Ilhan Omar stole my husband, DC mom claims in divorce papers
A Washington, DC, mom says her political-consultant husband left her for Rep. Ilhan Omar, according to a bombshell divorce filing obtained by The Post.
Dr. Beth Mynett says her cheating spouse, Tim Mynett, told her in April that he was having an affair with the Somali-born US representative — and that he even made a “shocking declaration of love” for the Minnesota congresswoman before he ditched his wife, alleges the filing, submitted in DC Superior Court on Tuesday.
The physician, 55, and her 38-year-old husband — who has worked for left-wing Democrats such as Omar and her Minnesota predecessor, Keith Ellison — have a 13-year-old son together.
“The parties physically separated on or about April 7, 2019, when Defendant told Plaintiff that he was romantically involved with and in love with another woman, Ilhan Omar,” the court papers say.
“Defendant met Rep. Omar while working for her,’’ the document states. “Although devastated by the betrayal and deceit that preceded his abrupt declaration, Plaintiff told Defendant that she loved him, and was willing to fight for the marriage.
“Defendant, however, told her that was not an option for him’’ and moved out the next day, the papers say.
“It is clear to Plaintiff that her marriage to Defendant is over and that there is no hope of reconciliation,’’ according to the filing.
The Mynetts lived together for six years before marrying in 2012, the filing said.
Omar — a member of “the Squad,” a group of far left-leaning female freshman House members including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and two others — recently separated from her husband, according to reports.
The 37-year-old congresswoman and mom of three paid Tim Mynett and his E. Street Group approximately $230,000 through her campaign since 2018 for fundraising consulting, digital communications, internet advertising and travel expenses.
Omar was spotted enjoying time with Tim Mynett at a California restaurant in March.
Beth Mynett is seeking primary physical custody of her and her husband’s son in part because of Tim Mynett’s “extensive travel” with Omar — which isn’t exactly part of his job description, the document says.
“Defendant’s more recent travel and long work hours now appear to be more related to his affair with Rep. Omar than with his actual work commitments,” the court papers state.
When he was home, “he was preoccupied and emotionally volatile,’’ Beth Mynett says of her estranged spouse. Meanwhile, the mom has been juggling “the vast majority of responsibilities related to [their son’s] school, medical care, and extracurricular activities,’’ the papers say.
The doctor argued that she doesn’t trust her husband’s judgment with their son anymore — in part because of his relationship with Omar.
“By way of example, days prior to Defendant’s devastating and shocking declaration of love for Rep. Omar and admission of their affair, he and Rep. Omar took the parties’ son to dinner to formally meet for the first time at the family’s favorite neighborhood restaurant while Plaintiff was out of town,” the papers state.
“Rep. Omar gave the parties’ son a gift and the Defendant later brought her back inside the family’s home,” the papers say.
Beth Mynett said in the filing that the most concerning thing about the excursion was her hubby’s decision to “put his son in harm’s way by taking him out in public with Rep. Omar, who at that time had garnered a plethora of media attention along with death threats, one rising to the level of arresting the known would-be assassin that same week.”
The physician said her husband “has a history of emotional volatility, that can cause him to become easily angered and rageful,’’ according to the papers.
She added that she used her contacts to help him launch and grow his career and financially supported him along the way — only to have him “conveniently asserting after their separation that he is nearly broke, and his business is floundering,” the documents show.
Tim Mynett, using “bullying tactics,” has “begun threatening not to pay for his share of their joint financial responsibilities,” Beth Mynett says in the complaint.
She is seeking full control of the couple’s DC home, child support and legal fees, according to the filing.
Tim Mynett and Omar did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Omar’s husband, Ahmed Hirsi, is a former banker who was hired as a senior policy aide to a Minnesota city councilwoman last year, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported at the time. Omar was previously married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
President Trump has repeated a claim that the union with Elmi was illegal immigration fraud because he is her brother and that they wed so he could obtain American citizenship. Omar called that allegation “absolutely false and ridiculous.”
