The Menendez brothers' resentencing in their case is "appropriate," according to Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón.

Kamala Harris is at the inventing hoaxes stage of failure in her campaign of lies and no clear agenda. She doesn’t really answer questions and that should terrify people. Will you continue building the border wall? Her answer: She is going to pass the Border Bill that enshrines illegal immigration of over 2 million a […] The post Harris’s Collapse In Her Own Words on Tape appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

North Korean troops who join Russia in the war against Ukraine will be “fair game,” a White House spokesman said. North Korea is expected to send roughly 12,000 troops to Russia for training and to potentially aid the Russian military in its fight against Ukraine, according to assessments from the U.S. and South Korean governments. About 3,000 North Korean troops have deployed to Russia already and are training at Russian military bases. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called the North Korean troops “fair game” if they enter the war against Ukraine, according to NBC News. “They’re fair targets and the Ukrainian military will defend themselves against North Korean soldiers the same way they’re defending themselves against Russian soldiers,” Kirby said. “There could be dead and wounded North Korean soldiers fighting against Ukraine.” The North Korean deployment to Russia follows years of the two countries signaling increased cooperation, especially after the West moved to isolate Russia after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Russia denied the reports of North Korea troop movements. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the reports “fake and hype” on Wednesday. MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ COMING TO DAILYWIRE+ OCT. 28 In comments from Rome on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that although North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia, it is not yet clear what their aims are. “We are seeing evidence that there are North Korean troops that have gone to Russia,” Austin said. “What, exactly, they’re doing is left to be seen.” South Korean officials, on the other hand, said that the North Korean troops were sent to bolster Russian forces fighting against Ukraine. South Korea’s defense minister told lawmakers on Thursday that North Korean troops were dressing in Russian uniforms and joining battle against Ukraine. “Kim Jong Un is selling North Korean soldiers as cannon fodder mercenaries,” the defense minister said, according to NBC. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said that in light of North Korea’s expanded role in the war, South Korea would consider boosting its aid to Ukraine to include weapons on top of the non-lethal assistance South Korea has been providing. The troop movements have rattled officials within NATO, who have begun discussions on what the development means for the alliance and how it approaches the Russia-Ukraine conflict. “If these troops are destined to fight in Ukraine, it would mark a significant escalation in North Korea’s support for Russia’s illegal war and yet another sign of Russia’s significant losses on the front lines,” NATO spokeswoman Farah Dakhlallah told Politico Europe in a statement. “We are actively consulting within the Alliance on this matter, and the North Atlantic Council will receive a briefing from the Republic of Korea and further discuss this matter soon.”

The Atlantic’s “Trump loves Hitler” hit-piece hit a snag as several people who worked alongside — and for — retired Marine General John Kelly have come out to publicly dispute his claims. In the article that was published on Tuesday, Kelly was quoted as saying that Trump had often praised “the German generals,” and when asked to clarify, had told Kelly he wanted the kind of generals that Hitler had. Kelly also claimed that Trump had praised Hitler for doing “some good things” like rebuilding the German economy after World War I. But according to a few who worked either alongside or for Kelly in the Trump White House — who was at the time serving as Chief of Staff — the retired general’s words appear to be the complaints of a malcontented ex-employee directed at a former boss he no longer likes. “I worked for John Kelly and don’t believe him,” Mercedes Schlapp said in a post on X. “His last ditch effort to stop Donald Trump is desperate. This is a personal vendetta from a staffer who failed at his job and believed as a chief of staff that he should have been the ultimate decisionmaker. President Trump loves America, will preserve our freedoms, and has done more for the Jewish people than any other president.” I worked for John Kelly and don’t believe him. His last ditch effort to stop Donald Trump is desperate. This is a personal vendetta from a staffer who failed at his job and believed as a chief of staff that he should have been the ultimate decisionmaker. President Trump loves… — Mercedes Schlapp (@mercedesschlapp) October 23, 2024 Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer gave a slightly different perspective, saying that he believed Kelly may have been among the so-called “experts” who felt as though they’d been unfairly cast aside when Trump didn’t simply take their word when deciding policy. MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ COMING TO DAILYWIRE+ OCT. 28 Sean Spicer reveals exactly what happened to make John Kelly hate President Trump. pic.twitter.com/seP4zlGkmk — Ames (@VivaLaAmes11) October 24, 2024 Sirius XM podcast host — and Daily Wire voice talent — Megyn Kelly asked Spicer to weigh in on why so many of Trump’s former staffers seemed so willing to trash him publicly, and Spicer said that it was all about Trump’s insistence on disrupting the status quo. “I think some of them just have a personal animus towards him because of how they personally were treated or the advice that they were giving — I watched it, constantly, in the Oval Office,” Spicer said, detailing how Trump had listened to the generals talk about Afghanistan, but had then called in a group of enlisted men who had served there to ask for their opinions and talk about their experiences on the ground. “It pissed a lot of people off that he wasn’t taking the advice of the more senior people, and asking the enlisted folks, ‘Tell me what your experience has been. Did you understand the mission? Are we winning? Are we moving forward? Were you getting the equipment and the tools that you needed?'” Spicer recalled. “They hated that. They hated the fact that they came in, gave their PowerPoint presentation, and they were being undermined by a guy who didn’t just sign off on it with, like, a blank check.” And they were not alone, either. Michael Morrison noted the timing, saying, “John Kelly was so shocked at how much Trump admired Hitler that he forgot about it for 5 years and conveniently remembered 2 weeks before the election. Got it.” John Kelly was so shocked at how much Trump admired Hitler that he forgot about it for 5 years and conveniently remembered 2 weeks before the election. Got it. — Michael J. Morrison (@OfficeOfMike) October 23, 2024

