptions of racial division and conflict, far from vanishing, have undergone complex, often Orwellian transformations.

Where once we celebrated a “melting pot” of diversity, the term “melting pot” may now be considered a micro-aggression intent on belittling identity-rights crusaders.

Even the most progressive of network news anchors is unsafe for having the audacity to suggest that immigrants might win more popular support by trying to assimilate.

And, with the advent of “intersectionality,” a liberal, Hollywood Latina can be destroyed by accusations of racism simply for ignoring black disparities while calling on more opportunities for Latinx actors.

It is within this context that Rashaad Thomas, a restaurant patron in Phoenix, Arizona, recently was triggered upon seeing an old photograph of coal miners, covered in soot, enjoying a pint after work.

Although Thomas’s opinion piece, published on The Arizona Republic‘s website, does not explicitly state the author’s race, it implied that he identifies as black.

“Who determines what’s offensive?” Thomas wrote. “For me, the coal miners disappeared and … [one of] the most racist propaganda films ever, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) surfaces, in which white actors appeared in blackface.”

Thomas acknowledged that there was a correct answer—that fact points to the context of the photograph not being racist originally. Indeed, online research suggests that the miners pictured were not even American but were Welsh workers, possibly during a union strike.

But Thomas maintained that perception was key. More specifically, his perception.

“At the downtown Phoenix restaurant, my concern that the photograph of men in blackface [i.e. the photograph of the coal miners —ed.] was a threat to me and my face and voice were ignored,” Thomas said. “A business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me, ‘Whites Only.’ It says people like me are not welcome.”

Revealing himself as an art patron and frequenter of local galleries, Thomas waxed philosophical about the nature of art, something many contemporary artists have said is designed to provoke and challenge people’s perceptions.

Viewed through Thomas’s cultural lense, however, art can reveal only one thing: more racism. Regardless of its intended purpose, a broader social message must needs be superimposed on even the chintziest of wall décor.

“Viewers cannot determine the intention of an artist’s work,” Thomas said. “Art also exposes society’s blind spots. Blackface is only a glimpse of a larger issue. The larger issue is the lack of representation of marginalized people and their voices in Phoenix.”

That issue is one the entire nation has grappled with recently while considering not just art, but also its historical legacy. Many of the Confederate monuments erected by groups such as the Daughters of the Confederacy in a time of active reconciliation, 50 years after the Civil War, are now being reassessed.

Prior to the Obama era, the consensus was that historical impact of such monuments and symbols outweighed the calls to raze and eradicate them. Since then, however, a nationwide initiative to recast and recontextualize its history has opened up entirely different debates, such as the one Thomas alluded to. While doing little to heal and unify, they have succeeded in pushing racial awareness to the forefront.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, efforts to remove monuments and rename two parks honoring Confederate generals spawned two days of violent conflict, directly resulting in the death of one local activist and indirectly leading to two others. The monuments remained standing after court injunctions said the city lacked the necessary authority.

In North Carolina, on the other hand, mobs gathered in 2017 and 2018 to forcibly tear down Confederate statues in the cities of Durham and Chapel Hill, respectively.

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IMAGE: Time via Youtube/DerrickQLewis via Twitter

A Durham task force recently proposed that the mangled remains of its monument be displayed as-is in a nearby municipal building with a placard commemorating not their history but their destruction.

Opponents said it was a celebration of lawlessness and lynch-mob mentality. “The crumpled metal, like some kind of perverse trophy for illegal behavior, will be ‘contextualized’ with historical inaccuracies and lies about its meaning and origin.”

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While the fate of Chapel Hill’s “Silent Sam” monument remains undetermined, students at the University of North Carolina protested plans to house it on campus. The controversy led the school’s chancellor to unexpectedly announce her resignation earlier in January.

Back in Phoenix, however, far removed from the blight of Civil War history, Thomas said even if the restaurant were to attempt to contextualize the image of the coal miners or otherwise offer justification for their inclusion of it on the wall, the effort would not be enough to placate him.

“The operators of that downtown restaurant can choose to take the photograph down, leave it up or create a title card with an intention statement,” he said. “No matter their decision, I think the photograph should be taken down—sacrificing one image for the greater good.”

Former W.H. Aide Says Leaker Kellyanne Has Trump’s Favor Because She Fights for Him

Ben Sellers
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0

‘One thing that never goes out of style in the Trump White House is someone who’s willing to go on TV and just fight it out with somebody…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) On his former “Colbert Report” show, TV talk-show host Stephen Colbert was known for having cultivated a fake Republican persona, using irony to paint a nasty caricature of conservatives.

But the Trump administration may have just beat him at his own game, using a supposed Trump-basher to instead engage in some guerilla public relations on prime-time, network television.

On Monday, the CBS “Late Show” host brought on Cliff Sims, who left his role as director of message strategy and spent two months writing a newly released White House ‘tell-all’ book titled “Team of Vipers,” for which he received a seven-figure deal, according to The Daily Mail.