Additional reporting by Nikki Schwab and Ben Feuerherd
Hasbro Has a New 'Monopoly: Socialism' Game and Socialists Are Not Happy
A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a deep breath and then reluctantly replied "sure" to our kids' request that we play Monopoly for family game night. As most of us can attest, Monopoly requires a level of commitment that no family game night should require, and it's not really that fun to begin with. Hasbro's new "Monopoly: Socialism," though, sounds like a hoot and a great way to continue to teach my kids why socialism is for the math-, economics-, and history-challenged among us.
Sadly, I have been completely unaware of this new game that mocks socialism as only a brilliant capitalist company can. It was only after stumbling across a Twitter thread composed by a deeply offended socialist that "Monopoly: Socialism" entered my consciousness. So, thank you, Twitter and upset socialist dude.
Since I apparently harbor some socialist tendencies in my own heart, I want to share this with you. Of course, the capitalist in me recognizes that I will be helping a business make money on the free market. Maybe I should submit Hasbro a bill for my advertising services. Frankly, I would settle for nothing more than a free copy of "Monopoly: Socialism," because, as I'm sure you'll agree after reading the unintentionally funny tweets below, the game sounds awesome!
I bought a copy of Hasbro's mean-spirited and woefully ill-informed "MONOPOLY: SOCIALISM" board game so you don't have to - a thread 1/
Twitter user Nick Kapur — who "only tweet[s] extremely interesting things," according to his bio — "bought a copy of Hasbro's mean-spirited and woefully ill-informed MONOPOLY: SOCIALISM board game so you don't have to."
So I "don't have to," Nick? Why, I wanted to buy the game from the moment I read your tweet, "From the tagline 'Winning is for capitalists' we can see right away that this game is not going to be friendly to whatever it deems 'socialism' to be." So, again, thank you.
If your second tweet wasn't enough to peak my interest in "Monopoly: Socialism," your comment deep into your Twitter rant—that "There are also tons of references to health food and veganism, despite the lack of any clear connection to socialism, apparently because what they share in common is that they are odious things that are fun to mock" — would have sealed the deal for me. Because I agree that health food and veganism have nothing in common with socialism except providing great targets for much mockery. I do love mocking vegans. And socialists, as I'm sure is evident by now.
Although, now that I think about it, veganism and socialism probably do have a connection. I mean, once socialism bankrupts our society and reduces everyone but Comrade Bernie and AOC to subsistence living, all we'll be eating will be whatever shriveled roots we can pull out of the dirt. I'm sure that a study somewhere proves that socialism leads to veganism. There's the connection. Hasbro, am I right?
And, Nick, by the time I read, "when you pass go, you get a $50 'living wage,' which was presumably reduced from the usual $200 to emphasize that 'socialism makes everyone poorer' or somesuch," I knew that I would be making a patriarchal rule that the only game played in my house on game night henceforth will be Hasbro's Monopoly: Socialism. Thanks to your Twitter meltdown, I get to incorporate both fun and education into family game night.
Planned Parenthood Refuses Title X Funding in Response to Trump Administration Restrictions
By JACK CROWE, August 19, 2019 3:01 PM
Planned Parenthood will refuse all Title X funding rather than comply with the Trump administration’s restrictions governing the discussion of abortion at clinics that participate in the program, the group announced Monday.
Planned Parenthood decided to abandon Title X, which accounts for roughly 15 percent of its overall federal funding each year, in response to a Trump administration rule barring clinics that participate in the program from referring women to abortion providers.
“When you have an unethical rule that will limit what providers can tell our patients, it becomes really important that we not agree to be in the program. But to be clear we’re doing that because we’re being forced out,” the group said in a Monday statement. “Trump’s administration is trying to force us to keep information from our patients. The gag rule is unethical, dangerous, and we will not subject our patients to it.”
