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Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

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A judge has issued a gag order in the case of former President Donald Trump chairman Paul Manafort and his protege Rick Gates. From Politico:
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson's directive Wednesday doesn't ban such statements outright, but prohibits any remarks that "pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice to this case."

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After large-scale tragedies the quest to prevent the next mass shooting begins. In the case of the Sutherland Springs shooting, the federal government's failure to properly report Devin Kelley's violent past may have allowed him to possess weapons to which he should not have had legal access.

The last time we reported on Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a student sit-in had shut down school’s finance office. The protests were organized by “Reedies Against Racism,” (RAR) a group that has been active on campus for a little over a year and whose members interrupted the lecture of a humanities class (Humanities 110) on Western Civilization it described as "Eurocentric" and "silencing people of color". Despite the intimidation and harassment, Reed College freshmen are battling back. The following snippet is from an article in the Atlantic that details the challenge the freshmen are giving to the RAR's moral authority.
...This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color. The turning point was the derailment of the Hum lecture on August 28, the first day of classes. As the Humanities 110 program chair, Elizabeth Drumm, introduced a panel presentation, three RAR leaders took to the stage and ignored her objections. Drumm canceled the lecture—a first since the boycott. Using a panelist’s microphone, a leader told the freshmen, “[Our] work is just as important as the work of the faculty, so we were going to introduce ourselves as well.”

Today we will have posts at key points during the day and evening retracing the 2016 presidential election day, ending with the late night stunner. Coming into the day, it wasn't supposed to be close. For months the demise of Donald Trump was predicted. This video compilation is pretty amazing, in hindsight:

Remember the meeting Donald Trump, Jr. had with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya? The meeting that Veselnitskaya arranged on the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton, but which appears to have been just a means of lobbying Trump on the Magnitsky Act. The leak about the meeting set off several news cycles of speculation. It turned out she had a connection to the firm, Fusion GPS, doing oppo research for the Clinton campaign. That put the meeting in an odd light, but it wasn't clear whether this was a Fusion GPS operation. When I covered it on July 13, 2017, I cautioned:

CNN, AP, NBC News have called the Virginia governor race for Democrat Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam in the past few days over Republican Ed Gillespie, 51% to 48%. From NBC News:
Both national parties have spent millions of dollars in Virginia and are closely watching it as an early barometer of the political climate and test of campaign tactics in the first major election since Donald Trump's unexpected victory last year. Northam, an Army veteran and pediatric neurologist who serves as the state’s lieutenant governor, struggled to capitalize on his ad-ready biography as the race descended into a nasty culture war. Popular Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe is term-limited.

So far it's been difficult to get information on the question of whether the parishioners in the Texas church where yesterday's mass murder took place were prohibited from carrying guns. Here are the pertinent rules in Texas:

SURPRISE! You didn't think the GOP tax reform bill would go off without a hitch, right? Because we all know that the government needs to keep spending so they can't cut too many taxes. The House Ways and Means Committee had a markup session on Monday and reports have emerged that multinational companies like Apple and Ford could possibly pay a 20% tax on any payments they make to offshore affiliates.

Evan McMullin ran for president in 2016. He failed, of course. But in running, he gave Never Trump conservatives who couldn't stomach pulling the lever (or pushing the button, these days) for Donald Trump an out; someone they could feel good about voting for, without forfeiting their vote entirely.

Here at LI, we've covered the increasing, alarming, and widespread leftist intolerance for free speech in this country.  The radical left has decided and worked diligently to spread the dangerous notion that any ideas they deem offensive or objectionable should not be expressed, and if they are, there is the growing sense that violence should be used to silence anyone speaking words with which they disagree. What we haven't seen as often is what everyone else feels about the far left's increasingly fascistic approach to silencing any but their own speech.  It turns out that Americans are generally pretty fed up with it, and that there is a growing sense that we cannot express our true thoughts or views.

One of the leading business schools in India, Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Management (IIM), has set up an 'Israel Center' on its campus with the aim to “bridge academic collaboration” between India and Israel. The center will carry out academic research, and promote faculty and student exchange programs between the two countries. "The Israel Centre at IIM Bangalore will lead to upgrading of academic collaboration between India and Israel, and will make our countries and economies stronger," said Israel's envoy to India Ambassador Daniel Carmon, at the inauguration ceremony on Sunday.

Ronan Farrow, who did as much as anyone to rip the lid off the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment/assault scandal, has another eye-opener. And the subject is superstar lawyer David Boies, who among other things, represented the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case on same-sex marriage. Weinstein, according to Ronan's reporting, had an Army of Spies to kill stories about his misconduct:

Late in October, California Governor Jerry Brown threatened to sue the administration of President Donald Trump for implementation of environmental policies focused more on real pollutants (e.g., heavy metals) and less on contrived ones (e.g., carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion. I noted Brown would be taking a European "climate change" tour that would include a stop at the Vatican. His presentation at the seat of the Catholic Church focused on climate, alright...the political one.

No one trusts the media these days and for good reason. Biased reporting, a disproportionate amount of attention exerted towards tearing down conservatives and traditionalism, and supposed fact-based reporting sneakily meshed with opinion all contribute to the growing tension between the American people and the fourth estate.