Mary Chastain | Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion - Part 451
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Author: Mary Chastain

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Mary Chastain

Mary is the resident libertarian. She covers stories in every vertical, but her favorite thing to do is take on the media. She saw its bias against the right when she was a socialist.

Mary loves the Chicago Cubs, Chicago Blackhawks, tennis, cats, Oxford comma, Diet Coke, and needlework.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 29 Comments
A gunman shot Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, in Ankara on Monday at a gallery opening. Reuters has tweeted that Karlov passed away: https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/810892214863794181 Hurriyet Daily News reported:
Hürriyet Ankara representatvice Deniz Zeyrek said the attacker first shot into the air and later shot the envoy in the back. He shot the envoy for the second time after the scene was evacuated. It has also been reported that the attacker entered the scene by showing a police identity and wearing a suit. The attacker reportedly shouted “Don’t forget Aleppo! Don’t forget Syria! As long as our brothers are not safe, you will not enjoy safety” according to a footage released on Dutch website nos.nl.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 81 Comments
Texas has given President-elect Donald Trump 36 electoral votes, pushing him to 304 electoral votes. He needed 270 to secure the presidency. Today is the day! The Electoral College across the nation will meet and cast its vote for the next president of the United States of America. President-elect Donald Trump won 306 electoral votes on election day, only needing 270 to win the election against Hillary Clinton. Remember, though, that Congress will officially count the votes on January 6. I have updated the post below the jump. Keep checking back!

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 11 Comments
White House staffers placed four snowmen in the Rose Garden for Christmas decorations, but a few decided to use them as pranks on President Barack Obama after he called them creepy:
In an Instagram post this weekend, Souza showed a snowman decoration looking in on Obama through a window in the Oval office. Many online saw the photo and commented the snowman looked as if it were stalking the president. In the post, Souza explained it was part of a prank.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 17, 2016 17 Comments
The House and Senate have become agitated with the CIA as the agency has continued to deny both sectors with briefings or information on claims that Russia hacked into America's election, but passed information to the mainstream media. Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) told a radio station in his home state that the CIA just denied his request for a briefing:
“I’m not happy they denied a briefing to me,” the Wisconsin Republican told a public radio interviewer in his home state on Friday morning. “I need information from the administration, and right now they're withholding it.”

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 16, 2016 19 Comments
Republican elector Chris Suprun caused a ruckus when he announced he would not vote for President-elect Donald Trump even though Trump won the state in the November election. But is it all a publicity stunt? WFAA investigated Suprun's past and found numerous inconsistencies such as lying about working as a 9/11 first responder at the Pentagon:
"He claimed to be a first responder with the Manassas Park [Virginia] Fire Department on September 11, 2001 and personally told us stories 'I was fighting fire that day at the Pentagon.’ No, I was on a medic unit that day at the Pentagon and you make a phone call to Manassas Park and you find out that he wasn't even employed there until October 2001,” said a first responder who knows Suprun and only agreed to speak about him if his identity was concealed. The City of Manassas Park confirmed to WFAA that it hired Suprun on October 10, 2001, one month after the 9/11 attacks.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 15, 2016 12 Comments
The Senate Finance Committee has discovered that 27 IRS employees in fiscal 2015 spent over $1.4 million on travel expenses to use "high-end car services and luxury apartment and hotel stays." One member of the committee said the report hows that the agency has not done anything to reduce waste. Federal employees must spend like a "prudent person" while traveling. These 27 employees traveled only 125 business days and the bills averaged $52,000 a year:
The committee found more than half of the long-term travel time was spent in the Washington D.C., area. It found cases of five employees living in hotels, primarily in the capital, for months at a time without looking for lower-cost housing or having their per diem rates reduced as outlined in federal guidelines.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 15, 2016 23 Comments
So the Michigan vote recount revealed corruption and fraud..just not what Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton hoped for. Instead, the recount showed that too many people voted in the Detroit precincts, areas that Hillary won by a large majority. The Detroit News reported:
Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News. Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 14, 2016 29 Comments
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Montana Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke as his Secretary of the Interior. The former U.S. Navy SEAL commander has often found himself at odds with environmentalists, which means he could possibly "reverse environmental policies the Obama administration has pursued over the past eight years." The Washington Post reported:
Zinke recently criticized an Interior Department rule aimed at curbing inadvertent releases of methane from oil and gas operations on federal land as “duplicative and unnecessary.”

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 14, 2016 24 Comments
This little bill flew under the radar, didn't it? While the Democrats deal with infighting and President-elect Donald Trump chooses his Cabinet, the House of Representatives quietly passed H.R. 4919, also known as Kevin and Avonte's Law. This law allows the attorney general to hand over money to local law enforcement agencies to develop human tracking devices:
The programs mission would to find “individuals with forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s Disease, or children with developmental disabilities, such as autism, who have wandered from safe environments.”

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 13, 2016 15 Comments
Google and Cuba finalized their deal to bring servers to the Communist island to allow high speed internet for users. The Wall Street Journal reported:
Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt signed an agreement in Havana on Monday with Cuba’s state telecommunications company, La Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba SA, concluding months of talks. The Google servers in Cuba will store content such as popular YouTube videos, allowing the content to be delivered more quickly to Cuban users. The move is the latest to improve internet access for the country of 11.2 million people, which has long been one of the world’s most isolated nations.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 13, 2016 7 Comments
The Bay Pines VA Healthcare System in Tampa Bay, FL, left the dead body of a veteran in an unused for shower for nine hours before transporting it to the morgue. The Tampa Bay Times reported:
Once the veteran died, hospice staff members made direct verbal requests to an individual described as the transporter for the body to be moved to the morgue. The transporter told them to follow proper procedures instead by contacting dispatchers. That request was never made, so those responsible for taking away the body never showed up. At first, the body was moved to a hallway in the hospice, then to a shower room, where it stayed, unattended, for more than nine hours.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 13, 2016 22 Comments
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen former Texas Governor Rick Perry as his Secretary of Energy. Perry served as agriculture commissioner in Texas before he became governor in 2000. His term ended in 2015. He ran for president in 2012 and 2016.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 13, 2016 31 Comments
President-elect Donald Trump has selected Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state. Trump said:
“His tenacity, broad experience and deep understanding of geopolitics make him an excellent choice for Secretary of State,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “He will promote regional stability and focus on the core national security interests of the United States. Rex knows how to manage a global enterprise, which is crucial to running a successful State Department, and his relationships with leaders all over the world are second to none.