Prior to its withdrawal, Planned Parenthood was receiving $60 million of the $286 million allocated annually through Title X. The organization will continue to receive roughly $500 million in annual Medicaid reimbursements from the federal government.
A federal appeals court ruled in July that the Trump administration’s rule change could take effect while a lawsuit, brought by Planned Parenthood and other groups in February, runs its course. The Department of Health and Human Services then gave Planned Parenthood until August 19 to submit a plan demonstrating that it would make “good faith efforts” to comply with the new rule. Planned Parenthood requested a stay from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week that would have delayed the rule-implementation deadline its legal challenge was resolved, but the court rejected that request.
The March for Life, a leading pro-life advocacy group, suggested that Planned Parenthood’s decision confirmed the group prioritizes abortion over women’s health care. Earlier this month, Planned Parenthood fired its president, Leana Wen, after less than a year, for being insufficiently zealous in her defense of abortion rights.
“Planned Parenthood, our nation’s largest abortion provider, today made a choice not to separate its abortion operation from Title X services, and in doing [so] declined Title X funding, which makes up approximately four percent of their annual budget,” said March for Life president Jeanne Mancini. “Abortion is neither healthcare nor family planning and taxpayer dollars should not support abortion. Leana Wen’s recent firing and Planned Parenthood’s decision today doubles down on their ultimate goal, which is political abortion advocacy, not healthcare.”
House Speaker-select Cameron Sexton a 'pragmatic conservative' with deep roots in Tennessee | Opinion
Keel Hunt , Columnist Published 5:00 a.m. CT Aug. 16, 2019
Cameron Sexton is scheduled to become the new Tennessee House Speaker in a special legislative session on Aug. 23. He succeeds former Speaker Glen Casada.
Cameron Sexton of Crossville, who will become Tennessee’s new House speaker Aug. 23, comes from a notable political lineage of Tennessee Republicans.
He was born in Lake City (now called Rocky Top) on Nov. 11, 1970. Folks who follow horoscopes might say that made him a Scorpio, but he definitely came into the world in an auspicious month of rising fortunes for the GOP in our Volunteer State.
Just one week earlier, Winfield Dunn of Memphis was elected governor, the first Republican to do so in 50 years, defeating Democrat John Jay Hooker Jr., and Chattanooga’s Republican Rep. Bill Brock defeated U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Sr., Democrat of Carthage.
Suddenly all three of Tennessee’s statewide elected officials were now Republicans, as Brock took his new seat in the U.S. Senate alongside Howard H. Baker Jr.
Sexton will join Bill Lee and Randy McNally as Tennessee's top leaders
Sexton’s own family roots are deep in the center-right stream of Tennessee’s Republican politics over most of the past half-century. His relations included, by marriage, the Baker and John Duncan families in the Knoxville region.
Next Friday when the General Assembly convenes in an extraordinary session for the purpose of electing a new speaker, Sexton himself will become one of the top three officials of Tennessee state government, together with Gov. Bill Lee and Senate Speaker Randy McNally.
Officially, he must organize and manage a recently troubled House. Unofficially, he also becomes one of the highest-profile leaders of the Tennessee Republican Party as it looks to the 2020 election season.
I caught up with him in his Nashville office on Tuesday. We had not met before, so I was eager to learn more about his origins and his thoughts about the new job.
Sexton’s home in Crossville is up on the Cumberland Plateau. His House district covers all or parts of Cumberland, Van Buren and Putnam counties.
In this first visit, I was frankly less curious about his positions on certain hot-button issues — private-school vouchers or the chances for Medicaid expansion — than I was hoping to gauge his temperament, his basic approach to the speakership, his way of thinking broadly about government’s role and how best to find solutions.
Issues will come and go from session to session, whereas most legislative speakers have had extraordinary longevity over the past century. I wanted a glimpse of his longer view. After meeting him, I suspect Sexton could be the speaker for a long time.
