A miracle IVF baby has tied the knot with a woman who was born steps away from him in the same hospital on the same day. Newborn Ross Watson made headlines when he was born on August 21, 1994—and the headlines are continuing 30 years later. Last month he celebrated his 30th birthday alongside his […] The post He was an IVF Miracle Baby Born Just Steps Away From His Future Wife appeared first on Good News Network.

Wait: we thought it was those ee-vil Republicans who incite violence among their supporters!l But on Saturday's edition of MSNBC's The Weekend, co-host Symone Sanders Townsend made an explicit call for violence against Trump. Or she used violent metaphors that could be misunderstood. Democrat strategist and MSNBC analyst Basil Smikle uncorked a lecture about how Trump disrespects Kamala Harris by suggesting she isn't qualified, isn't smart, and doesn't do her homework. Symone worked for Kamala and she's sitting right there. Ask her if Harris did had a habit of doing her homework, and what kind of boss she was.  But Smikle's overarching point was that Trump's attacks denied her any dignity. They never stop for two seconds and wonder if anyone on MSNBC grants Trump any fraction of respect. Because, automatically, they don't think he deserves any.  When Smikle suggested that Kamala Harris shouldn't descend into "the gutter" with Trump, Sanders took issue: "Well, sometimes when they go low, you gotta kick 'em. You gotta -- boom! -- pop him in the shin real quick. And maybe we will see that on the debate stage." Trump has already been the victim of an assassination attempt, escaping death by the narrowest of margins. Sanders might defend her outburst by saying she was speaking figuratively. But surely Sanders understands that some unhinged person out there, hearing her words, might take them literally and launch another attack on Trump -- with unknowable consequences. And just imagine the outrage on the left if Trump recommended kicking Kamala! Well, we can remember 2016, when he joked about paying the legal fees of his supporters if they would "knock the crap" out of those protesting Trump.   Here's the transcript. MSNBC The Weekend 9/7/24 8:02 am EDT DONALD TRUMP: Now, Kamala is an unusual name, but at least you know who we're talking about. When I say Harris, nobody knows who the hell I'm talking about. They say, who is that? So maybe we'll refer to her more as Kamala. It's a little friendlier, too. But it's hard to be friendly with somebody that wants to destroy our country. BASIL SMIKLE: I think that if he feels and his team feels that they can't grow grow their support, the best way to win is to diminish her. MICHAEL STEELE: Well, that's an important point. SMIKLE: And the way that they're doing it, is by trying to tap into a sense that this woman of color is not qualified for the role. Isn't smart, doesn't do her homework, isn't up to the task. We've heard that a thousand times before, right? The whole, if you're a person of color, a very common attack by your opponent, if that person is not a person of color, is that you're not qualified. It's a very old tactic.  And you can see him doubling down on that language every single time that he talks about her. Not even using her name correctly. I mean, that's textbook for him, but it'sa lso textbook in ways that people of color are diminished. I'm not even going to say your name, I'm not even going to give you that kind of dignity, right? We'll see that more often. I said that when she became the nominee, that his attacks would get bad, and they are. But what I like is that they're not, I don't think they're working, they're not sticking. Because as you talk about the enthusiasm, the sort of juice from the last two months, means that everybody feels deputized to be able to push back. And that's what we're seeing. STEELE: Just real quick, because you made a really important point that I don't want people to skip by. I think it's important. Donald Trump has a ceiling, she does not. So he's got to bring her down to his ceiling or below. And that's what you're seeing as part of that. SMIKLE: Don't play, don't play in the gutter. And she's gotta -- she's not going to do it. But don't go down there with him. SYMONE SANDERS TOWNSEND: Well, but sometimes when they go low, you gotta kick 'em. You know? You gotta -- boom! -- pop him in the shin real quick. And maybe we will see that on the debate stage.

