Herzi Halevi, top commander of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), announced on Wednesday that his troops were preparing for a ground invasion in Lebanon following the back-and-forth rocket attacks that both sides have engaged in.

"Squad” member and New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for Mayor Eric Adams to resign amid the federal probes that have faced the Mayor’s administration. 

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs released a scathing 133-page report on the massive failures of the Secret Service in the first assassination attempt on the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. As Sen. Rank Paul said, there was an inexcusable dereliction of duty. Not only was the American […] The post Damning Senate Report on the July 13 Assassination Attempt appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

The mayor of Berlin, Germany, gave a no-nonsense answer when asked why his office had Israeli flags flying in front of it. The questioner claimed Israel was perpetrating a “genocide,” asking Mayor Kai Wegner, “The genocide taking place in Palestine does affect us, even if geopolitics is now perhaps more important than the office of a small mayor, I say. Nevertheless, we cannot duck away from a genocide. But why, why, for example, are there Israeli flags hanging in front of our Berlin town halls?” Wegner decried those who have called Israel’s actions “genocide,” firing back, “So it’s not happening. Period. And I won’t allow it, either.” Wegner implicitly referred to the effort by Germans to atone for the terrible crimes of the Nazis against the Jews in World War II, saying, “This is a massive, one-sided propaganda campaign by certain circles, where I simply say, I thought we were further along. I thought we had moved on and learned other lessons from our history, too. So apparently, some people haven’t yet. And I can tell them that the Israeli flag will hang outside my red town hall until we know the fate of the hostages, who are being held in the most cruel, atrocious conditions, in agonizing suffering in the tunnels of Hamas terrorists. As long as there is still hope that one of these hostages will be returned to their families, the Israeli flag will hang in front of the ruling mayor’s official residence.” Seit fast einem Jahr hängt die israelische Flagge vor dem Roten Rathaus. Es gibt Menschen, die dieses Symbol der Solidarität ablehnen. Einige von ihnen waren bei „Kai Wegner vor Ort“. Der Reg. Bürgermeister @kaiwegner hat klar gemacht, welche Haltung er bei diesem Thema hat. pic.twitter.com/UZFgzz5vYZ — Senatskanzlei Berlin (@RegBerlin) September 20, 2024   In February, Wegner stated on X, “Berlin has a clear stance when it comes to freedom. Berlin stands firmly on Israel’s side. There is no doubt about that. Full responsibility for the deep suffering in Israel and the Gaza Strip lies with Hamas.” Am I Racist? Is In Theaters NOW — Get Your Tickets Here! Berlin hat eine klare Haltung, wenn es um Freiheit geht. Berlin steht fest auf der Seite Israels. Darüber gibt es keinen Zweifel. Die volle Verantwortung für das tiefe Leid in Israel und dem Gazastreifen liegt bei der Hamas. — Kai Wegner (@kaiwegner) February 25, 2024   In May, Wegner defended police who had removed pro-Hamas demonstrators from buildings at Humboldt University. He accused the demonstrators of supporting Hamas; Germany, as well as the United States, considers Hamas a terrorist organization. “I will not let this pass, we do not tolerate anti-Semitism, hatred and agitation at our universities,” Wegner declared. “Jewish students must be able to study at universities without fear. … I attach great importance to academic freedom and freedom of opinion, but anti-Semitic crimes are not an opinion.”