We visited for an hour. He smiles easily and often. He comes across as thoughtful, methodical, articulate. He looked his visitor straight in the eye. He spoke without notes and dodged no questions
He strives to be a bridge builder who does not want to label people
I noticed on his office bookshelf the busts of two U.S. presidents — Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy — so we talked about the prospects for more bipartisan cooperation. (Sexton’s ousted predecessor did not practice it.) He recalled that in McNally’s 1994 state Senate campaign, Anderson and Campbell counties still voted Democratic.
Sexton also was a staffer to former Rep. Van Hilleary, Republican of West Tennessee, and worked in Hilleary’s 2002 run for governor. Hilleary lost only narrowly to Democrat Phil Bredesen.
“I’ve had some very good mentors in the people I’ve worked for, who did politics a little bit differently than how it’s done today,” Sexton told me. “I think I have a unique perspective — the family history, with the individuals I have worked for in politics. I’ve been called a pragmatic conservative. Sometimes we get too involved in trying to split apart and label people. ...
"When you’re fighting, there’s always a winner and a loser — sometimes you’re both losers. When you work towards a better agreement, a lot of times it comes out more of a win-win. There are times when you need to fight, I get that, but the first onus should not be towards fighting but to work out your differences.”
Sexton projects a mix of understatement and confidence, and he seems to value the role of bridge builder. Next Friday he will appoint new House committees and chairs. In our visit he did not rule out the possibility of naming one or more Democrats to committee leadership.
“Is it a given,” I asked, “that you will name only Republican chairs?”
“No,” he replied. Then he smiled.
Columnist Keel Hunt is the author of two books on Tennessee political history. Read more at www.KeelHunt.com.
If you make stupid life choices, don’t ask someone else to pay for them. But, if other people are forced to pay for your stupid choices, don’t be surprised when your choices become extremely limited.
Using the socialist party line that “education is a human right,” self-described “democratic-socialist” Bernie Sanders wants taxpayers to pay for ‘free’ college tuition.
His proletariat gal pal, Elizabeth Warren, wants taxpayers to give college kids $50,000 toward their college costs.
As an example why, CNBCrecently highlighted a case of a woman who made some pretty stupid decisions and now is half a million dollars in debt:
Elisha Bokman has been out of school for eight years. Still, her student loan balance is half a million dollars.
Today, for her doctorate degree in naturopathic medicine and master’s in acupuncture from Bastyr University, she owes $499,322.69.
She and her husband struggled to buy a house because of her debt. Eventually, the financial stress led them to a divorce. “He felt like he couldn’t live his life or do the things he wanted to do,” Bokman, 38, said. She wanted to open her own medical practice, but she said her student debt prevents her from getting a business loan. [Emphasis added.]
If you haven’t noticed by the excerpt above, CNBC expects you to feel sorry for Ms. Bokman for making stupid life choices that left her in debt and divorced.
Then, to double down on examples in stupidity, CNBC shared another example of a person making a stupid decision:
Rebecca Grable loves her job as a pharmacy manager at Walgreens. But to study at the University of Oklahoma to become a doctor of pharmacy, she borrowed more than $310,000, and said the debt has limited her options. A few years ago, when she tried to buy a car, she said, more than 11 banks denied her a loan. [Emphasis added.]
If taxpayers are going to be forced to pay the tuition of people who choose to go to college, it won’t be long before taxpayers demand (it’s “democratic socialism,” remember?)–and the government will be forced to dictate–which types of degrees college kids will be allowed to get.
For example, instead of Ms. Bokman freely choosing to put herself in debt by pursuing her degrees in naturopathic medicine and acupuncture, if society (taxpayers) are going to be expected to fund her schooling, wouldn’t society be better served with her getting a degree (or certification) in a field that society actually needs (like plumbing or CNC machining)?
“The Committee Of Student Selection believes your test scores are high enough, Comrade Bokman, that you should be assigned to an engineering academy instead of acupuncture.”