On Tuesday's Amanpour & Company on PBS and CNN International, Hari Sreenivasan interviewed a former editor of the far-left website Salon.com who accuses the Republican Party of a grand conspiracy theory in a book titled Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. Not only did he push the liberal narrative that it is racial discrimination to require voter ID, but he also exaggerated the effects of gerrymandering in favor of Republicans.  Fill-in host Bianna Golodryga set up the segment: "And now we turn to democracy in the United States, which our next guest believes is under threat. In his new book, David Daley suggests that far-right actors, including within the Supreme Court, are controlling American elections. He describes a 50-year plot to undermine voting rights." In a dust-cover blurb, ultraliberal Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) underlines the vast right-wing conspiracy: "the Federalist Society’s anti-civil rights movement is the constant humming machinery of reaction working to implant plutocracy, kleptocracy, theocracy, and autocracy in our country." These are the conspiracy-theory books PBS and CNN want to promote. Hari Sreenivasan was then seen interviewing David Daley about he latest book, After Daley argued that Chief John Roberts has been very successful at pushing a conservative agenda on several issues, and recalled that he had long wanted to overturn the Voting Rights Act before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, the PBS correspondent followed up: "Tell me, why is it so important to understand this attack that you say is an attack on the Voting Rights Act, you know, that's been a long plan? Why is that crucial to understanding not just the power of the attacker but the consequences to the attack?" Referring back to the 2013 court ruling against the Voting Rights Act, Daley preposterously argued that the South has not changed much since the 1960s: In this decision, John Roberts says that things have changed in the South and that the protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary -- that we lived in a different country -- it was not 1965 anymore. The trouble with that is that the attack on the vote began that very morning. That states across the South and elsewhere were waiting for this decision and immediately began implementing things like voter ID pushes and voter roll purges and precinct closures that they could not have gotten away with prior to the court's decision. So when Roberts says that things have changed in the South, all he had to do is open his eyes to what was happening before the court's decision and immediately afterwards. Very little had actually changed in the South except now, thanks to the court, these dark forces that the decision in Shelby unleashed were able to get away with it again. He soon singled out Texas and Georgia as Republican-controlled states that are allegedly engaging in racial discrimination. Although Sreenivasan modestly pushed back and couple of times, he still failed to dispel some of his guest's misleading claims. For example, with regard to allegedly racial gerrymandering in Texas, it was widely reported incorrectly in the liberal media in 2021 that Texas Republicans were cutting minority representation in Congress and delivering 23 white-majority districts versus only 7 Hispanic majority out of 38. But, in reality, the number of Hispanic majority districts remained unchanged at 10 with 16 white-majority while the number of black opportunity districts remained at three. (And, notably, the number of Hispanic majority districts would have increased by one if Democrats had not opposed a Republican effort to un-gerrymander the 18th district.) It then turned out there were nine Hispanics (an increase of one) and six blacks (also an increase of one) who won seats in the 2022 congressional elections in Texas. And, in Georgia, Republicans kept all four black opportunity districts (out of a total of 14 districts), and all five black members of the House delegation were reelected in 2022. In one of his modest pushbacks, Sreenivasan asked if Chief Justice Roberts was really that "sinister," leading to an emphatic yes from his leftist guest. Transcript follows: PBS's Amanpour & Co. September 3, 2024 BIANNA GOLODRYGA: And now we turn to democracy in the United States, which our next guest believes is under threat. In his new book, David Daley suggests that far-right actors, including within the Supreme Court, are controlling American elections. He describes a 50-year plot to undermine voting rights, and he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the implications as Americans head to the polls in November. HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. David Daley, thanks so much for joining us. Your most recent book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. I've got to ask: Look, when somebody reads "50-year plot," they're going to be like, "Okay, this is tinfoil material here, this is conspiracy theory." What makes this not a conspiracy in your mind? DAVID DALEY, AUTHOR OF ANTIDEMOCRATIC: This has been a very strategic effort at the heart of the Republican party over the last 50 years. They have understood I think more effectively than the Democrats have that there are pressure points within our democracy, and that if you can put your finger on them -- if you can control these little levers sort of fly under the radar whether we talk about gerrymandered state legislatures or whether we're talking in many about the constitution of the U.S. Supreme Court that you are able to have outsized influence and to win victories that you never could have won otherwise. In many ways, Chief Justice John Roberts is the most effective Republican politician of his generation because by controlling the Supreme Court as Republicans have, they've been able over the last 20 years to win victories on guns -- on voting rights -- on the environment -- on the regulatory state that would simply not have been possible through the electoral process at the ballot box. SREENIVASAN: What makes him a politician? He and lots of our other members of our audience would say, "Hold on, he's not elected -- he's not, you know, he's a presidential appointee." I mean, you go back into his history as a young lawyer at the Reagan DOJ. DALEY: That's right. I mean, John