2.4 trillion cigarettes sold annually in China

A verdict is in on the ground-breaking case

The vials allegedly contained the GHB used to drug victims

Biden DOJ Perfects 'Equity' Blueprint For Destroying Police, Fire Departments

In the United States today, there are over 660,000 illegal aliens with pending criminal charges for crimes other than just crossing the border illegally. By all law and logic, they should be behind bars. Instead, they are allowed to roam free throughout the country, putting all the risk of their future misbehavior on American communities and not their own countries. Of those 660,000, about two-thirds—435,000—are already convicted criminals, including 13,000 convicted murderers. Most of these aliens are among the roughly 1.3 million who have been ordered deported by an immigration court. They already had their criminal due process, and after a separate immigration process to determine whether they would be allowed to stay in the United States, they got a so-called “final order of removal” from an immigration judge. Legally we can, and morally we should, send them home forthwith. Why are these people—many of whom will surely reoffend—still here? One reason is that the Biden-Harris administration has been purposefully lax at  enforcing our immigration laws in the nation’s interior. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said early in President Joe Biden’s term that an alien just being here illegally wasn’t reason enough for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to try and deport them (although it absolutely is). Mayorkas sent a notorious memo to ICE in 2021 ordering this approach and saddling officers with onerous paperwork and limits on where and how they could take action. That’s much of the reason all the criminal aliens are still here, but that’s not all. Another reason is that some countries refuse to take back their people. The United States and other responsible countries take back their citizens from anywhere in the world, no matter how serious their crimes. But countries like China, India, and Venezuela say, “No, we won’t take our people back. They’re your problem now.” These countries play various tricks to pass on their problems to us. Let’s say a Chinese illegal immigrant is caught committing armed robbery, is convicted, and serves a 10-year sentence. At the end of it, the prison informs ICE, which picks the convict up and puts him in immigration detention. If the alien has a final order for removal, ICE still has to get him home. If he doesn’t have a passport or confirmation of nationality, ICE needs a consular officer from the alien’s home country to come and verify the ex-con’s citizenship. Countries can flatly refuse to help or deny that an alien is one of its own. Or they claim they don’t have staff to handle the processing and then delay so long that ICE has to let the alien free in the United States. According to some court decisions over the years, ICE can only detain an alien when they have a reasonable chance of deporting them, and even then, only for a limited period. ICE labels countries that refuse or delay taking back their people “recalcitrant.” Back in 2016, there was a list of about a dozen such countries, and a longer list of those “at risk of noncompliance.” ICE would work with the State Department through diplomatic means to try and get recalcitrant countries to take their people back. From 2016-2017, I was the State Department’s coordinator on this. One tool we had was visa sanctions. When a country “denies or unreasonably delays accepting an alien who is a citizen,” U.S. law says the State Department can stop issuing visas for its citizens to enter the U.S. This can start with not letting their leaders’ families go to Disney World and can ratchet all the way up to banning visas to that country altogether. It’s amazingly effective. Using visa sanctions, the U.S. made significant progress on getting recalcitrant countries to change their minds. The first country we acted on was the tiny African state of The Gambia. It wasn’t chosen because of its size or location, but because it had only 11 convicted criminal aliens it wouldn’t take back. First, the U.S. informed The Gambia that due to its refusal to cooperate, our embassy would stop issuing visas to Gambian officials and their families. The message was clear: If that didn’t work, we’d move on to larger and larger groups of Gambians. A few weeks later, the Gambian government authorized and accepted the repatriation of the 11 Gambian nationals who were subject to final orders of removal from the United States—and it requested that we remove the visa sanctions. From The Gambia, the U.S. moved up the recalcitrant list, taking on Eritrea, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, and then much harder nuts like Cambodia. By the end of the Trump administration, the U.S. was going after even the really big offenders—China, India, and Russia—to take back their criminals. China and India each had about 20,000 convicted criminal citizens living illegally in the United States at the time. For a while, there was a will, and a way, and it worked. So, what happened? From the start, the Biden administration immediately made it easier