Perhaps someone should ask Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren whether their plans will eventually incorporate the government determining what types of degrees people will be allowed to get…Or, better yet, can they guarantee that it won’t?
(CNSNews.com) - The number of border crossings have dropped by 43 percent since May, acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan said Wednesday.
Furthermore, the number of illegal immigrants in custody at border stations has dropped from 20,000 in June to less than 4,000 as of today.
“So those efforts are making progress - 43% reduction in crossings since May. We're hoping to continue the progress in August. I’ll be going back to Central America next week to try to build on that with El Salvador and Panama and really address this problem as a regional effort,” he told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday.
“On the first week of June, we had 20,000 people in custody in border stations. They're having a difficult time managing that overcrowding. This morning we have less than 4,000, and they're not staying with us very long. We're able to repatriate the single adults quickly. The unaccompanied children are going to a better situation with Health and Human Services,” McAleenan said.
Speaking about the recent attacks on ICE facilities across the country, the acting director said, “It does appear to be targeted, and again, as you just noted, this is the fourth incident of violence or an issue at an ICE facility, and our top priority is the safety of our men and women who are out there protecting American communities.
“I really appreciate the quick response of the FBI. The state and locals are going to be investigating this, but we got to find this perpetrator, and we’ve got to insure this can't happen again,” he said.
“I think the environment where we're demonizing law enforcement for doing their jobs, enforcing the laws on the books is concerning. It can be dangerous, and it can result in people taking actions that are not supported by the facts, that are not in response to anything inappropriate, that our men and women of ICE and enforcement removal operations are doing. I think we’ve got to tone that down, absolutely,” McAleenan said.
Moments in Memory: Abortion debate in 1990s splits Chattanooga, closes women's clinic
NOTE: I was blessed several years to tour this amazing place and hear the story firsthand of how it came to be and some of the stories about those who have come there to greive, or heal, or whatever helps them to come to terms with what happend. It felt ike a very Holy place to me.
August 4th, 2019by Davis Lundyin Local Regional NEWS
Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. To read more, visit timesfreepress.com/150years.
The Jan. 22, 1989, banner headline in the Sunday News-Free Press read, "70 ARRESTED AT ABORTION SITE."
The May 1, 1993, headline on the front page in the News-Free Press read, "Pro-Lifers Win Bid Battle, Paying $294,000 For Clinic."
Those two headlines bookend nearly a decadelong effort by a collection of evangelical Christians to close Chattanooga's only abortion clinic. The battle saw three different occasions when protesters were arrested for blocking the entrance to the clinic on Vance Road in Brainerd, and an unexpected ending that gave the Chattanooga Times and Chattanooga News-Free Press ample opportunities to chronicle the ongoing debate.
Patricia Lindley, Dr. Dennis Bizzoco and Mike Jennings were all at the epicenter of the effort by a loosely knit group of evangelical Christians who shut down Chattanooga's only abortion clinic in 1993.
Document: Chattanooga Times Free Press archives
The front page of the Saturday, May 1, 1993, edition of the Chattanooga News-Free Press reports on a successful bid by a pro-life group to purchase the Chattanooga Women's Clinic.
There were others, to be sure, who can tell the story as well as Lindley, Bizzoco and Jennings, who gathered recently to remember a time three decades ago when, in a single day, Chattanooga became the largest city in America without a practicing abortion clinic.
The trio played central roles between the mid-1980s when the anti-abortion movement began protesting at the Chattanooga Women's Clinic and May 1, 1993, the day the anti-abortion movement bought the Chattanooga Women's Clinic out of bankruptcy court and put it out of business.
Lindley was the public face of the movement, Bizzoco a passionate protester and Jennings a lawyer. They talked and laughed around a breakroom table in Bizzoco's podiatry practice like three high school friends gathering at a 30-year reunion.
"Wow, we've really gotten older," said Lindley, who was the first liver transplant recipient at Emory University in 1994 and has many times over defied the life expectations for liver transplant patients. "It's just good to be here."