Sims acknowledged that he considered himself one of those “vipers” referenced in the book’s title.

“If I’m going to tell the truth … I’ve gotta be willing to be honest about myself, too,” he said. “… [M]y biggest regret of all was that I was not always a picture of my [Christian] faith to the people that I was around.”

Colbert—who is now free to spout his unabashedly leftist views and routinely snipe at Republicans from his network soapbox—typically expects his guests to follow certain political cues, but instead of criticizing Trump, Sims spent much of the segment defending the president.

He hedged when Colbert asked point-blank, “Are you still on the Trump Train?”

“It’s kind of fun to be on the outside and not have to defend every single thing, but in terms of what it means for the nation, I can say it’s probably mixed,” Sims replied.

“I do think the economic growth that we have seen is great,” he added. “I believe that he deserves credit for pulling us out of some of these foreign engagements that president after president had promised to do and just hadn’t. … he’s really trying to keep his promises, and I think that’s something genuine.”

Gen. Mattis Warns N. Korea Not to Invite 'Destruction of Its People'
Donald Trump and James Mattis/Photo by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

As Colbert teed him up to mock Trump’s surprise announcement in December of a planned withdrawal from Syria, which prompted the departure of Defense Secretary James Mattis, Sims said the president had, in fact, been discussing and pressing for the Syria policy long before his public announcement.

“He’s surrounded by people at the highest levels who make it their mission, it seems to me, to slow-walk everything that he’s doing, to kind of subvert what he’s doing,” Sims said.

“Some people that don’t agree with him would say, ‘Well thank God they’re in there.’ I would say to that, what kind of precedent does it set if somehow it’s now patriotic to undermine the duly elected president of the United States that you serve?”

Echoing past statements the White House has made about “resistance” members, Sims said it was honorable for Mattis to step aside rather than continue to be a roadblock if he objected to the policy.

“If you disagree with the guy, you always have an option: You either get on board once he makes a decision and you try to implement what he does, or you quit,” he said.

Sims did, however, paint a less-than-flattering portrait of some in the administration who, he claimed, have worked to damage Trump’s agenda. He wrote in the book that adviser Kellyanne Conway was “cartoon villain brought to life,” according to Roll Call.

Sims told Colbert that he had once been working with Conway in her office, using her synced Apple computer to formulate a strategy for defending her from allegations that she was privately trashing others in the White House—only to discover that she was on her iPhone doing it while they worked.

Conway Says Trump 'Pointing Out Inconsistencies' Not Mocking Ford
Kellyanne Conway/IMAGE: Fox News via YouTube

“I’m watching her talk to reporter after reporter and trash her colleagues and even not painting the president in a very favorable light, and basically I’m supposed to be writing a statement defending her against exactly what she’s doing in that very moment,” Sims said.

But he added that Conway has been able to keep her spot in Trump’s inner circle because of her willingness to defend him and his policies publicly.

“One thing that never goes out of style in the Trump White House is someone who’s willing to go on TV and just fight it out with somebody,” Sims said.

Other episodes of palace intrigue in the book include a little-known rivalry between White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

Sims said that Miller stabbed his supposed mentor in the back by telling Trump that his poll numbers were being hurt by Bannon leaking to the media.

“You had a lot of people thrust together who kind of came in there and had their own best interest in mind,” he told Colbert.

While the book does include some anecdotes sure to roil the image-sensitive chief executive, the focus of many is on since-departed staff members like Bannon, short-lived communications director Anthony Scaramucci and former Chief of Staff John Kelly.

It underscores the growing pains of an organization from outside the ‘swamp’ attempting to challenge both bureaucratic inertia and the active partisan resistance from Obama-era holdovers.

“As a staffer you like to think that those things are congruent—I’m gonna serve my nation by serving my president,” Sims told Colbert. “I think you had a lot of people in the White House who came in—sometimes I was one of them—who got wrapped up in the game, what happens when you have proximity to power, when you have access to the most powerful person on the planet.”

Both Conway and Trump responded on Tuesday to Sims’ media appearances, including a visit to Trump’s nemesis network, CNN.

Trump issued a Twitter response denying that Sims had any insider knowledge of the administration, while suggesting a lawsuit may be on the horizon.

It may be too early to tell whether Sims’ underlying motive was, in fact, a self-serving betrayal for financial gain; or if it was—as he says—an honest, candid insider assessment driven by his own need for penitence and catharsis; or rather if he is a double-agent infiltrating the true den of vipers—the hostile media—to spread talking-points under the pretense of Trump-bashing.

Whatever the case, as his media tour continues, Sims clearly will not be following the usual script.

Sims told Colbert that at one point he had helped Trump to compile an “enemies” list.

“I had you at No. 2 on the list, so…,” he trailed off.

Ex-NBC Anchor Brokaw Likely Headed to Pasture After Candid Immigration Slip

Ben Sellers
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‘You misspelled, “I apologize for my ignorant and demeaning glib generalization”…’

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Tom Brokaw / IMAGE: NBC News via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Troubles continue swirling in the news industry.