to enter the U.S. illegally and stay by reversing all the policies that previous presidents used to control illegal entry at the border. The corollary to the administration’s open-borders approach was to severely curtail interior enforcement—and to stop pressuring foreign countries to take back their people. The last list of recalcitrant countries published by ICE was in 2020. The agency’s visa sanctions webpage hasn’t really changed in four years. Because of that lack of updated information, members of Congress wrote to Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July asking what countries the Department of Homeland Security considered recalcitrant. As of now, Mayorkas has not replied. But sources tell me that China, Cuba, India, and Pakistan are still on the list. India is so desperate for U.S. visas that suspending the issuance of H1B work visas alone would bring them around—but has the Biden team threatened them with sanctions? Fat chance. If any diplomatic pressure is being applied by the Biden-Harris administration on recalcitrant countries, it’s been well hidden. More likely, the administration abandoned the effort, judging by the low number of deportations each year and by DHS letting in millions of unscreened aliens from all over the world, including from many recalcitrant countries. The Biden-Harris administration wants us to believe that there is nothing it can do to prevent any illegal aliens, even including violent members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, from entering the U.S. Then, when those thugs murder, rape, and rob Americans, they want us to believe there is nothing they can do to send them back home. Don’t believe it. Visa sanctions are one tool, but there are plenty of others, and we should be using them. America should use all possible diplomatic, economic, and legal pressure to induce countries like Venezuela, China, and others to do their duty and take back their criminals. Removing dangerous felons who are illegally present in our country is the government’s basic duty to its citizens. Violent crime rates have already risen across America during the past few years, as newly corrected FBI data shows. The White House should stop making excuses and immediately re-implement visa sanctions as a simple and effective solution to reduce the population of alien convicts and restore some sense of law and order in this nation. The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more. Read Other BorderLine Columns: Biden Administration Gives Panama ‘Jack’ to Help Control Border What I Saw on My Visit to Springfield, Ohio ‘The BorderLine’ Anniversary Column: Revisiting Biden’s Border by the Numbers One Year Later That Bipartisan Border Bill Harris Blames Trump for Killing Would Codify Illegal Immigration Crisis Into Law The Stunning Costs of Biden-Harris’ ‘America-Last’ Border Policies—Part 2 The post Deportation: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way—The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Biden-Harris administration has proposed a rule implementing Obamacare’s controversial contraception mandate—again. Under the proposal announced Monday, certain health insurance plans would be required to cover over-the counter birth control. The text of the law creating Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, doesn’t explicitly require that plans cover contraceptives, so how did we get here? What’s the Contraception Mandate? Obamacare, passed by Congress and signed into law in 2010 by President Barack Obama, requires health insurance companies to cover certain kinds of preventive services with no enrollee cost-sharing. It instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to specify the types of preventive services for women that insurance plans must cover. In 2011, HHS issued guidelines that insurance plans must include coverage for all contraceptive methods and sterilization procedures approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Plans that already covered millions of women were “grandfathered” and exempted from the requirement to provide preventive services with no cost-sharing. Many of these plans are still in effect today. The contraception mandate sparked more than a decade of litigation, including famous victories for religious liberty at the Supreme Court for companies such as Hobby Lobby and groups such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns. Regulations for religious and moral exemptions to HHS’ contraception mandate were strengthened under Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump. Last year, the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a rule to weaken those exemptions again. That rule has not been finalized yet. Like the original contraception mandate, this week’s proposal to cover over-the-counter contraception is possible because Congress didn’t actually lay out the nitty-gritty, specific requirements in the text of Obamacare. Policy details were left to the discretion of the executive branch. Proposed Biden-Harris Change A press release from the Department of Health and Human Services lays out the gist of the changes. “[M]ost group health plans and health insurance issuers” must cover over-the-counter methods of