One basic rule of survival is that, when a clearly deranged individual is ranting and raving in public, you shouldn’t engage with them. Generally speaking, there’s no benefit to doing so. You can’t persuade them not to be delusional, as much as you might like to. You can only make things worse. Unfortunately, every now and then, despite your best efforts, sometimes this strategy doesn’t work out. We’ve all been there. You’re trying to mind your own business, and then out of nowhere, you catch a stranger’s eye. And then they might start talking about you. They might verbalize their unhinged delusions about who you are, or what you do for a living. And in those cases, sometimes, it can be impossible to resist saying a word or two in response. You know it won’t help anything, you know you probably shouldn’t do it, but it’s human nature to respond when someone — even a lunatic — is talking about you. Last night I found myself in a situation just like this, when the “Kamala HQ” account — the official account of the Kamala Harris campaign — posted a message in response to a segment from my show yesterday. This is the same account that even CNN reports is guilty of “repeatedly deceiving” people with obviously false posts. It’s the same account that Tim Pool is suing because they wildly misrepresented something he said on his show. They’re pathological, delusional liars in every sense. And last night, totally unprovoked, they came after me. Here’s what they wrote, in response to my show yesterday: “Top Trump operative, echoing Project 2025: Not only should the Department of Education be abolished, but the entire public school system should be abolished.” Before I play the clip that they embedded in that tweet, I have to say a few things. First of all, it’d be news to the Trump campaign that I’m one of their “operatives.” I don’t work for the Trump campaign. I don’t coordinate with the Trump campaign. During the primary I supported Ron DeSantis. So in no sense am I a Trump campaign “operative.” At the same time, I have to admit that this particular lie is a little flattering. If they’re going to falsely label me a “Trump operative,” I’m glad they’ve promoted me to a “top operative” instead of a regular one, at least. I’m not some rank-and-file Trump operative over here. I’m the cream of the crop, in the eyes of the Kamala Harris campaign. It’s nice to finally be getting some damned respect around here, I have to say. In any event, here’s the footage they embedded in their tweet, to demonstrate that I’m a “top Trump operative” who is “echoing Project 2025.” I’m responding here to a clip from a recent Trump rally, where he says the education system is failing in this country. Watch: Top Trump operative, echoing Project 2025: Not only should the Department of Education be abolished, but the entire public school system should be abolished pic.twitter.com/cCr0zr65C2 — Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 25, 2024 Like everything else that this “Kamala HQ” account has uploaded in the past few weeks, this post backfired almost immediately. Pretty much every reply was along the lines of: “Yep, the public school system and the Department of Education are terrible and should be abolished.” The goal of the Kamala Harris campaign is to portray this as an inherently extreme position — as if the existence of the Department of Education is an inevitable fact of life in this country — but it’s not. For most of this country’s history, up until 1979, we haven’t had a Department of Education at all. WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show Actually, to be more precise, Andrew Johnson also launched a Department of Education back in 1867. It had just four employees — the commissioner and three clerks. And it had a very limited mandate. It was supposed to collect statistics on “the condition and progress of education in the United States” and then publish that information. But even with that limited mandate, politicians at the time thought the Department of Education had too much power. They didn’t see any reason for the department to exist at all. As Politico reported, “Many in Congress … saw its existence as an unconstitutional power grab and worried that its data-gathering authority gave Washington a new and dangerous kind of leverage.” Andrew Rogers, a Democrat from New Jersey, put it this way: “I am content .. to leave this matter of education where our fathers left it, where the history of our country left it, to the schools systems of the different towns, cities and states.” Ultimately, the first Department of Education lasted just a year before Congress realized it was a horrible idea and abolished it. Instead of having a bloated and unnecessary federal bureaucracy spending tens of billions of dollars every year, education mostly remained a local concern from 1868 to 1979. And all told, we did pretty well as a country in that period. In fact, during that time frame, we went from horses to cars to planes to rocket ships flying to the moon. It was a period of human advancement never seen before. And we did it all without the Department of Education, if you can imagine. Then, in 1979, after this period of uninterrupted prosperity and innovation, Jimmy Carter revived the federal Department of Education. And by that point, we didn’t have a lot of politicians in Washington anymore who wanted to limit their own power. Instead they wanted to expand it, at all costs. So the D.O.E. has stuck around, to disastrous results. As the New York Sun reported last year: The recent report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes referred to as the nation’s report card, is a devastating assessment of the condition of our nation’s schools. In short, there has been virtually no educational progress with our nation’s children in more than 30 years – and urban districts are the worst performers. … Virtually every major city shows declining proficiency for their students, even as school spending continues to increase. Yes, you read that correctly. There has been virtually no educational progress in this country’s educational system in more than 30 years. The Department of Education has been around this entire time, and it hasn’t done anything to improve education. They’ve hired a bunch of LGBTQ overseers to police “misgendering” in kindergarten, but when it comes to education, it’s been a debacle. Instead, in major school districts all over the country, corruption has flourished. Again from the Sun: The report ranked the Detroit Public Schools as the worst performing of all 26 large city districts, with just 5 percent of their eighth-grade students rated proficient in reading and only 3 percent in math. What is surprising is the Detroit Public Schools Community District rated 99 percent of Detroit’s teachers as ‘highly effective’ or ‘effective,’ the two highest ratings given to teachers. An added conundrum is that Detroit public high schools received an ‘F’ on student proficiency and yet received an ‘A’ on graduation rates. In other words, students are doing terribly — worse than they’ve done in decades. And yet the teachers are rating themselves highly. They’re graduating all of these students who can’t read, write, or do arithmetic. And despite all of this, billions of dollars from the federal government flow into Michigan schools every year. The Department of Education isn’t just tolerating failure. It’s enabling it. To be clear, the source for these claims isn’t Project 2025. It’s not me, either. The source for these claims is the Department of Education itself. The “National Assessment of Educational Progress,” or the nation’s report card, is both overseen and administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. And the National Center for Education Statistics is embedded within the U.S. Department of Education. The Department of Education itself is saying that it’s doing a terrible job. They’re acknowledging that public schools are failing, too, which is why homeschooling is now more popular than ever. How bad are things going in public schools, exactly? In 2023 The New York Times reported: “The math and reading performance of 13-year-olds in the United States has hit the lowest level in decades.” Again, their source is the Department of Education and the exam from the National Report Card. And there are reasons to believe these numbers from the national report card because: Scores on the exam do not result in any rewards or punishments for students, teachers or schools, making them especially useful for research purposes, since there are fewer incentives to cheat or teach to the test. If there were punishments for underperforming schools, then we can assume that a lot of teachers would give their students the answers. But apparently they’re not clever enough to do that — at least not yet. So the corruption and the incompetence are laid bare. Out of curiosity, I just pulled up the homepage for the National Report Card. The very first thing on the website is a chart entitled, “Student Performance Across Subjects.” It shows “Changes in average scores and scores at selected percentiles, by subject and grade.” Here’s what it looks like: NationalReportCard.gov As you can see, every single arrow except one is down — meaning there’s been a “Significant decrease compared to last assessment year,” according to the website. Average scores in math and reading are down for grades 4 through 8, in every percentile. The only exception is the 90th percentile in reading among 4th graders. That experienced “no significant difference” year-over-year. Not a single category improved. Am I Racist? Is In Theaters NOW — Get Your Tickets Here! I could go on and on about the various metrics that show our public school system, and the Department of Education, are both failing. Every single statistic like this is clear evidence that we need to scrap the system and start over. But the failures actually go even deeper than test scores and academic proficiency. All the way back in 2004, the Department of Education released a comprehensive report showing that 10% of students in public schools nationwide, in grades K-12, were subjected to “sexual misconduct” by a school employee. That’s millions of children. It’s the kind of report you’d expect would lead to annual, if not monthly, follow-ups by the Department of Education. But as far as I can tell, they haven’t followed up at all with another comprehensive assessment. And as I discussed earlier this year, that’s not because sexual abuse in public schools has gone away. If anything, there are clear indications it’s become substantially more common — and that public schools are covering it up. Put it all together, and it’s evident that the education system is catastrophically failing to do the single thing it is supposed to do, which is to equip each new generation with the knowledge and intellectual tools they need to be productive and happy human beings. The failure of the education system should be considered a major scandal — perhaps the greatest scandal facing the country today. The problem is that the Democrats don’t consider failure to be failure. They want the education system to churn out shallow, obedient serfs. And it is indeed succeeding in doing that. All that said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that one thing the Kamala HQ account tweeted out is, in fact, accurate. It’s true that I am, indeed, a proponent of Project 2025. They got me there. If you want to find out more about our dastardly, secretive plot— now that we’ve been unmasked for all the world to see— you can find out more at project2025.com. I shouldn’t just give out the URL like that, I know. But as a top Trump operative, as opposed to a middle-manager, I have declassification authority. WATCH THE TRAILER FOR ‘AM I RACIST?’ — A MATT WALSH COMEDY ON DEI Once again, the website is project2025.com. Send it to all your friends. But whatever you do, don’t send it to the Kamala HQ account. We don’t want them to see what we’re really up to, over here in the Trump campaign. It’d be really, really bad if they tweeted out that link and exposed what we Trump operatives are doing. We can’t let them know about project2025.com. But everyone else — everyone on our side who wants access to our secret blueprint — can go over to that URL anytime they want. Read it. Internalize it. And then, when the Department of Education is abolished and children can once again read, write, and do arithmetic in this country, we must never speak about our sinister Project 2025 plan ever again.

