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    House GOP Targets Anti-Christian Military Lobbying Group

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    1

    *Warning: This article contains some graphic language.

    ANALYSIS – For those conservatives who say that Republicans are weak or ineffective, take note of all the actions this GOP-led House has taken so far. And with only the slimmest of majorities. The latest effort targets a distasteful anti-Christian group that focuses on influencing Pentagon policy.

    While operating under the misleading name of the ‘Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), this advocacy group is anything but an organization for religious freedom. Its real mission is to attack and remove any Christian influences from our entire military.

    In February, for example, the MRFF convinced Merchant Marine Academy leaders to move a massive historical painting titled “Christ on the Water” from a public space to a chapel.

    This move was attacked by Republican lawmakers and Christian groups as gross overreach, especially since it was a historical item and part of the Academy’s proud heritage.

    But the Academy caved quickly to the group’s outrageous demand.

    The aggressive actions of the group have raised concerns among lawmakers for years, with ill-informed military staffers often overreacting to the group’s incessant, and at times inappropriate, demands without following proper review procedures.

    Thankfully, the GOP House has it in its sights.

    Under an amendment to the House draft of the annual defense authorization bill last week, reported Military Times, Defense officials and troops would be barred from communicating with the Foundation or from making “any decision as a result of any claim, objection, or protest made by MRFF without the authority of the Secretary of Defense.”

    While the language for the amendment was offered by Republican Rep. Mike Turner, of Ohio, the amendment was adopted with unanimous, bipartisan support in the House Armed Services Committee.

    The amendment is designed to simply ensure that military staffers don’t overreact to the group’s demands without following proper protocols. And its bipartisan support shows that it is very reasonable.

    But that didn’t stop the group from issuing a profanity-laced tirade.

    Confirming its bigoted anti-Christian bias, not to mention lack of professionalism and decorum, the MRFF’s president and founder Mikey Weinstein, angrily lashed out, calling his opponents “bastards” and “enemies.”

    More specifically he said, according to Military Times: “If they don’t like what we do at MRFF … they can take a number, pack a picnic lunch and stand in line with the rest of those fundamentalist Christian extremist bastards who constitute our enemies.”

    But he didn’t stop digging his anti-Christian hole there. He went on:

    If the fundamentalist Christian nationalists who are behind this are trying to execute us through legislation, we’ll take that as validation of the positive effect that we’re having for our clients and for the Constitution.”

    “And they can go fuck themselves.”

    Well, Mr. Weinstein, we won’t do that, but we will fight him and his group tooth and nail legislatively.

    The Senate Armed Services Committee’s draft of the defense authorization bill does not include any similar restrictions on communications or response to MRFF requests, but it should. Expect intense efforts to ensure that they are included in a final bill.

    House Republicans will also likely add more amendments on abortion and transgender issues when the bill is debated in the full chamber next month.

    If you want to be part of the solution, then contact your Senators and tell them how you feel about far-left extremists pushing a bigoted, anti-Christian agenda on our military.

    Religious freedom means our troops are guaranteed the right to express their religion, even on military bases and facilities. And defending that right is a fight worth having.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Did Trump Threaten to Execute Gen. Mark Milley for Treason?

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    4
    Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Michael J. McCord provide testimony at a Senate Armed Services Committee budget hearing, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., March 28, 2023. (DoD photo by Chad J. McNeeley)

    ANALYSIS – Words matter. In a post on his Truth Social platform last Friday, former President Donald Trump suggested that outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley deserved to be executed after speaking with China’s top general during Trump’s final months in office. 

    Trump said Milley’s “treasonous act” was “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

    Clearly, Trump wasn’t threatening to do so but saying that Milley’s actions could have been punished by death in a prior era.

    I condemned Milley’s actions at the time because they seemed to give the Chinese Communist regime a promise that they would be given a warning prior to any attack under Trump.

    While Milley claims his actions were a normal part of his duties, I disagree. 

    They appeared to be more a normal part of the mission that he took upon himself, which was to counter Trump when Milley believed the president had crossed some line only Milley could see.

    Some argue that Milley’s actions were not only disloyal to the president but also borderline ‘treasonous.’

    Milley contends that he was behaving appropriately to avert an accidental war. He responded to Trump’s comments on CBS:

    He also assured viewers that he had adequate safety measures for himself and his family.

    The two backchannel calls to China’s top general, Li Zuocheng, that Milley made, and at the center of all this, were revealed in the 2021 book “Peril.”  

