Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) made a noteworthy declaration about his post-election political intents on Monday, though it was lost amid his joke, for which he has since apologized, about shooting Hillary Clinton.
Should he head back to the Senate, Burr pledged, he would try to block any Supreme Court nomination from a President Clinton.
“If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court,” he said.
This is how constitutional crises are made. And it’s also why Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Clinton’s running mate, told The Huffington Post that Senate Democrats would try to nuke the filibuster option on Supreme Court nominees should they regain power in that chamber.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
The greatest miracle of the Internet is that it exists—the second greatest is that it persists. Every so often we’re reminded that bad actors wield great skill and have little conscience about the harm they inflict on the world’s digital nervous system. They invent viruses, botnets, and sundry species of malware. There’s good money to be made deflecting these incursions. But a small, tightly-knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cyber-security firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the Internet with their bugs. “We’re the Union of Concerned Nerds,” in the wry formulation of the Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp.
In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cyber-security firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.
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Donald Trump gives a fist-pump to the ground crew as he arrives on his plane in St. Augustine, Florida, on Oct. 24.
Donald Trump regularly claims that the presidential election is “rigged” against him, thanks in part to “all too common” instances of voter fraud. “Watch Philadelphia. Watch St. Louis. Watch Chicago, watch Chicago. Watch so many other places,” the GOP nominee urged his supporters at a recent rally.
Election experts typically respond by pointing out that instances of fraud by voters at the polls are actually remarkably rare.
But they do happen. Case in point: Police in Des Moines, Iowa, said Friday that they had arrested Terri Lynn Rote, 55, on suspicion of voting twice in the general election.
Rote, a registered Republican, allegedly submitted ballots at two different early-voting locations in Polk County, Iowa, according to local media reports. She has been charged with first-degree election misconduct, a felony.
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Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Well, Donald Trump has warned us to expect people voting more than once.
GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump frequently complains about the possibility of “voter fraud” swaying the 2016 presidential election in favor of Democrats, and on Sunday he told supporters in Colorado they should take secondary steps ― ones that could result in fraudulent vote tallies ― in order to guard against this.
Colorado is one of three states in the nation where ballots are mailed to all registered voters and can be filled out and returned by mail. Voters are also welcome to vote in person.
“Who here has sent in their ballot?” Trump asked a crowd of more than 2,000 supporters at a rally in Greeley. The crowd replied with a roaring affirmative cheer.
Trump then asked, “When you send your ballot in, do you think it’s properly counted?” The crowd was quiet for a second before people realized that the correct answer was “No!”
A constellation of warring factions have seemingly set aside deadly disputes to take part in one of Iraq’s toughest challenges yet — clearing ISIS out of its last major stronghold in the country.
A successful offensive to recapture Mosul could boost desperately needed national unity, restore the pride of an army that was humiliated when it fled ISIS in 2014 and rip the heart out of the group’s self-declared caliphate.
But the tinderbox coalition of anti-ISIS fighters that began its march on Iraq’s second-largest city earlier this month, as well as the combustible mix of the city’s ethnic and sectarian groups, risks triggering yet more bloodshed even after the jihadists have gone.
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Iraqi forces targeting ISIS militants south of Mosul on Wednesday. STRINGER / Reuters
In a letter to FBI employees explaining why he’d alerted Congress about newly discovered emails pertaining to HillaryClinton, bureau Director James Comey stressed he understood the “significant risk” with going public so close to an election.
“Given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression,” he wrote, adding that his desire to keep the public abreast with developments superseded that concern.
Less than 24 hours after Comey tried to calm nerves at the FBI, GOP presidential nominee DonaldTrump proved his fears to be justified and raised additional questions about why he went public in the first place.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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A federal jury acquitted Ammon Bundy and six other armed ranchers Thursday. They were found not guilty of weapons and conspiracy charges for their weeks-long armed takeover of a federal wildlife facility in Oregon in January.
They were innocent because they were white.
At least that’s the conclusion of plenty of observers who sounded off on social media, who noted that black people who protested the deaths of unarmed men and boys were often met with brutal force from police and the full brunt of the law.
Something strange happened Friday after the FBI director’s bombshell revelation of newly obtained emails that he said may be relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server: The presidential campaigns of Democrat Clinton and Republican Donald Trump found common ground.
Both camps demanded that FBI Director James Comey disclose more details about the emails and the bureau’s investigation, which he made known in a letter to Congress just 11 days before the election.
“FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen,” Clinton campaign chair John Podesta said in a statement that called Comey’s move “extraordinary.”
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Two Yazidi women and former ISIS sex slaves were awarded the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on Thursday. The honor is given to those “who have made an exceptional contribution to the fight for human rights across the globe.”
Nadia Murad Basee Taha, 23, and Lamiya Aji Bashar, 18, were both enslaved by ISIS when their Iraqi village was attacked by militants on Aug. 3, 2014. ISIS militants rounded up groups of Yazidi men and murdered them, before enslaving scores of young women.
The families of Murad and Aji Bashar were either killed or enslaved, but the two women escaped, and have since become human rights activists, fighting human trafficking, Yazidi genocide and ISIS enslavement.
A federal court jury on Thursday acquitted anti-government militant leader Ammon Bundy and six followers of conspiracy charges stemming from their role in the armed takeover of a U.S. wildlife center in Oregon earlier this year.
Bundy and others, including his brother and co-defendant Ryan Bundy, cast the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a legitimate and patriotic act of civil disobedience. Prosecutors called it a lawless scheme to seize federal property by force.
In an emotional climax to the trial in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ammon Bundy’s lawyer, Marcus Mumford, was tackled to the floor by U.S. marshals as he became involved in a heated verbal exchange with the judge over the terms of his client’s release.
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Handout . / Reuters
Inmates Ammon Bundy (L) and his brother Ryan Bundy are seen in a combination of police jail booking photos released by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland, Oregon January 27, 2016.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
James' World 2 