Roberts, in many ways, his life's work has been curtailing the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts grew up in an extraordinarily white town in Indiana. This was a town that even after America banned discrimination in housing was still advertising itself in vacation brochures as a home where only Caucasian gentiles lived. He clerks on the U.S. Supreme Court for Bill Rehnquist who -- it has been well-documented in his days in Arizona was personally harassing and intimidating voters back in the 1960s. (...) SREENIVASAN: Okay, so fast forward, one of his first cases at the Department of Justice under Ronald Reagan is about the Voting Rights Act, and then in 2013 he is writing the opinion for a really important decision -- Shelby County versus Holder, and for people who might not have been paying attention, there's a concept in there called pre-clearance. What was it? Why is it so important? (DALEY) Tell me, why is it so important to understand this attack that you say is an attack on the Voting Rights Act, you know, that's been a long plan? Why is that crucial to understanding not just the power of the attacker but the consequences to the attack? DALEY: In this decision, John Roberts says that things have changed in the South and that the protections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer necessary -- that we lived in a different country -- it was not 1965 anymore. The trouble with that is that the attack on the vote began that very morning. That states across the South and elsewhere were waiting for this decision and immediately began implementing things like voter ID pushes and voter roll purges and precinct closures that they could not have gotten away with prior to the court's decision. So when Roberts says that things have changed in the South, all he had to do is open his eyes to what was happening before the court's decision and immediately afterwards. Very little had actually changed in the South except now, thanks to the court, these dark forces that the decision in Shelby unleashed were able to get away with it again. SREENIVASAN: Well, give me an example, the first federal election after that decision would have been Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. Was there an impact of the Shelby decision on that election? DALEY: Yes, I think that absolutely we can see the impact of Shelby County across American elections. We can see it in the 2024 election right now. So much of the election chicanery under way in the state of Georgia right now in which a state election board is attempting to change laws around how elections are certified and credentialed would not have been possible under Shelby County. It would have had to have been precleared first. So many state legislatures across the South that are enacting these new laws, those maps would have had to have been pre-cleared to ensure that they were not racial gerrymanders. So in states like Texas and states like Georgia, where the population growth has been almost entirely driven by black Americans and Latinos, and yet their representation has not gone up. In fact, in many cases, it has gone backwards. That would not have been possible. The court's decision in the Dobbs case that effectively put an end to abortion in many parts of the country. In this case, the justice who wrote the decision, Samuel Alito, ensured Americans that the court was not taking away a right -- it was simply returning a contentious issue to the people in the electoral process. Except the court knew full well that they were returning this issue to gerrymandered -- often times racially gerrymandered -- state legislatures that they had allowed to be rigged in advance, and the outcomes were entirely predictable, and the outcomes were opposed -- often times diametrically opposed to the wishes of the people of these states. And yet voters had little recourse at the ballot box thanks to the decisions that the court had made over the course of the previous decade. It's as if they planned it that way. SREENIVASAN: If Shelby County's decision -- Shelby County versus Holder -- that decision had an impact on the next federal election, I think a lot of people are also wondering: What does the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity do to the elections that we have coming up?  (DALEY) SREENIVASAN: I can hear conservatives right now saying, "What are you talking about? The Roberts court's the one that upheld Obamacare -- it made, you know, same-sex marriages the law of the land." You can kind of go through the list of other ideas. They upheld section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I mean, is John Roberts really this kind of sinister character that you paint him out to be? DALEY: Yes. (laughs) When you look at the America that we lived in in 2005 -- when you look at the America of 2024, our constitutional rights have been dramatically changed, and there's been a dramatic shift in constitutional law over the period of that time. Roe versus Wade simply no longer exists. The question of guns, conservative heckles and the NRA's agenda has really been allowed to run roughshod over any effort by states and localities to control the safety of their own citizens. When you look at the court's decisions on the regulatory state, what we have seen is a court that has placed itself again and again above the checks and balances of our system which is supposed to have three co-equal branches -- that this court has placed itself above the other branches. And the American people see and recognize this. The court's approval ratings are at all-time lows. Huge majorities of Americans back the idea of ethics codes and term limits -- often times above 70 percent of Americans. So I think that the court would like us to think that they are simply neutral arbiters of the law, but we don't have to close our eyes to what we see. This is a court that is unelected, that makes its decisions in private, that is bound by no ethics code, that has lifetime appointments, and it has behaved in ways that has turned itself into a super legislature in many ways. And Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural talked about how if the decisions of the entire people had to be fixed by the Supreme Court, the people have ceased to be their own rulers. I think we're dangerously close to experiencing that moment.