    As CNN reported:

    In October 2020, as intelligence suggested China believed the US was going to attack them, Milley sought to calm Li by reassuring him that the US was not considering a strike, according to the book. Milley called again two days after the January 6 riot at the US Capitol to tell Li that the US is “100 percent steady” even though “things may look unsteady.”

    How much of this reporting in the book was accurate, is hard to say. But Trump sees things very differently. 

    Trump said that Milley “turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States.”

    And Trump may be right. For Milley to do that could be seen as highly inappropriate, if not exactly ‘treasonous.’

    Still, Trump, a former president, and current front-runner for the Republican nomination for president, is way out of line. No American political leader should be using that kind of language against any American military official or political leader.

    In today’s volatile climate, it is extremely dangerous.

    Yet few in the GOP will condemn Trump’s statements. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is one of those willing to take aim at the Republican frontrunner. Politico quoted Hutchinson as saying:

    To suggest that Gen. Milley should be executed is inexcusable and dangerous. While some will excuse this latest outrage as Trump just being Trump, the fact is that his statement endangers people and is an insult to those who serve in the military.

    Perennial Trump critic, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, had stronger words, calling Trump an “absolute child” for the “reprehensible” remarks. 

    But it is part of a disturbing pattern by both sides to use dangerously inflammatory rhetoric at the highest levels against the other side.

    Democrats raised the political temperature considerably against Trump, calling for, or at least condoning the calls for, his beheading and death on many occasions. 

    The demonization of Trump by the left and Democrat Party was more than I had ever seen in over thirty years in and around U.S. politics. 

    It was, and still is, outrageous.

    But Trump isn’t helping things with his own dangerous rhetoric.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Should Trump Bring Back His Winning ’16 Campaign Chief?

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    2

    ANALYSIS – Will Kellyanne Conway return to Team Trump? As Kamala Harris, who recently stole the campaign from her boss, Joe Biden, basks in her current sugar high glory, some in the Trump campaign are wondering if his team needs a reboot. 

    Or maybe an injection of a 2016 winner.

    And who better to revitalize Trump’s campaign, than his winning campaign manager from 2016, Kellyanne Conway.

    At least Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, reportedly thinks so.

    And a recent post on X showing pics of Conway and Trump together in New Jersey has fueled the speculation that a return to the campaign is in the works.

    In 2016 the brash flaxen haired pollster-turned campaign chief swooped in after the campaign’s failing start with its B Team and is rightly credited as helping to get Trump across the finish line to victory against Hillary Clinton.

    According to the Daily Beast:

    Donald Trump is looking to bring in Kellyanne Conway to shake up his faltering campaign, according to a new report.

    The outspoken adviser is seen as a trusted confidante by both the former president and, importantly, by Melania Trump who is “pushing” for Conway to return because she sees her as “a familiar face amid a sea of relative newcomers,” says Tara Palmeri in the online magazine, Puck.

    Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee and wife of Trump’s son, Eric, is also said to be pushing for Conway to be brought on board to reignite campaign stalwarts taken by surprise by Kamala Harris’ fast start after Joe Biden’s sudden departure.

    One adviser told Puck that Trump listens to powerful women, more than men. “He listens to Hope Hicks. He listens to Brooke Rollins,” they tell Puck. “Ironically, he likes powerful women. If you’re a sharp woman, he will listen to you. Hope and these people could tell him the hardest shit. He may not have done anything, but at least he listens.”

    While she was a key player in Trump’s 2016 win, eight years ago, she could still be the spark that relights the fire of a campaign still unsteady after Harris’ surprising Democrat Party coup and subsequent rise.

    Puck notes:

    …it may also be fair to question whether his brain trust is living in the past. Chris LaCivita, who famously ran the Swift Boat Veterans campaign against John Kerry, has spearheaded an attack on Walz’s military record, but it’s yet to have the same impact as it did in 2004, when the U.S. had recently invaded Iraq. Other Trump allies are wondering if pollster Tony Fabrizio is likewise frozen in carbonite, as he considers a race-baiting strategy against Harris akin to the Willie Horton ads against Dukakis back in 1988. 

    Team Harris has raised $310 million in July, and another $36 million in the 24 hours after announcing her stolen Valor radical VP choice, Tim Walz.

    So far Team Trump hasn’t been able to land any significant blows on his younger female political opponent.

    According to Puck, Trump’s campaign team is split in half over whether she should return in a similar role to the one she had in 2016.