All three agree 1989 was a year when the broader Chattanooga community became aware of the efforts to stop abortions at the clinic, but the genesis of the effort began in 1985. Then, a small group from various churches had begun praying on the public right of way in front of the clinic and offering counseling to women arriving for appointments. They were on site each day the clinic was open.
At the same time, AAA Women's Services, a crisis pregnancy center, opened across the street from the clinic on Vance Road. It remains in business today as Choices Chattanooga and is located in half of the former abortion clinic. The other half houses the National Memorial for the Unborn, a place where about 3,800 plaques are placed by women and families in memory of their unborn children.
"Operation Rescue and arrests were happening across the nation," Jennings said. "We had a group here. There was a group of sidewalk counselors, AAA, Bethany Christian Services for adoptions and a student group at UTC."
The focus of attention at the clinic resulted in court actions to the point where Chancellor Howell Peoples had a white line painted on the sidewalk.
On Jan. 22, National Sanctity of Human Life Day, the group that would go on to become the Pro-Life Majority Coalition of Chattanooga (PROMACC) seven months later, organized an anti-abortion rally that led to the first arrests at the women's clinic.
The rally had been planned for a parking lot at Provident, now Unum, donated by the Maclellan family.
"When we started publicizing it, some other powers-to-be objected, and we had to move it at the last minute to CCS [Chattanooga Christian School]," Lindley said. "We still had several hundred people."
Later, Bizzoco and 76 others crossed the white line and blocked the entrance to the clinic. There was no violence. All were arrested and the charges were dismissed in city court.
"Police Chief [Gene] McCutcheon read each of us our rights three times," Bizzoco said.
Three months later, around 20 more were arrested, again for blocking the entrance and again without violence; four spent five days in Silverdale Detention Center. In October 1989, more protests and more arrests. Eight protesters would go to trial in September 1990. Bizzoco was arrested each time but didn't go to jail or to trial.
"I had a good lawyer," he laughs, referring to Jennings.
Jennings' law partner, Hoyt Samples, was the lead attorney for the arrested protestors in a trial before the late Judge Doug Meyer. A jury was seated, and pretrial motions heard on Sept. 13. Meyer told Samples and Jennings that they would not be able to use the necessity defense.
"The defense was the common defense around the country of those arrested at abortion clinics," said Jennings. "It simply said it was OK to violate the law if you are acting out of necessity to prevent a greater offense. Hoyt and I gathered the defendants in an adjacent, empty courtroom and said, 'You are all going to jail. That was our only defense.'"
That Thursday night, an anti-abortion volunteer gave Jennings a schedule from the clinic found while legally searching through a dumpster. The schedule showed the clinic had been performing second-trimester procedures, which was against Tennessee law. On Friday, presented with that evidence, Meyer reversed course and allowed the necessity defense. The clinic business manager confirmed under oath that second-trimester abortions had been performed on Vance Road. The prosecutors asked for a recess.
"That trial never reconvened," Jennings said.
"God used ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results," Hoyt said. "If there was no reason that I went to law school other than to try that case, that was enough."
Two years later, Bizzoco offered to buy the clinic from Porter Yarbrough, a local Realtor who owned the property. Bizzoco didn't have the money. Failing health led Yarbrough to file for bankruptcy, and the clinic was listed as an asset.
PROMACC officials did not know the property was in bankruptcy until Thursday, April 22, 1993. A local physician who was a creditor in the bankruptcy called a friend at PROMACC and told him of the bankruptcy and that the physician running the clinic had placed a bid to buy the clinic.
The board was scheduled for its quarterly meeting that night. Jennings, the group's treasurer, said there was less than $1,000 in PROMACC's bank account. The entire meeting focused on how to raise money to buy the clinic and close it permanently. Board members used their network to seek funds.
"It just started pouring in," Lindley said.