birth control such as emergency contraception, condoms, and pills “without cost sharing or requiring a prescription.” The proposal also requires insurance plans to cover “a broader array” of pills and intrauterine devices, or IUDs, the press release says. Right now, plans must cover only one drug in different categories of contraception methods. Exactly how this change would be implemented remains to be seen. The Biden-Harris administration is seeking public comment during a 60-day countdown as soon as the proposed rule formally hits the Federal Register. If finalized, the rule would mark another major change for contraception coverage under Obamacare. Birth Control The new rule is significant for several reasons. The Food and Drug Administration only recently approved an over-the-counter birth control pill. It’s called OPill and is sold at retailers such as Walgreens, Costco, and Amazon for about $20 per month. Additional brands will follow suit and seek FDA approval to be sold over the counter. Another brand already has started the process for its drug, Zena. Not everyone is cheering over-the-counter pills, though. Beyond altering a woman’s menstrual cycle, birth control pills significantly affect a woman’s hormones. They can have mild to severe side effects—both mentally and psychologically—that vary widely from person to person. Some experts are understandably concerned that medication that could have such drastic effects on the body would be available without consultation with a doctor. It even would be available to minors without their parent’s knowledge or consent. Emergency Contraception The HHS mandate also includes coverage for emergency contraception such as Plan B (levonorgestrel) and Ella (ulipristal acetate). Until 2022, the label on both medications warned that the drug could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. For those who believe human life begins at fertilization, this means that these drugs could induce an abortion. In 2022, the FDA modified the Plan B label to remove this warning, but it remains the case for Ella. Plan B is available over the counter, but Ella requires a prescription. Under current rules, both Plan B and Ella are covered under Obamacare only if the woman has a prescription. Under the Biden-Harris proposal, Plan B would be covered if a person purchases it over the counter. Don’t Fall for Dishonest Framing Mainstream media coverage notes “widespread bipartisan support for access to contraception” and refers to congressional Republicans’ votes against a Democrat-led bill that would enshrine a right to contraception in federal law. But general support for the availability of contraception doesn’t mean that Americans automatically support taxpayer funding, insurance coverage for contraception, or violating religious liberty and conscience rights in the name of access. It’s a mistake to conflate general support for access with specific policy proposals. Along those same lines, declining to support a bill enshrining a federal right to obtain contraceptives doesn’t mean that that someone opposes access to contraception. Rather, such opposition acknowledges that it would be a mistake to enact a wide-reaching bill that, for example, would gut religious freedom and protections for conscience rights, could hamper the FDA’s ability to regulate contraceptive drugs and devices, and could make it more difficult to enforce federal safety regulations. In other words, it’s legitimate to be concerned that enshrining a legal right to contraception creates more problems than it solves. Don’t fall for demagoguery. Contraception already is widely available, affordable, and easy to access. The New York Times’ coverage may insinuate otherwise, but voting against poorly crafted bills doesn’t mean that Republicans in Congress are “against” contraception access generally. What’s Next? Once the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register, Americans will have 60 days to provide feedback through public comment. Whether the Biden-Harris administration will take such concerns into account if and when it publishes a final rule remains to be seen. The results of the Nov. 5 election could be a factor in what happens. We don’t yet know who will take office as president on Jan. 20, 2025. If Harris wins and the rule hasn’t yet been finalized, she presumably would take it up and get it across the finish line. If Trump wins and the rule hasn’t been finalized, his second administration could stop the rule from being issued. If the rule has been finalized, the new administration still could amend or revoke it. Alternatively, depending on the makeup of Congress, lawmakers could use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the rule (and other recent rules from the Biden-Harris administration, for that matter). Time will tell what’s next for the text of the final rule and its ultimate fate as part of Obamacare. In the meantime, Americans have an opportunity to weigh in on a proposal that would expand coverage for controversial over-the-counter drugs that have serious side effects for women. The post Will Obamacare Cover Over-the-Counter Birth Control? Yes, If Biden-Harris Proposal Goes Through appeared first on The Daily Signal.