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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 22, 2016 23 Comments
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama invoked a provision of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands act, a law from 1953, that allowed him to place "a permanent drilling ban on portions of the ocean floor from Virginia to Maine and along much of Alaska's coast." Overall, it adds up to almost 120 million acres! No other president has used this provision to protect such a large part of federal waters before and he promised not even President-elect Donald Trump could undo this declaration. But Alaska lawmakers Sen. Dan Sullivan, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and Rep. Dan Young said they want to find a way to draft legislation to overturn Obama's actions:
"The sweeping withdrawal disrespects the Alaskan people, is not based on sound science, and contradicts the administration's own conclusions about Arctic development," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Don Young said late Tuesday. "It will have lasting consequences for Alaska's economy, state finances, and the security and competitiveness of the nation. In making the decision, President Obama yet again sided with extreme environmentalists, while betraying his utter lack of commitment to improving the lives of the people who actually live in the Arctic."

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 22, 2016 14 Comments
Well, look at this! Politico has revealed that those in the electoral college who wanted to cause a ruckus on Monday kept in close contact with Hillary Clinton's top aides Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri. Politico reported:
The first conversation appears to have occurred on Nov. 29, when Sullivan and other aides joined a conference call that included Colorado elector Micheal Baca, a member of a group working to persuade Republicans in the Electoral College to abandon Trump. Baca relayed the group’s long-shot strategy: to persuade Democratic and Republican electors to unite behind an alternative candidate to Trump. In an email after the call, Baca apologized to Sullivan for his urgent tone.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 21, 2016 8 Comments
The U.S. Treasury Department released more sanctions against Russians and Russian companies for Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea in March 2014. The Kremlin has lashed out against these new sanctions, saying the government may respond:
"We regret that Washington is continuing on this destructive path," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. "We believe this damages bilateral relations ... Russia will take commensurate measures."

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 21, 2016 11 Comments
A New York judge has unsealed the search warrant giving the FBI permission to search a laptop belonging to disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton's top aides. The FBI began an investigation into Weiner after it emerged he sexted with an underage girl. The investigation revealed a laptop that may have had new information for the FBI's investigation into Hillary's private email server, which Director James Comey closed in July.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 20, 2016 41 Comments
As someone with chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis, the war on prescription opioids has troubled me because the government wants to punish the many who actually need these drugs because a few abuse the pills. The Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation polled those with chronic pain "who have taken the drugs for at least two months during the past two years." The majority said the drugs have helped them function and live a normal life. Someone needs to tell Big Government this information.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 20, 2016 7 Comments
Turkish special forces police officer Meviut Mert Alintas, 22, assassinated the Russian ambassador to Turkey on Monday during the opening of a gallery in Ankara. He shouted things about Aleppo, Syria, before cops took him down. Motives immediately swirled around, but I remained interested in who Russia and Turkey blamed. Once again, the officials did not disappoint. See, this is why it's hard not to go all Alex Jones on Russia and Turkey because you know the officials would do anything to achieve their objective. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan desperately wants America to extradite cleric Fethullah Gulen so it did not surprise me when Turkish authorities linked the gunman to the cleric, who resides in Pennsylvania. It also did not surprise me that a Kremlin official close to President Vladimir Putin claimed NATO organized the assassination as a way to provoke Moscow.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 20, 2016 28 Comments
Going into Monday, leftists and celebrities tried to persuade electors in the Electoral College to vote for anyone but President-elect Donald Trump. It's all the media has covered, but hiding underneath that remains the disdain and anger Democrats have for their own party. When electors met to vote, several electors for the Democrats defected or attempted to defect. Seven electors tried to vote against Hillary with four succeeding in Washington. Trump easily won with 304 electoral votes.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 21 Comments
PRECIOUS! During an interview with NPR, President Barack Obama advised president-elect Donald Trump not to abuse the executive orders privilege:
Should President-elect Trump, once he's inaugurated, use his executive powers in the same way that you have? I think that he is entirely within his lawful power to do so. Keep in mind though that my strong preference has always been to legislate when I can get legislation done. In my first two years, I wasn't relying on executive powers, because I had big majorities in the Congress and we were able to get bills done, get bills passed. And even after we lost the majorities in Congress, I bent over backwards consistently to try to find compromise and a legislative solution to some of the big problems that we've got — a classic example being immigration reform, where I held off for years in taking some of the executive actions that I ultimately took in pursuit of a bipartisan solution — one that, by the way, did pass through the Senate on a bipartisan basis with our help.

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.
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