There was a single $100,000 donation and the rest in smaller amounts. By Monday, April 26, PROMACC had enough money to inform the bankruptcy court that it would make a counter offer. The next Friday morning, Jennings sat in bankruptcy court as motions on all cases, including the clinic case, were heard.
"The room was full of bankruptcy attorneys who saw what was going on in our case," said Jennings. "I was sitting on the front row, and one of them came up to me and whispered, 'I'm good for $10,000 if you need it.' If we hadn't had that pledge, we would not have had enough money."
The judge, acknowledging two legitimate bids, set an auction for Friday afternoon that would begin at the existing offer of $264,000 and go up from there in $5,000 increments. The limit for PROMACC was pre-determined to be $294,000. Four bids got the group to $294,000, and the physician did not counter.
"If he had gone one step further, we were done," said Jennings, who testified in the morning and was called one of the "street rowdies" creating problems. "What happened in a week is the one thing in my life that I can point to and say, 'You cannot explain this in any way without God.' You simply cannot come up with any explanation of how that money and those events came together."
The owners of the clinic, Sue Crawley and Fran Muzzoco, both died in 1993. Yarbrough, owner of the building and property, died in 2011. Dr. Ed Perry, who sought to buy the clinic in bankruptcy after the owners' deaths, died in 2015.
Planned Parenthood of Tennessee North Mississippi did not respond to a request for comment, nor did attorneys involved in the legal cases.
The Sunday News-Free Press, which sold for $1.25 at the time, reported that "approximately 70" protesters were arrested at the clinic on Saturday, Jan. 21. The newspaper featured a two-column picture over its six-column layout that showed law enforcement carrying one man off the clinic site.
The report's fourth paragraph reads, "'The party is over folks,' said Mr. [Bill] Tickel. He said 1988 was the abortion clinic's 'last good year.'" Tickel was the local leader of anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
The story continued, "The protesters, who were arrested over a two-hour time span, were all charged with criminal trespass and taken to City Jail in police vehicles ranging from patrol cars to converted school buses to converted commercial buses."
The Chattanooga Times, which sold for 25 cents an issue, did not publish on Sunday in 1989 as part of the joint operating agreement with the News-Free Press. A day behind the story, the paper's editors pivoted to a National Sanctity of Life Sunday rally in Bradley County, Tennessee, to lead its report. The third paragraph summarized what happened the previous Saturday.
"That service, and a small protest in downtown Chattanooga, came a day after about six dozen protesters were arrested on charges of criminal trespassing at a Chattanooga clinic where abortions are performed," it states.
In September of 1990, both newspapers reported on the trial of the protesters arrested in October 1990.
"Abortion labeled as real issue in trial of 8 clinic protesters," the second paragraph said. "But the real battle, that for public opinion, is being fought in the hallway outside the courtroom."
"There — away from the watchful eye of Criminal Court Judge Doug Meyer, who has slapped a gag order on defendants and attorneys — supporters of the defendants are arguing that the issue here is abortion, not trespass."
When the trial ended abruptly the next day, the News-Free Press displayed a four-column picture of Samples introducing the defendants to the jury with Jennings sitting to his side. The headline and subhead said, "Appeal Halts 8 Pro-Lifers' Trial."
"Judge Would Allow Testimony on 'Illegal Abortions'" was the secondary headline.
The next morning headline in the Times read, "Protesters' case ends in mistrial."
Thirty-three months later, the News-Free Press ran its headline regarding PROMACC buying the clinic. The Saturday morning Times led its paper with the headline, "Pro-life group buys clinic." The report's lead two paragraphs said:
"Since the Chattanooga Women's Clinic opened almost 20 years ago, anti-abortion rights activists have prayed, picketed and preached outside the facility's doors, hoping to turn away patients wanting abortions — and maybe, one day — close the facility down.
"Friday, a local anti-abortion group decided if it couldn't beat 'em, it would buy 'em.'"