Don't look up. We’re currently seeing a crescendo of stories centered around wild videos of unexplained craft and even stranger accounts from whistleblowers. It seems there is a build-up to something. Whether that’s acknowledging we’re being visited by beings from outside our solar system, our understanding of three-dimensional time and space, or merely a psyop serving as a distraction isn't entirely clear.For the last 75 years, since UFOs entered the national zeitgeist, much of the discourse has taken place on the fringes. It was a fun group to dabble in. The appeal of seeking hidden knowledge is intoxicating while perusing r/UFOs for the best documentaries and strange theories, watching old "X-files" episodes, and reading about little green men and abductions. I wanted to believe! It was all very low-stakes, one more internet rabbit hole enmeshed in conspiracy theories to waste time.When religion ebbs, the idea of no one in control is disconcerting, so we look for authority: aliens, the New World Order, Free Masons, etc., something to make sense of a world spiraling out of equilibrium.However, the leaks and stories of the last seven years have taken on a decidedly more serious tenor precisely because of the serious people coming forward. It’s no longer the "Ancient Aliens"-level "researchers" who saw everything through a grand conspiratorial lens of off-world contact. And because of this, the entire world of UFOs has taken on a scarier tinge the more real it seems. - YouTube youtu.be McLuhan's ubiquitous saying about the medium being the message is analogous when discussing UFOs. So much of our conception of extraterrestrials is heavily colored by the last century of film. From Méliès’ 1902 "A Trip to the Moon" through 1950s B movies to the adorable "E.T.," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "Independence Day," we imagine the Hollywood visuals of these beings. It’s a perfect mimetic vector to discuss uniting humanity against a shared foe as Reagan once did. The entire point of TV, film, and now the internet is to flatten out world differences into one all-consuming and consumption-driven entity. The Borg — to steal a sci-fi trope — the monoculture, the global village, or whatever phrasing you’d prefer.Are we just seeing lights in the sky and deciphering them through all the movies we’ve consumed? Why do the phenomena so closely mirror the appearance of UFOs in culture and humanity’s tentative steps into space? And how would governments possibly be able to keep something so earth-shattering under wraps?Military officials go on recordWhen you dig into the history of UFOs, you find a variety of high-level government officials, astronauts, and pilots who have discussed their experiences. Paul Hellyer, the former defense minister of Canada, went on record in 2013 saying there has been contact with alien civilizations. He even went so far as to say there are treaties between these societies and governments on Earth.In 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of Israel's Defense Ministry's space directorate (essentially Israeli NASA), told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, "There is an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here.""The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet," he said. While this is a rather exceptional claim, it’s worth noting that Eshed is the father of the Israeli space program and still enjoys a tremendous level of respect in the Israeli defense establishment.This doesn’t prove anything, but when sober and respected officials who would know about these encounters, as well as numerous astronauts, including Edgar Mitchell, go on record, it’s much harder to dismiss than some rando who says he saw something strange in the sky.Tic Tac flying saucers in the TikTok ageThe current moment of disclosure mania can be traced directly to 2017, when Com. David Fravor and other Navy pilots came forward to the New York Times with an encounter they experienced. What was different from earlier UFO stories were the videos recorded from their aircraft along with radar data showing strange Tic Tac-shaped ships doing maneuvers seemingly beyond the laws of physics. They came up out of the ocean, rising and then descending 80,000 feet in a second. They would stop in an instant and hover only to disappear. - YouTube youtu.be In 2017, the New York Times ran a story about a peculiar man with a stranger tale named Luis Elizondo. He was the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a clandestine group tasked with investigating UFOs for the Pentagon. He began publishing other declassified military videos of strange encounters with technology seemingly beyond human capabilities. He was interviewed by the Washington Post and went into detail about the origins of these phenomena.The bottom line is, up until very recently there were really only three possibilities