A group of nearly two dozen state attorneys general is warning the American Academy of Pediatrics that it may be breaking the law by continuing to recommend puberty blockers to children who are unhappy with their biological gender despite evidence the drugs cause harm. On Tuesday, the 21 attorneys general, led by Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, sent a letter warning the Academy that it may be violating a slew of state consumer protection laws. The group put the Academy “on notice for possible violations of state consumer protection statutes over its evidence free standards on gender dysphoria care for minors,” the attorneys general said in a statement. “Most concerning, AAP claims that the use of puberty blockers on children is safe and reversible,” the group wrote, calling that claim “misleading and deceptive.” The Academy’s guidance is based “more on political pressure and agendas rather than medical efficacy and sound medical judgement,” the group wrote. The attorneys general are demanding the Academy submit specific documentation for its ongoing recommendations of the powerful drugs for gender dysphoric children. “Telling parents and children that puberty blockers are ‘reversible’ at the very least conveys assurance that no permanent harm or change will occur,” the attorneys general wrote in their letter. “But that claim cannot be made in the face of the unstudied and ‘novel’ use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria.” “We expect you will address this matter with the same seriousness that we are, and we look forward to receiving your response soon,” the group wrote. The Academy represents 67,000 pediatricians across the country. Puberty blockers can affect bone growth and density and cause sexual dysfunction, voice damage, and infertility, among other issues. Cross-sex hormones, often given to children after they take puberty blockers, which can be estrogen or testosterone can cause infertility, deadly blood clots, heart attacks, increased cancer risks of the breasts and ovaries, liver dysfunction, worsening psychological illness, and other serious conditions. In Europe, several countries including England, Finland, and Sweden have pumped the brakes on transgender medical interventions for children, including both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The attorneys general cites the Cass review, the landmark report commissioned by England’s National Health Service, which recommended halting the prescription of puberty blockers due to their effects on brain development and bone health. In April, the Tavistock clinic, England’s only youth gender identity clinic, officially closed its doors after being dogged by controversy for years. The clinic, the biggest in the world, referred thousands of children for puberty blockers. In its last years, Tavistock began to see an increasing flood of young girls with gender-related distress asking for drugs despite having other mental issues like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and histories of abuse. In May, a British high court upheld Britain’s ban on puberty blockers. At least 25 U.S. states have passed restrictions on transgender surgeries and hormone treatments for minors. The Cass review also warned that children who are referred to gender services come with high rates of abuse and neglect, including sexual abuse and parental substance abuse.

Being in a relationship takes a lot of things, and love isn’t always enough. Sometimes, we take our partners for granted when we’ve been with the same person for a long time. We think they know how we feel just because we’re together, but that isn’t always the case. Kevin Costner shared a reminder with fans of a simple way to show our affection. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kevin Costner (@kevincostner) Kevin Costner Wants People To Be Thoughtful In Their Relationships According to People, during a performance with his band, Modern West, at the One805Live! charity concert at his residence in California, Kevin Costner reminded the audience to say “one thing.” “The person to our right, you know, the one that gets us through everything, your sweetheart, your wife, your whatever it is,” Kevin said. “But sometimes, you know, we see everything and we just kind of forget to just say that one thing: You’re important.” He added that it’s a little thing that many people struggle with, and he doesn’t understand why. “What’s so f—— hard about going, you know, ‘You’re important. You’ve been important for a long time,'” he said. “Sometimes you gotta search and so that’s what this song is about.” The One805 is a 502(c)(3) corporation that works to raise funds for first responders groups in California. It began in 2018 after the Montecito Mudflow killed 23 people and destroyed hundreds of homes. According to the organization’s website, “Our First Responders don’t only need our support in the aftermath of a disaster, they need it year in, year out. Be it flood, fire, or earthquake, natural disasters are inevitable in California, so as we remember the past, and prepare for the future, consider giving generously to One805.” This story’s featured image is by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images. The post Kevin Costner Offered Simple But Necessary Relationship Advice During Recent Concert appeared first on InspireMore.