Facing the fallout of financial struggles and embarrassing fake-news feeding frenzies, the latest symbolic smack-down could be the downfall of Tom Brokaw, the last man standing from the heyday of the nightly network news.

Even though some fellow anchors—among them, his longtime CBS rival, Dan Rather; and his NBC successor, Brian Williams—already have been forced out in disgrace for biased and unethical reporting, none represent the sanctimonious pomposity of the bleeding-heart legacy media as well as Brokaw.

Ironically, after recent comments that seemed to violate the Left’s immigration orthodoxy, it may be that 78-year-old former anchor is left hoisted with his own politically-correct petard.

On Sunday, Brokaw ignited a firestorm of controversy by first saying that much of the opposition to immigration was from those who didn’t want “brown grandbabies.”

He later added that “Hispanics should work harder at assimilation.”

Despite the fact that Brokaw was merely trying to characterize what he regarded as the “right-wing” view of immigration, his moment of senile candor brought widespread criticism from the echo chamber, which condemned the comments as “xenophobic.”

While some praised him for his honesty, Brokaw spent much of Sunday on Twitter apologizing for the comments, but not necessarily inspiring confidence in his mental alacrity.

Last year, Brokaw narrowly avoided the wrath of the #MeToo movement that felled the likes of Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and scores of other media industry heavy-hitters.

Whether he continues past strike-two remains to be seen.

Few in the Twittersphere seemed ready to accept his “disingenuous” apology.

While the Left often jumps to forgive its own, Brokaw could be overdue as a sacrifice to the gods of wokeness and intersectionality.

But it may be more a quiet phasing out than a public flogging.

For many, Brokaw still represents the public face of NBC News, and top brass would likely hesitate putting the brand at risk for further damage by keeping him on air.

Moreover, as “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd (who is also NBC News political director) has shown with his recent climate-change censorship, there is little patience or appetite for representing diverse views.

Or maybe Brokaw, who also spoke wistfully on the “Meet the Press” panel of having known recently indicted political impresario Roger Stone for many years, was simply taking a page out of the former Trump advisor’s playbook, that no news is bad news:

McCaskill Blames Senate Loss on Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court ‘Strategy’

Ben Sellers
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0

‘I don’t know what he really cares about, other than holding on to his job…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who lost her re-election bid last November, blamed the cold-hearted, partisan strategizing of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for costing her the race.

“He sees his job as only to protect Republican senators and to protect a Republican majority,” McCaskill said of McConnell during an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” Thursday night.

“In the most political of places, no one is more political,” she continued. “I don’t know what he really cares about, other than holding on to his job.”

One might have said the same of McCaskill—when she had a job.

Although she ran as a centrist, touting her eagerness to cross the aisle, more often than not she voted straight down the party line, eager to serve the Obama agenda and to please lobbying interests like labor unions and Planned Parenthood, to whom she was beholden.

After widely viewed videos from Project Veritas exposed McCaskill as an extremist liberal in the otherwise solid-red, Trump-supporting state of Missouri, voters ousted the two-term senator in favor of Republican state Attorney General Josh Hawley.

McCaskill’s “no” vote on the polarizing confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh less than two months before the election likely was a deal-breaker for conservatives in the state, but while three of her fellow battleground Democrat colleagues had broken ranks on and earlier vote to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch, McCaskill also opposed him and was criticized on the campaign trail for putting party ahead of voters.

“For a lot of evangelical voters in my state who maybe didn’t see Trump as a role model for their children, they were convinced he’d put people on the Supreme Court that they liked,” McCaskill told Seth Meyers. “And that was really because of Mitch McConnell’s strategy.”

Now, it seems, McCaskill’s years of keeping her true colors bottled up while shoehorned into the role of imposter moderate have finally caused her progressive views to burst.

Her scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners curtain call has targeted everyone from her Senate colleagues and President Donald Trump to fellow Democrats—including socialist freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, whom she called “the new shining object” that the distractable Left was obsessing over.

On the “Seth Meyers” show, McCaskill again went after Trump, calling him a “con” and “very, very weird.”

She regaled the liberal audience with a story about how Trump tried to charm her during White House talks over the president’s tax-cut proposals.

Noticing she was seated right next to him, McCaskill told Meyers, “I’m going, ‘Oh sh**!'”

She said Trump was a gentleman when he entered, offering to pull her chair out for her, but then took it a step too far.

“He leans down and whispers in my ear, ‘I bet no other president has ever done that before,’” McCaskill said.

Some speculate that McCaskill’s savage score-settling may be part of a rebranding effort, perhaps to reclaim a seat in the Senate when Republican Roy Blunt faces re-election in 2022—or in the 2020 Missouri gubernatorial race.

In the governor’s race, she would likely face an un-elected GOP incumbent, Gov. Mike Parson, who replaced scandal-plagued ex-Gov. Eric Greitens last June when he resigned under threat of impeachment.