of what this could be. And the first possibility is that it is some sort of secret U.S. tech that somehow, we have managed to keep secret even from ourselves for a long period of time. The second option is that it is some sort of foreign adversarial technology that has somehow managed to technology leapfrog ahead of our country despite having a fairly robust and comprehensive intelligence apparatus. And of course, the third option is something quite entirely different.It’s a different paradigm completely. ... Is it from here, or is it from out there? We don’t really know. In fact, there’s lots of other options on the table. ... It could be from outer space, inner space, or the space in between. As we begin to learn what quantum physics is and we begin to understand our place here on this little planet, we begin to realize that there’s a lot of other options. We judge the universe in five fundamental senses, the ways that we perceive the universe, and that’s touch, taste, hear, smell, et cetera. And if you can’t … use those senses to look at something or measure it, then we really can’t interact with it.Spook talesAn intelligence officer, David Grusch, last year made an earth-shattering announcement. He claims defense contractors are in possession of numerous ships and bodies not of human origin. He also cryptically implies they may be interdimensional. Confirmation that Grusch is from the above-top secret clandestine world that would have access to this information has provided his claims with a veneer of credibility. - YouTube youtu.be Grusch is following the whistleblower procedures for a government official and declaring that Congress just needs to look into a specific area of our byzantine secrecy programs to discover the truth. Senator Marco Rubio went on record on June 26 that other whistleblowers “in high positions of government” have testified about recovered UFOs.“There are people that have come forward to share information with our committee over the last couple of years. ... I want to be very protective of these people. A lot of these people came to us even before protections were in the law for whistleblowers to come forward,” Rubio told NewsNation.Project Blue Beam homeworks255 via Getty ImagesIt’s worth touching on one of the stranger and credulity-straining conspiracy theories in the UFO oeuvre, Project Blue Beam. Serge Monast was a French-Canadian journalist who published the book "Project Blue Beam (NASA)" in 1994. This book is a smorgasbord of intersecting conspiracy theories whereby NASA, with the help of the U.N., was planning on projecting UFOs into the sky to stage a fake alien invasion.It becomes a little wonky, but all the electronics in our homes would begin transmitting this message simultaneously worldwide. Monast claimed this event would herald the New World Order with a New Age religion headed by the Antichrist. He died less than two years after publishing, and his readers claimed he was silenced.People like Monast represent what UFO researchers used to be: eccentrics, who were often very intelligent and obsessive, focused on connecting all of the strands into a Grand Unified Theory of Conspiracy.His hypothesis does resonate in this sense: Why are governments now openly speaking about disclosure when they were happy to laugh about it only a few years ago?Two answers spring to mind that are equally thorny. Either we’re on the cusp of finding out we’re not alone in the universe, or this is a giant psyop designed to distract us or control the narrative in some way. It could be a powerful fear-inducing mechanism to challenge tenets of Western religions. What better way to generate global cooperation and control than an outside threat?You can see our long national obsession with conspiracy theories as the human mind attempting to make sense of an increasingly complex world. When religion ebbs, the idea of no one in control is disconcerting, so we look for authority: aliens, the New World Order, Freemasons, etc., something to make sense of a world spiraling out of equilibrium.However, these explanations are no longer adequate to disregard the collective sense of unease we feel about the world. After several years of being gaslit about a global pandemic, along with a myriad of uniquely modern ills, the collective trust in institutions is gone; instead, we’re coasting on the fumes of a society built by considerably more competent men.Why would anyone trust governments, corporations, and religious institutions when we’ve witnessed decades of incompetence and experienced firsthand the postmodern ethos destroying the civilizational scaffolding? It seems we’re building to some inflection point. Whether that’s aliens, national divorce, or global governance is perhaps beside the point when societal ennui is reaching a fever pitch. I want to believe, but in what?

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