    Meanwhile, Conway is smoothing over any ruffled feather with JD Vance after openly suggesting Marco Rubio as Trump’s VP.

    As part of her mending relations effort, Conway recently tweeted “Brilliant” to Vance’s stunt when he landed at the same airport as Harris and Walz and challenged her to debate.

    One big potential drawback to Team Trump is the fact that Conway recently registered as a $50,000- a month foreign agent for a Ukrainian oligarch.

    This is already provoking accusations among her critics that it would be a conflict of interest. However, a campaign manager or advisor is not the same as a member of the administration. So, that issue may not matter much in these final three months of the campaign.

    The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk.

    Amanda Head: Pam Anderson Is Uncomfortable With Nudity

    By
    Amanda Head
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    2

    Oh, the irony…

    1990s sex icon Pamela Anderson is releasing a new memoir where she describes an uncomfortable situation involving “Home Improvement” star Tim Allen.

    Let Amanda explain the controversy below.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Trump Shifts All Blame to Abortion for Midterm Losses

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    6
    Donald Trump via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    ANALYSIS – In typical Trump fashion, the former president just threw all pro-lifer conservatives under the bus to deflect any blame from himself for the weak ‘Red Trickle’ that was the 2022 election. But is he wrong?

    On November 9, I wrote about how both issues impacted the 2022 election losses. ‘Abortion and Trump tipped the scales.’

    Yes, some pro-life conservatives took the reasonable Supreme Court decision to give abortion decisions back to the states (where they belong), as a green light to push for the most aggressive anti-abortion restrictions they could.

    And this was a mistake. It only reinforced Democrat women’s fears and independent women’s doubts, fueling the abortion rights extremists to rally and independents to waver or vote Democrat.

    What they should have done is defend Dobbs and the Supreme Court while positioning the GOP as the reasonable party on abortion.

    Abortion on demand at all times under any circumstances, until the time of birth (and sometimes even beyond), is the extreme position.

    And most Americans oppose that insanity.

    “Let states decide. The left is extreme on abortion.” That’s how we should have played it.

    Sadly, too many on the right didn’t follow that playbook.

    So, when Trump stated on Truth Social on Sunday that it wasn’t his fault that “Republicans didn’t live up to expectations” in the 2022 midterm elections, he may be partly right.

    Instead, Trump blamed the “abortion issue,” writing that it was “poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother.”

    And that was true. Here I agree with Trump.

    When I ran for office in South Florida 10 years ago, I signed the National Right to Life Pledge, but even that staunchly pro-life organization made exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother.

    Now, however, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the nation’s leading pro-life groups, which spent tens of millions to mobilize the pro-life vote in the 2022 midterms, stated in response to Trump:

    The approach to winning on abortion in federal races, proven for a decade is this: state clearly the ambitious consensus pro-life view on abortion and contrast that with the extreme view of Democrat opponents. We look forward to hearing that position fully articulated by Mr. Trump and all presidential candidates.

    Their response was far from convincing. Taking the most extreme counterpoint to the left’s extreme position doesn’t win votes. It only makes you seem more extreme than the other guys.

    In an interview with Breitbart News last month, Trump said it best: “I think a lot of Republicans didn’t handle the abortion question properly. I think if you don’t have the three exceptions, it’s almost impossible in most parts of the country to win.”

    And even when Republicans were not asking for the most extreme abortion restrictions, the Democrats lied that they were.

    And this was also a failure of the GOP.

    The Democrats and leftist groups spent $468 million on abortion-related advertisements, whereas the Republican party focused its campaign advertising on inflation.

    While some grassroots conservatives were overzealous about rolling back abortion after Dobbs, the GOP establishment was afraid of the abortion issue altogether, ignored it and hoped it would just go away.

    But I think Trump is also wrong to take no blame himself. He did play a big part in the 2022 electoral defeat.

    As I wrote on November 9:

    But beyond the abortion issue, former president Trump likely played an outsized role in the red wave turning to a ripple.

    And as someone who has been a strong Trump supporter and voted for Trump twice, I believe this sentiment [Trump was part of the problem] has validity.

    Continuous ranting about election fraud in 2020 makes the future about the past.

    And forcefully demanding GOP loyalty to one man doesn’t help either.

    It also makes everything about Trump rather than conservative ideas, policies, and candidates.

    Nothing mobilizes the Democrats, the media and the left like Trump.

    Of course, the title of my November piece could have given a clue. It was: “Is It Time for the GOP to Dump Trump?”

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Amanda Head: Trump Compared to Tupac…What?

    By
    Amanda Head
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    1

    Did you ever think that former President Donald Trump and infamous rapper Tupac would be compared to one another?

    Watch Amanda explain the latest developments below:

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Biden Defends China’s ‘COVID Freedom’ Protests, But Not U.S. and Canadian Ones 

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    0
    The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    ANALYSIS – The massive protests against the communist Chinese dictatorship, and its draconian anti-COVID repression continues.

    And so does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) crackdown.

    As these Chinese ‘freedom protests’ grow and spread, hypocritical Western leaders, who until recently pursued their own, less harsh, COVID crackdowns and vaccine mandates, are showing their support.

    Among them, is Joe Biden. 

    A Monday White House statement in response to anti-lockdown demonstrations that swept through major Chinese cities reads:

    We think it’s going to be very difficult for the People’s Republic of China to be able to contain this virus through their zero COVID strategy. We’ve long said everyone has a right to peacefully protest, here in the United States and around the world. This includes the PRC.

    Sadly, while he could be far more aggressive in his response to China’s COVID repression, Biden was doing just the opposite with earlier Canadian and American COVID crackdown protests.

    Justin Trudeau’s authoritarian overkill in response to Canadian truckers was particularly egregious.

    An unquestionably authoritarian move, it received criticism from the left, right, and center.

    The leftist Canadian Civil Liberties Association called Trudeau’s actions “unnecessary, unjustifiable and unconstitutional.” 

    Reason Magazine’s J.D. Tuccille said at the time that Trudeau had a “bad case of China-envy.”

    Yet, Biden wholeheartedly backed Trudeau’s repression.

    As Reason explains:

    The Biden administration urged the Canadian government to use whatever means it had to reopen border crossings barricaded by the so-called “Freedom convoy” and get a handle on the protests.

    That’s according to revelations of an ongoing Canadian inquiry into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unprecedented invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act.

    Why was Biden so gung-ho about Trudeau’s crushing of the peaceful trucker freedom protests?

    Reason argues that in part:

    Biden embraced an expansive view of his executive powers to effectively mandate vaccines for millions of Americans. That contributed to his support for the suppression of Canadian anti-mandate demonstrations. 

    REASON added: “The only people who seem to support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers against peaceful protestors are the prime minister himself—and the Biden White House.”

    And Biden’s strong backing of Trudeau’s repression makes his current defense of China’s protests all the more laughable.

    It also erodes his moral authority to lecture the Chinese government now on the right of the people to peaceful protest.

    As Reason concludes: “It’s also a lesson in how restrictions on freedom in one country can damage it everywhere.” 

    When America allows the crushing of political dissent at home and promotes repression by its liberal northern neighbor, it not only hurts us, it fuels more repression among our enemies.

    This only helps authoritarianism grow globally.

    Amanda Head: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Movie Bombs!

    By
    Amanda Head
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    0

    Oh, the sweet irony.

    Democrat Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest venture in Hollywood is a complete and utter disaster.

    Watch Amanda break down the situation below:

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    AP ‘Stylebook’ – How the Left Manipulates Abortion Language to Manipulate News

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    0
    Washington D.C., USA - January 22, 2015; A Pro-Life woman clashes with a group of Pro-Choice demonstrators at the U.S. Supreme Court.

    ANALYSIS – Most conservatives understand that one of the left’s major weapons in the war of ideas is manipulating language and using well-researched buzzwords and phrases to change reality and mask their more extreme ideas.

    We see it every day with the constant use of ‘gun violence’ rather than shooting or murder committed by a criminal. We see it with ‘global warming’ becoming ‘climate change’ when the facts don’t support the narrative.

    We also see it with the insanely deceptive and grotesque ‘gender-affirming care’ rather for genital-mutilating sex-change surgery.

    And of course, we see it in spades with abortion, where supporting the unrestricted killing of unborn babies in the womb becomes ‘reproductive health care rights,’ previously known as being ‘pro-choice.’

    The new term is far better politically since it appears to somehow be about rights and health, not deception and killing. Plus, ‘pro-choice’ has been thoroughly sullied by its accurate association with being ‘pro-abortion.’

    And we can’t have that.

    And now, since the Dobbs decision correctly returned the abortion issue to the states where it always belonged, the battle to control the language, and hence the narrative on abortion, is intensifying.