With her liberal views uncorked, though—not to mention a propensity for pettiness—it could be a true test of the “Show-Me” State‘s values.

Of course, McCaskill would also be in good company if she were to enter the crowded field for the White House amid a bevy of radical leftist former Senate colleagues and a few prominent fellow losers.

Liberals in NC Oppose Redrawn Districts They Approved Previously

Ben Sellers
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‘That’s the end of the rule of law…’

North Carolina
North Carolina Congressional Districts as proposed by Common Cause/IMAGE: NC General Assembly

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After forcing North Carolina to redraw its legislative maps two years ago, an activist group that has repeatedly sued to flip the state Democratic is again asking the courts to intervene because it was unhappy with the results.

But the Left’s latest skulduggery could have a devastating impact on public confidence in an electoral system already fraught with partisan bickering and scandal, according to state GOP leaders.

“If Democratic judges manipulate the State Constitution to expand their party’s power in the legislative branch, we are looking at a full-blown constitutional crisis,” said state Sen. Ralph Hise, chairman of the Senate Redistricting and Elections Committee, in a press release. “That’s the end of the rule of law.”

Common Cause, a national left-wing lobbying organization masquerading as a ‘nonpartisan’ charity, cried racism on the Republican-led legislature that oversaw redistricting following the 2010 Census.

A panel of judges agreed, ultimately demanding a redo of the maps for both the state and federal districts in 2017.

Despite picking up five seats in the state’s 50-seat Senate and 10 seats in its 120-seat General Assembly, breaking GOP super-majorities in both, Democrats were unable to gain control of either chamber in the November 2018 election.

Now, the group has filed another suit asking for a redraw of all 170 districts in the state legislature, with the hope of a more favorable outcome using the court system instead of voters.

Absurdly, said state Republicans, that includes asking for a revision of four House districts from a map that Common Cause endorsed during the earlier court-mandated redistricting.

Pat Ryan, a spokesman for state Sen. Phil Berger, said far from being a principled effort to bolster representative democracy the suit was a blatant ploy to flip the legislature before the next redistricting so that Democrats could enact their own state-level gerrymandering.

“What should really raise a red flag about motives here [was that Common Cause] filed a day, two days, after the election results,” Ryan said.

North Carolina Democrats’ biggest steal of the November election—at least at the state level—may have been the addition of Anita Earls to the state Supreme Court.

Earls, a radical attorney who had helped litigate the earlier redistricting effort in favor of Democrats, won a three-way race with 49.5 percent of the vote after Democrat Chris Anglin switched parties in June 2018, fraudulently running as a Republican and poaching voters from incumbent Barbara Jackson.

The pickup gave Democrats a 5-2 majority on the court, where a partisan elections process was re-instated in 2016.

“They’re hoping that a Democratic judge [will] discover some heretofore unknown” provision in the state constitution that might render Republican-favored districts illegal, Ryan said.

In addition, to the state-level fight, Common Cause also filed suit in federal court over North Carolina’s 13 U.S. congressional districts. Those, too, underwent a mandatory redraw that yielded no additional pickups on election night for Democrats (with the outcome of the disputed 9th District race still to be determined).

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Rucho vs. Common Cause on appeal, along with a separate case from Maryland, likely in March of this year. Those decisions could help resolve national-level battles over the legality of gerrymandering.

Obama and Holder Team to Take Out Walker in 2018, Flip Ryan's Seat
Eric Holder & Barack Obama/PHOTO: WhiteHouse.gov

A campaign led by former Attorney General Eric Holder has been among the activist efforts to actively target red states for court-forced redistricting over the past several election cycles.

However, even assuming liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is healthy and present for the decision, the swapping of chronic swing-voter Anthony Kennedy for the (presumably) more conservative Brett Kavanaugh likely shifts the high court to the right. Kennedy had sided with the court’s liberal wing in previous redistricting cases.

A failure at the national level would make redistricting with a Democratic state legislature the only shot for left-wing activists of once again turning the Tarheel State a deep blue.

“They probably figure they have a much better chance” through the state courts, Ryan said.

Ironically, he pointed out that Republicans had only been in control of the state since around 2010, when they were able to win outright through the elections process rather than court challenges.

“Democrats controlled the legislature here for 140 years, and they didn’t have a problem with it till they lost,” Ryan said.

It’s one of several hypocrisies the state GOP has noted regarding the legal challenges being posed by the Left.

At a press event last week, state Sen. Dean Arp said the same principle applied to the recent accusations of election fraud in a handful of North Carolina counties.

State Republicans say partisan Democratic elections officials not only were aware of but may have been actively involved in earlier ballot-harvesting operations. But amid accusations that 9th District Republican candidate Mark Harris had contracted with a get-out-the-vote operative who may have used illegal harvesting practices, they feigned shock and refused to certify the race.

Although the state GOP maintains that any alleged irregularities are not enough to change the outcome, Democrats have pushed for a new election, and the Nancy Pelosi-led House of Representatives has signaled it would refuse to seat Harris without conducting its own investigation.

