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As NewsBuster Geoffrey Dickens has noted, Ben Affleck appeared on yesterday evening's edition of Hardball. And while it's true that the actor/director/Dem activist offered a generally innocuous analysis, he did manage to engage in a bit of religious bigotry. Affleck's foul foray arose in the course of his discussion of the way the various Republican candidates have dealt with the issue of evolution and creationism. Talk turned to the former governor of Arkansas. BEN AFFLECK: I think Huckabee actually framed his position in a much less dramatic way than had been made out. Which was he said it could...

General Colin Powell, one of the nation's most prominent African-American leaders, put some of the blame on Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the confrontation that has become a raging controversy. Asked in an interview airing on CNN's "Larry King Live" tonight whether Gates was wrong to confront Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley before being arrested in his own home, Powell replied, "I'm saying that Skip, perhaps in this instance, might have waited a while, come outside, talked to the officer, and that might have been the end of it. "I think he should have reflected on whether or...

The ethically-challenged "ethicist" of the New York Times Magazine, Randy Cohen, who writes The Ethicist column has inserted himself into the Henry Louis Gates situation by urging the Harvard professor to sue in order to "pursue social justice." To see where Mr. Ethicist is coming from, let us start off with his laughable money quote in his current column on the subject of lawsuits: Gates should enjoy a cool one and then file suit, assuming he has legal grounds to do so. We Americans are often mocked for being overly litigious, but we are not nearly litigious enough. In the...

The now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response, so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the First Amendment than with race and social class. The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said--assuming, for argument's sake, the officer's version of events as fact--could by any stretch...

After dropping her young daughter with a baby sitter, Taquana Harris rushed to her hostess job at the fashionable Bowery Bar one night last February, her leopard-print evening gown sweeping elegantly through the dark, icy streets of the East Village. Then a strange woman crudely grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know what she had done with the drugs. Within seconds, Ms. Harris recalled, she found herself pinned to the steel grating of a bodega by two plainclothes officers engaged in a neighborhood drug sweep.

In the aftermath of the mass shooting of a dozen police officers in Dallas this week, some conservatives rushed to lay blame for the incident at the feet of the Obama administration. Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said on Twitter that "Obama's words & [Black Lives Matter]'s deeds have gotten cops killed." Rep. Roger Williams (R-Tex.) said, "the spread of misinformation and constant instigation by prominent leaders, including our president" contributed to the killings. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said the shooting had "roots" in the "anti-white/cop events illuminated by Obama." These statements are part of a broader narrative of a...

In case you missed it last night, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke made an appearance on CNN with cop killer advocate and CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill to discuss the recent execution of Harris County Sheriff Deputy Daron Goforth at a Houston area gas station.Sheriff Clarke is holding the #BlackLivesMatter responsible for fueling a war on cops with their rhetoric. Over the weekend, #BlackLivesMatter activists in Minnesota chanted, "Pigs in a blanket, fry em' like bacon.""This is part of a pattern now. You would have to stick your head in the sand to think that this thing here wasn't fueled...

Do Shooting Lies Matter? The investigation into the Falcon Heights, MN officer-involved shooting of Philando Castile has taken a sharp turn from the story we first heard in the video his girlfriend shot immediately following the incident.

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that in the discussions after the shooting of police officers in Dallas, and the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, “it doesn’t help that we have an American political debate with basically one all-white party.” Brooks began by saying, “The question, to me, is, are we going to speak out in a way that is actual dialogue and conversation, or are we going to drift into tribal thinking? There’s been a lot of rancid overgeneralizations in our society, that all African men behind the wheel are dangerous, that...

"So who is Alton Sterling? For starters, liberals should know he possessed an illegal firearm. As a felon with a lengthy rap sheet, Sterling is legally prohibited from possessing a firearm. Police records show Sterling had been a member of the Bloods gang, and had a list of offenses including battery, assault, drugs and weapons charges, and owed $25,000 in child support. He was also a registered pedophile, having impregnated a 14-year-old girl when he was 20. The media, by contrast, has portrayed him as a loving father of five."

