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September 2017

Late Wednesday night, Democrats Sen. Schumer and White House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced they'd reached a deal with Trump on DACA and that funding for Trump's campaign cornerstone, the border wall, was not part of the agreement, though they'd agreed to include some form of beefed up border security. Trump and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders both denied any deal was made.

Not even Hillary Clinton, acclaimed author of What Happened, went this far.  On Wednesday's Hardball, Dem Rep. Jackie Speier called Russian "hacking" of the presidential election an "act of war." Taking things a significant step further, Speier said:
"I'm not convinced that they didn't get into the [voting] machines."
That was too much even for Chris Matthews, who interjected, "we don't know that yet. We don't know that."

I just developed a profound new respect for our judicial system. The last time we checked on former pharmaceutical titan Martin Shkreli, he had been arrested by the FBI, accused of orchestrating a “trifecta of lies, deceit and greed" related to his hedge fund and pharma business dealings. The move occurred after Shkreli gained notoriety for jacking the prices of life-essential medicines by over 5000% while he was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Shkreli was convicted of defrauding hedge fund investors in last month, and may eventually get a sentence of up to 20 years when sentenced. While awaiting sentencing, he made an usual request of his Facebook followers:

If we judged elections that are over a year (congressional midterms) and three years (presidential) away based on current approval ratings and popularity polling, Donald Trump would seem done for. Indeed, that is the prevailing media narrative. Though there was a recent blip upward, Trumps favorability and job approval numbers are poor. Here is a chart of Trump's job approval ratings from 538 based on a composite of all polls:

Texas' Congressional and state legislative district maps have been bouncing around the federal court system for months. Tuesday, the Supreme Court blocked an order from the lower court that required new maps redrawn. Redrawing maps would create new districts and ultimately favor Democrats in upcoming elections. At the heart of the district maps battle are allegations that maps drawn after the 2010 census were essentially racist and thus unconstitutional and contradictory to the Voting Rights Act.

This post originally was published by The Gatestone Institute, under the title What Happened to the ADL? Cross-posted with permission. --------------- In the months leading up to the U.S. presidential election in November 2016, a former director of the World Jewish Congress decried the direction in which the new head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was taking the international human rights group. In a series of columns, Isi Leibler -- a prominent Australian Israeli -- blasted ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, for turning the 100-year-old organization, whose mission is to monitor and expose anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, into a platform that "represents an echo chamber of left-wing Democratic politics."

The U.S. Senate has voted to table Sen. Rand Paul's (R-KY) amendment to repeal the 2001 and 2002 war authorizations that have allowed the U.S. military "to fight terrorism across the globe" in everlasting wars. Paul wanted Congress to "reassert its authority to declare war from the Executive Branch." Paul and others, including Democrats, have said that "the Senate is ceding its constitutional war powers" with these amendments.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed amendments to stop the Department of Justice's civil asset forfeiture program, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced in July. The amendments received support from those within the House Freedom Caucus and some of the biggest liberals in Congress.

They can get you now, or get you later . . . Fifteen senators, including 2020 hopefuls like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, are co-sponsoring Bernie Sanders' single-payer health care bill. But even some of those not signing on have plans to eventually convert the country to single payer. On today's Morning Joe, Dem Senator Chris Murphy [CT] described his plan, which Politico has called "stealthy single-payer." Under it, people would be given the option of buying into Medicare or remaining with private insurance. Murphy expressed the belief that:

The leadership at ESPN seems to think it can change the way people think by injecting left wing politics into its coverage of professional sports. Instead, they are alienating sports fans, many of whom are conservatives, and destroying their brand at the same time.