“To call for a new ballgame after you lose is not how you play,” Arp said.

Student Targeted by Liberal Attack-Dogs Speaks Out About March for Life Video

Ben Sellers
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0

‘It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A teenage boy has spoken out following an unprecedented assault by the left-wing press, which included doxxing his family and his school, for the sin of staring at an adult activist during Friday’s March for Life rally.

Doing its best to ignore the presence of thousands of goose-stepping, anti-Semitic feminazis cursing their way up Pennsylvania Avenue during Saturday’s Women’s March, the press instead fixated over the weekend on what might have been an innocuous encounter between Nick Sandmann, a junior at Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School, and Nathan Phillips, a Native American elder and outspoken Trump critic.

After video of the exchange hit the internet, the media kicked into high gear to publicly shame Sandmann for triggering and taunting the seasoned leftist protestor, who was drumming near the Lincoln Memorial as part of the concurrent Indigenous People’s March.

Phillips, 64, who has been involved in a number of past protests, including the Dakota and Keystone XL pipelines, was singing songs “urging participants to ‘be strong’ against the ravages of colonialism that include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations,” when he claimed a group of schoolboys began to gather near him, according to The Washington Post.

Phillips told The Post that he felt threatened by the children. “It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’” he said.

“I started going that way, and that guy in the hat [Sandmann] stood in my way, and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

Leftist pundits quickly projected their own interpretations of the encounter, many accusing the boy and his friends of “taunting” Phillips.

Facing harassment, Sandmann released a public statement on Sunday rebutting the false narrative that had emerged.

He said that the group, while waiting for its bus to return home to Kentucky, was shouting its school spirit chant to drown out the hateful remarks being directed at them by another group of radicals nearby.

Phillips then worked his way through the crowd and approached Sandmann.

“The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.”

Sandmann said he, too, was concerned by the escalation. “I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers,” he said.

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Nonetheless, he calmly stood his ground while trying to avoid directly engaging with the liberal activists.

“I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor,” he said. “He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.”

Although Sandmann said he never sought to become part of the media spectacle, the fallout has included death threats against him, vicious insults and character assassination, while some have even waged a Twitter campaign targeting his parents, who were not present at the rally.

The leftist media has been known to exploit children in service of pushing agendas like gun control and climate change. Taking a page from Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas—which often places its missile sites near areas of high collateral damage, like schools—it has effectively used teens like David Hogg as human shields against criticism of liberal policies.

Meanwhile, it is not above inflicting its own damage on whoever happens to stand in the way.

As current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in October, those who oppose the Left’s orthodoxy—by daring to support the president—must be ready to face the unrelenting and merciless consequences.

“We owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there is some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it,” she told Paul Krugman.

Pelosi is but one of countless Democrats who have gone so far as encouraging activists to “get up in the face” of Republican opponents, resulting in some high-profile cases of bullying.

While forgiving or ignoring the atrocious behavior of progressive activists and justifying the often illegal violations of privacy and property against both public servants and private figures, the media now finds it acceptable to target and destroy innocent, underage victims expressly for the purpose of showing that it can out-bully its opponents with impunity.

A statement of the Indigenous People’s Movement, which organized Phillips’ protest, called the standoff between the elder activist and the teen “emblematic of our discourse in Trump’s America.”

One Washington Post columnist attempted to pin the blame on the immensely successful March for Life, which the teens were leaving to return home at the time of the encounter.

Michelle Boorstein claimed the episode offered clear evidence that the pro-life rally, drawing tens of thousands to the National Mall, had “become too partisan and too aligned with politically conservative figures, Trump in particular.”

It was unclear at press time whether Boorstein and her media cohorts intended to amend their statements following a full disclosure of facts to include condemnation of the Indigenous People’s March or other counter-demonstrations.

The story broke the same day as another damaging hit on the media’s credibility, when the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller publicly rebuffed a sensational account by Buzzfeed. Others in the liberal press picked up on the fake report in order to amplify calls for impeaching the president.

It also comes a week after liberal education-school researchers published a dubious statistical study attempting to link a rise in school bullying with support for Trump.

As Left Stokes Shutdown Panic, Some on the Right See Opportunity

Ben Sellers
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‘It’s going to take a big national event to move things. I mean, we’re at a standstill….’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Call it a Tale of Two Shutdowns. At 28 days, both President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remain firmly entrenched in their positions over the $5 billion in requested funding for a southern border wall, which has led to the longest partial government closure in history.

With no end in sight, the greatest crisis thus far has been that the furloughing of some 380,000 nonessential federal employees might start to become old news.

It has left many Americans wondering: If the government can absorb these losses and still function as usual, what’s next? And exactly how long will this go on?

However, the two sides see the end-game playing out in very different ways: While the Left is pushing fear tactics, prognosticating an epic disaster that could possibly eclipse even global warming, some on the Right see a master strategy in which Trump lays the groundwork for permanently draining the swamp.