She’s a walking parody of an unhinged leftist ‘reporter.’...But even among leftist hacks, Amanpour is a special case: It’s almost as if she’s trying to mock herself — a Trump-is-a-Clinton-plant conspiracy theory, if you will, but in the mainstream media. She referred to devout Christianity as “totalitarian” in her August 23, 2007, CNN profile “Christian Warriors.” But in 2008, she fawned over the “progress” achieved by Fidel Castro, and in 2013 she wished Zimbawean dictator Robert Mugabe a happy birthday. If a higher-profile (read: important) person had such a rich historical cache of commentary, they would have already been driven...

Donald Trump steered clear of his characteristic bombast in responding to the massacre of five police officers patrolling a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on Thursday night, ditching the self-congratulations he put forth after last month's attack on Orlando's Pulse nightclub in favor of a somber statement lamenting national division and racial tension. But while the presumptive Republican presidential nominee sought to avoid the appearance of nakedly capitalizing on the latest tragedy to boost his White House hopes, an upsurge in law-and-order sentiment may yet deliver him the presidency. An eerie echo: To some observers, the potential fallout from...

These Americans feel hopeless when they see FBI Director James Comey excusing Hillary Clinton from indictment. The same transformative power that has recently recorded and exposed violence can also cleanse our government and lead to the replacement of our leadership. It can be used both to expose horrific incidents and police bad apples. It can, and should, be used to clean up Washington. People are upset that the Department of Justice may be unconstitutionally working with the Executive Branch to disrupt justice. What if we had live streaming video inside our federal agencies which have betrayed our trust? What if...

Announcement of congressman G. K Butterfield of North Carolina, as the current chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC): https://cbc-butterfield.house.gov/about/from-the-chair More pictures on google images: https://www.google.com/search?q=g+k+butterfield+north+carolina&biw=1024&bih=651&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwic9t2emuTNAhUH7RQKHT40DVsQ_AUIBygC#imgrc=_

The Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shootings have caused an uproar among leftists because they fuel their narrative that racist white police officers are hunting down innocent black men. But the statistics – brought to light by the superb work of Heather MacDonald – tell a different story. Here are five key statistics you need to know about cops killing blacks. 1. Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of...

I love and support cops of ALL races who do their jobs. The MEDIA and the federal government, though, is trying to WHITEWASH the FACT that it was WHITE COPS who were targeted.

Morning Joe did a very decent job today of covering the shooting of police officers in Dallas and the issue of police shootings of African-American. The remarks were generally even-handed. Even Al Sharpton was cautious and balanced in his comments. And so it was surprising that of all people, Chuck Todd made the most tendentious remark. Speaking of the shooting of Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, and discussing the need for better police training, Todd said: “how do you train prejudice and hate out of somebody’s heart? That’s a tough thing.” Is there racism among police? Of course, as...

Former President Jimmy Carter said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was among the factors that led to the deadly attacks last week in Paris. Carter made the assertion Monday night during an appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. “Well, one of the origins for it is the Palestinian problem. And this aggravates people who are affiliated in any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza, what they are doing now — what’s being done to them. So I think that’s part of it,” Carter told Stewart. He called the training in the...

Mika Brzezinski makes no bones about being a liberal Democrat. She was big on Bernie, even more enthusiastic about Elizabeth Warren, whom she repeatedly urged to run for president. But while she might well vote for Hillary in the end, Brzezinski is anything but a Clinton acolyte. Her aversion was on display on today’s Morning Joe. A clip rolled of Speaker Paul Ryan saying that as a candidate Hillary should be denied classified briefings, given FBI Director Comey’s finding that she had been “extremely careless” with classified information. Panelists Harold Ford, Jr., Jim VandeHei and Michael Steele scoffed at the...

House Democrats roughed up Sen. Bernie Sanders in a closed-door session Wednesday after he deflected questions about when he would formally back Hillary Clinton for president, with a group of members booing him at one point, according to three Democrats who attended the meeting.