    And it just got a lot worse.

    The latest words and phrases chosen by the left to describe or refer to abortion fly in the face of fact and science.

    But the leftist language warriors are now being reinforced by the power behind the news media – the Associated Press—and its widely used ‘Stylebook.’

    The Daily Signal reports:

    The Associated Press recently released a guide for news outlets for reporting on abortion that’s so biased in favor of the procedure, its guidance often runs contrary to medical science. The new guide has the ability to significantly distort how Americans perceive the abortion issue.

    The AP’s “Abortion Topical Guide” is part of the widely used “AP Stylebook” that many outlets across the country, including The Daily Signal, use as a guide for everything from grammar to punctuation to best practices for terms and phrasing.

    One glaring problem among many? The guide frequently cites the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to back up its guidance. ACOG claims to be the premier professional membership organization of OB-GYNs. But on the issue of abortion—a procedure that most OB-GYNs don’t perform—ACOG is wholly committed to lobbying for extreme abortion policies that don’t reflect its membership’s views.

    In typical Orwellian fashion, the leftists at AP cudgel writers into referring to an unborn child’s “heartbeat,” which is detectable via ultrasound from the very early stages of life to the deliberately bland and mostly meaningless term “cardiac activity.”

    The Stylebook also inappropriately enters the scientific realm as self-made medical experts when it advises writers not to refer to unborn children as “pain-capable” until after at least 24 weeks.

    This, even though the beloved doctors who actually perform surgeries on ‘preemies,’ or premature babies in utero, regularly use anesthesia for those babies under 24 weeks because they feel pain.

    The AP’s demonic advice also contradicts the massive, and growing, body of research showing unborn babies can feel pain at just 15 weeks or even earlier.

    And most importantly, the Stylebook admonishes writers to never, ever use the accurate but uncomfortable phrase – ‘late-term abortion.’

    Polls show a solid majority of Americans are opposed to late-term abortions, so best to religiously (pun intended) avoid the term.

    The Daily Signal concludes:

    The AP guide misses the mark throughout. Of course, that’s inevitable when the goal is not objective reporting of fact but rather promoting pro-abortion propaganda. Try as the AP might, it’s a fool’s errand to put lipstick on a pig.

    I go further by saying AP is part of the left’s far-flung language-distorting media empire intended to manipulate words, in order to manipulate news, in order to manipulate you.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Biden’s Totally Intentional Open Border Disaster

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    7
    CBP Photography, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    ANALYSIS – I have long argued that Joe Biden’s border crisis is absolutely self-created, and it has become increasingly obvious that he in fact has essentially opened the border.

    And worse this is absolutely intentional.

    There can be no other explanation.

    Biden’s shameful denials that there is no border crisis show that he is either delusional or a pathological liar. 

    Or both.

    But his appointment of Kamala Harris, who can barely find Mexico on a map, as his border czar, also speaks volumes. 

    Neither has visited the border since coming to office two years ago.

    Yet the illegal migrant numbers and incidents are only mushrooming in magnitude. 

    And getting worse every day.

    The border is going from disastrous to cataclysmic.

    And it’s not just incompetence or bad policy.

    It is part of a plan. 

    Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection says Team Biden “intentionally unsecured” the southern border because “they see a perceived political benefit from open borders.” 

    In a recent podcast with the Heritage Foundation, Morgan said of the border:

    It’s a total disaster, simply getting worse. And I think what’s important is we really need to compare it to the last year under the Trump administration. Now, look, this is not a Right or Left thing for me. This is about factual data.

    So if you look in the last fiscal year under the Trump administration, I think we were around 400,000 total encounters. What we saw the first fiscal year under the Biden administration, as you said, over 2 million. This last fiscal year, we had 2.7 million total encounters. In the first 23, now almost 24 months under this administration, we’ve seen over 4.7 million total encounters with another 1.2 million “got-aways.” So we’re actually getting close to 6 million total encounters, plus got-aways, in the first 24 months of this administration.

    Those data points, Virginia, alone are staggering. It’s the worst self-inflicted border crisis we’ve ever seen on our southern border and our lifetime and the data is undeniable.

    In response to a question about what the future may hold for the border under Team Biden’s remaining two years, Morgan said worst case things stay the same.

    Horrible.

    And that is unacceptable. As he added :

    It’s insanity. It’s absolutely unsustainable. And again, it’s jeopardizing every aspect of our nation’s safety and national security. We cannot allow this to happen.GAND

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

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