‘Macabre Hypotheticals’

MURDOCK: Trump Should Resist Pelosi, Use SOTU for Border Wall Pitch
Nancy Pelosi/IMAGE: The Washington Post via Youtube

Given his flair for the sensational, it is small wonder that Drudge Report proprietor Matt Drudge found his banner story on Friday in the left-leaning Atlantic. 

With the initial wave of shutdown stories having failed to create the necessary public panic, the magazine took a page straight from the Al Gore playbook by torquing up the doom-and-gloom scenarios in a mostly anonymously-sourced rundown of “macabre hypotheticals.”

Wrote Atlantic author McKay Coppins: “For a deal to shake loose in this environment, it may require a failure of government so dramatic, so shocking, as to galvanize public outrage and force the two parties back to the negotiating table.”

The article at times felt like it was dropping suggestions, exhorting its social justice warriors in the Resistance army to take action. Among the possible outcomes slouching toward their inevitable conclusion on Capitol Hill:

  • A legion of starving masses encamped in Trump shanty towns outside the White House once food stamps expire in March
  • A maverick TSA worker, more enterprising than usual due to disgruntled desperation, routing a plane into the ground
  • A backlog of USDA approvals leading to an outbreak of tainted, sub-quality beef
  • And, of course, terrorism

Likely, the Leftist press would find a way to deflect such a terrorist attack back onto Trump—even if it happened to be one of the many jihadists who entered the U.S. via the unprotected southern border.

After doing all it could to ding the president for creating both sides of this two-way impasse, The Atlantic concluded, “And so the quiet catastrophizing continues. … Even if some of their worst-case shutdown scenarios remain unlikely—there are still plenty of paths forward that don’t include body counts…”

‘This Is All Pageantry’

As President Trump and House Speaker Pelosi proved this week, neither is above trolling tactics in the current appropriations standoff.

Pelosi set out to passive-aggressively pique the president’s ego by disinviting him from Congress for the State of the Union address.

Trump reciprocated by canceling Pelosi’s flight as she was about to embark on an international public-relations mission.

“This is all pageantry,” a Democratic House aide told The Atlantic. “It’s going to take a big national event to move things. I mean, we’re at a standstill.”

Unlike Obama, who deliberately sought to enhance public misery during the 2013 shutdown by unnecessarily shuttering funded services, Trump has downplayed it, even injecting sardonic humor into the situation by inviting the NCAA-winning Clemson football team to a self-funded fast-food feast.

Some, such as ESPN, naturally cried “racism” over the banquet.

But The Atlantic gave voice to what most of the Left felt deep in their chafing craws.

“Now that he’s in the fight, Trump seems to be relishing the opportunities for showmanship that the shutdown affords him,” it wrote.

“Why bother governing—a job he has rarely seemed to like—when he can spend all day doling out Quarter Pounders to college-football players, plotting publicity stunts, and trading barbs with political enemies?”

Meanwhile, on the Right, some wondered if behind the showmanship and pageantry, Trump might be setting a trap.

From an optical standpoint, Trump and the Republicans may never be able to prevail in the courtroom of the mainstream media, no matter how many “Chuck and Nancy” memes crop up.

As many have observed, the anti-wall position that Congressional Democrats are now firmly entrenched against is one they have publicly supported in the past, meaning their principled stand is against the president himself.

Trump’s only way, thus, to fulfill a crucial campaign promise may be a bait-and-switch.

Indeed, the president may have just such a solution for the border wall by declaring a national emergency and having the Pentagon provide the funding—although it’s likely to be subject to many 9th Circuit injunctions and eminent-domain challenges.

Still, the purpose of a protracted shutdown may be something entirely different than funding the wall if Trump is set on fulfilling another campaign promise: draining the swamp in Washington, D.C.

Bucking ‘The Process’

MURDOCK: Trump Should Resist Pelosi, Use SOTU for Border Wall Pitch 1
Donald Trump/IMAGE: The Washington Post via Youtube

Writing for the conservative site American Thinker, Thomas Lifson posed the question, “Has President Trump suckered Democrats and the Deep State into a trap that will enable a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy?”

Lifson’s main point of reasoning was a little-known bureaucratic procedure from the federal Office of Personnel Management known as a Reduction in Force. It stipulates says after 30 calendar days a furloughed federal employee may be downsized.

“For all practical purposes, a government RIF is the same thing as a layoff,” explained Michael Roberts on The Balance.

The brilliance of the tactical move stems from the fact that it may be otherwise virtually impossible to fire many government employees. Even if there are performance related reasons, the federal bureaucracy often finds itself slave to the “process” of avoiding lawsuits by transferring, promoting or simply ignoring problem employees.

“Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value,” wrote a  a senior Trump administration official in an anonymous op-ed published Monday by the Daily Caller. “It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process.”

The Daily Caller piece effectively confirmed the theory that Trump had an altogether different game in mind. “The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall” said the writer. “It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.”

The author noted that many of those within the federal public sector create more inefficiencies than productive contributions. “On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. … But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.”

Even worse, many seek to undermine Trump’s efforts, said the source. “Most of my career colleagues actively work against the president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown.”

Since the reductions, argued the author, government offices have found it necessary to reorganize, and often they have become more efficient as a result.

Likewise, as furloughed employees find themselves without paychecks, many of those seeking to supplement income may simply be reduced through attrition.

“President Trump has created more jobs in the private sector than the furloughed federal workforce,” said the source. “Now that we are shut down, not only are we identifying and eliminating much of the sabotage and waste, but we are finally working on the president’s agenda.”

Late Friday, Trump announced via Twitter that he would be making a major announcement tomorrow concerning the border wall and the shutdown.

Only time will tell how it unfolds, but as long as Trump controls the narrative, the one thing Americans can be certain of is that the ongoing saga is not likely to become old news.

Judge Forces Top Obama Officials to Answer Questions on Clinton Emails, Benghazi

Ben Sellers
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‘One of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency…’

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Hillary Clinton/IMAGE: PBS NewsHour via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In its ongoing efforts to cast daylight on the shady dealings of the Clintons, transparency advocate Judicial Watch has scored another win.

On Tuesday, a federal judge allowed its Freedom of Information case to proceed relating to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conceal state business during the Obama era.

In greenlighting the discovery phase of the case, which also focuses on the Benghazi cover-up, District Judge Royce C. Lamberth will compel top officials including former national security adviser Susan Rice and her deputy of communications, “echo chamber” architect Ben Rhodes, to respond to Judicial Watch questions.

Rhodes helped craft the notorious talking points that Rice used to mislead the public following the Sept. 11, 2012, assault on the U.S. Embassy in Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

It was through Judicial Watch’s efforts to pursue transparency in the Benghazi case that Clinton’s private e-mail server initially was revealed in 2015. It ultimately became one of the defining issues of her candidacy for president and may have contributed largely—along with other character flaws—to her election loss.

Longtime Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan and former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap will also be under the heat lamp. Additionally, several Clinton underlings involved in the creation and maintenance of the private email server are cleared for questioning by the order .

But if Clinton’s past responses to such depositions are any indication, they are unlikely to yield any great breakthroughs. Most of her answers involved either memory lapses or legal objections as to why she could not give a straight reply.

Lamberth previously had ordered the State and Justice departments to comply in the efforts to establish a discovery plan for the proceedings. In doing so, he expressed, in no uncertain terms, his disdain for the stonewalling and cover-up efforts afoot by the deep-state bureaucracy.

Lamberth called the scandal ““one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency,” and questioned “even now, whether they are acting in good faith.”

In a press release, Judicial Watch said it broadly hoped to use the depositions to learn:

  • Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
  • whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
  • whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

The preliminary discovery period will last 120 days, after which another hearing will determine if depositions of Clinton herself and her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, are also warranted.

The lawsuit is one of many courtroom battles Judicial Watch has under litigation against Clinton and Obama officials.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton recently testified before the (then Republican-led) House of Representatives on the pay-to-play operations of the Clinton Foundation, which intermingled its supposed charity work with Hillary Clinton’s official secretary-of-State duties, as well as likely supplying a slush fund for her 2016 presidential campaign.

NC GOP Leaders Dismiss Fraud Accusations, Push for Certification of 9th District

Ben Sellers
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‘All we can do is present the truth and hope that the public won’t allow this race to be stolen…’

North Carolina GOP Chairman Robin Hayes speaks to media and supporters in Charlotte on January 15./PHOTO: Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District approaches its third week without representation, the state’s Republican leaders expressed confidence that their candidate, Mark Harris, had rightfully won the race and should be confirmed as soon as possible.

But they remained less certain on how to achieve that, with the pathways to resolution lying either in the control of the courts, the state’s Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper or the now Democrat-led U.S. House of Representatives.

“All we can do is present the truth and hope that the public won’t allow this race to be stolen,” NCGOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse told Liberty Headlines at a press conference in Charlotte on Tuesday.

In early December, when allegations first began to surface about McRae Dowless—a get-out-the-vote operative contracted by the Harris campaign in Bladen County who is alleged to have illegally harvested absentee ballots—both the Harris campaign and the NCGOP leadership acknowledged they were caught off-guard.

Harris’s opponent, Democrat Dan McCready, had conceded the election with no protest, and it was not until the race was due to be certified the week after Thanksgiving that Joshua Malcolm, a partisan member of the N.C. State Board of Elections, called on the board to withhold certification due to irregularities.

“I was sick to my stomach, saying ‘My God, how did this happen?'” said Woodhouse, who went on national media outlets like MSNBC publicly expressing support for a thorough investigation.

“We know now that it didn’t—this was a political setup,” Woodhouse said.

Elections Board Conspiracy

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Dallas Woodhouse/IMAGE: MSNBC via Youtube

The GOP leaders point to frequent communication in the months leading up to the election between Malcolm and Jens Lutz, the former vice chairman of the Bladen County Board of Elections, who resigned during the fraud investigation. According to an audience member at the Charlotte event (unconfirmed by Liberty Headlines), Lutz was last seen at the Mexican border.

In addition to revealing Malcolm’s advance knowledge of the fraud concerns in Bladen, Lutz also had been a business partner of Dowless’s in a local political-consulting firm.

Woodhouse said Lutz may have been motivated to get back at Dowless after their partnership dissolved.

“Malcolm obviously conspired with Lutz to keep a local election protest from being filed” prior to the board certification, Woodhouse said.

As for Malcolm’s motive—along with many of the other prominent Democrats who were aware of ongoing fraud concerns before the election—“They clearly wanted to see who won,” Woodhouse said.

He noted that a possible conflict of interest arose from the fact that Malcolm’s daughter worked for the McCready campaign.

“You can shuck off any one of these things that’s kind of coincidence,” Woodhouse said, “but [if] you take the totality of the circumstances, you can’t” dismiss the evidence of malfeasance.

Both Woodhouse and NCGOP Chairman Robin Hayes criticized the Democrats’ stall tactics, exploiting the vaguely worded provisions of the state election law that authorize the elections board to block any certification of an election where “taint” or “irregularities” are suspected.

“Any election would fall if you could just say ‘Someone somewhere did something,'” Woodhouse said. “We don’t think that’s the law. … The investigation can’t be justification for its own existence.”

They also said that despite being given the opportunity to investigate, Democrats, led by Malcolm, had attempted instead to turn the investigation into an indefinite fishing expedition.

“Under the Democrat rules, the investigation never ends,” said Hayes.

Out of Their Hands

Although the elections board initially had set its deadline to complete the investigation for late December, Malcolm unilaterally declared that it would be extended and the evidentiary hearing pushed back until Jan. 11—a week after the new Congressional term had started.

However, a bipartisan three-judge circuit court panel disagreed, and in late December it dissolved the elections board, which it said had unconstitutionally overstayed its own legal charter.

1
Roy Cooper/Photo by NCDOTcommunications (CC)

A new law takes effect at the end of January that will permit the governor to convene a new elections board under the advisement of the state legislature and the two major parties. But state Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union County, said beyond the General Assembly making its recommendations, it lay entirely within Cooper’s control whether to allow politics to continue to pervade the board.

“We all hope and wish and wait for him to not use the Board of Elections in a partisan manner and to seat someone he may disagree with politically” who could restore the board’s good-faith standing, Arp said.

“I hope the governor steps up and fulfills his constitutional duty. What is absolutely not tenable is leaving the voters of the 9th District” without representation in Congress, he said.

The board’s non-appointed staff has continued to investigate the election fraud matters even though the hearing for January was called off.

Should the matter return to the Board of Elections without Harris having been yet certified, the possibility still looms for a complete do-over of the election.

Republican legislators in Raleigh have debated whether that also should include a new GOP primary.

Playing Dirty

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign—citing past elections with similar circumstances where a local board refused to certify— has asked the court to step in once again.

Woodhouse said he was hopeful that this would resolve the matter before the elections board (which likely would include Malcolm as chairman again) reconvenes. “Based on the court’s precedent, they’ll certify,” he said.

Even so, other roadblocks stand in the way that could, once again, catch the GOP leaders off-guard. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have indicated that they may yet refuse to seat Harris without first conducting their own investigation.

McCready’s team also has secured as a lead attorney Marc Elias, whose notorious work with contested elections has resulted in several high-stakes national GOP victories being overturned.

Democrat attorney Marc Elias/IMAGE: Maxwell School of Syracuse University via Youtube

Elias first rose to prominence in the Minnesota election that gave Al Franken the Democrats’ 60th seat in the U.S. Senate in 2008, a filibuster-proof super-majority that paved the way for the unobstructed passage of legislation like Obamacare.

Elias also helped defend North Carolina’s Cooper in the 2016 gubernatorial race against Republican Pat McCrory’s accusations of widespread ballot fraud—which Malcolm at the same time motioned for the Board of Elections to dismiss.

Woodhouse said that the state GOP had been in communication with its national counterpart, but he signaled that no long-term strategy existed for defending the 9th District seat from the Left’s subversive maneuvers.

“We don’t play dirty like this,” Woodhouse said. “We think we won the election. We had the votes.”

Hayes said it posed a “difficult challenge” that Democrats had sought to “bury this under an avalanche of outside money.” But he commended the media’s work in shedding light on the corruption coming from the other side.

“The press has really dug into this to help to blunt” the efforts by Democrats both within and outside the state to steal an election, Hayes said.

Although the NCGOP leaders were adamant that Harris should be certified in the absence of clear evidence to overturn the initial result, they said they did not object to an investigation into the state’s election fraud troubles continuing after that.

However, Hayes said, “the investigation needs to follow a logical conclusion with defined, specific objectives and defined, transparent outcomes.”

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