(Natural News) Thanks to the incessant Left-wing counter-culture social engineering and increasing levels of violence and bullying, more American parents are pulling their kids out of failing government schools and teaching them at home.
As reported by The Washington Times, the recent school shooting at Parkland, Fla., was the last straw for scores of parents. The paper noted that “the phones started ringing at the Texas Home School Coalition, and they haven’t stopped yet.”
The Times added:
The Lubbock-based organization has been swamped with inquiries for months from parents seeking safer options for their kids in the aftermath of this year’s deadly school massacres, first in Parkland and then in Santa Fe, Texas.
“When the Parkland shooting happened, our phone calls and emails exploded,” said coalition president Tim Lambert. “In the last couple of months, our numbers have doubled. We’re dealing with probably between 1,200 and 1,400 calls and emails per month, and prior to that it was 600 to 700.”
While the debate rages anew over familiar topics following such tragedies — tougher, more restrictive gun control laws and bolstering security at public schools — the revolution in homeschooling has been taking place quietly, behind the scenes and off the radar screens of most political organizations.
Much of this is due to outright negligence on the part of local government-controlled schools. In the case of Parkland, for instance, the accused shooter — Nikolas Cruz — was a known threat to the community (and the FBI), but he was nevertheless placed in an Obama-era program called PROMISE, which was originally aimed at shielding “minority” school kids from arrest and prosecution for certain crimes.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Superintendent Robert Runcie initially said that no, Cruz wasn’t in the program — which was a lie. He was.
“One of the things we’ve seen definitely an uptick in the last five years is the aspect of violence. It’s the bullying. That is off the charts,” Chin told The Times, citing a primary reason parents are more concerned today than ever about leaving their kids in a public school.
The Left is driving more kids OUT of public schools
There is also the Left-wing social engineering. The craziness over transgender students and bathrooms/locker rooms, allowing students to “take a knee” during the playing of the National Anthem, the Left-wing curriculum, and refusing to allow students to wear shirts that praise POTUS Trump or feature the American flag are also driving parents into homeschooling.
The violence, though, is the biggest issue.
Brian D. Ray, who heads up the National Home Education Research Institute, in Salem, Oregon, who’s conducted homeschooling research for 33 years, told The Times that concern over school safety has reached the top of the charts for most parents.
The times noted:
He said the top three reasons that parents choose homeschooling are a desire to provide religious instruction or different values than those offered in public schools; dissatisfaction with the academic curriculum, and worries about the school environment.
“Most parents homeschool for more than one reason,” Ray told the paper. “But when we ask families why do they homeschool, near the top nowadays is concern about the environment of schools, and that includes safety, pressure to get into drugs, pressure to get into sexual activity. It includes all of that.”
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 1.69 million kids between the ages of 5 and 17 were homeschooled, based on spring 2016 numbers. And that data comes just from the 15 states that track homeschooling, as well as Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix).
That number is only going to increase unless the Trump administration can reverse decades of Alt-Left manipulation.
Read more about mass school shootings at Shootings.news.
J.D. Heyes is editor of The National Sentinel and a senior writer for Natural News and News Target.
A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience provides additional evidence of the harmful biological and behavioral effects of drug-induced abortion.
Using rat subjects, the study “strongly suggest that pregnancy termination at mid-term (first-trimester human equivalent) induces significant negative biological and behavioral changes in the rat.” The study found that drug-induced abortion presented more negative effects than a spontaneous abortion through miscarriage. Finally, the study found there were positive benefits to carrying the baby to term.
Mifepristone, when used together with misoprostol, can be administered up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy when the baby has a beating heart and arms and legs. The first pill in the regimen, mifepristone, cuts off blood and nutrients to the baby, slowly starving it to death over one to two days. The second pill induces labor.
As of December 31, 2018, there have been 24 reported deaths of women in the United States associated with mifepristone since U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in September 2000. This includes two cases of ectopic pregnancy resulting in death and eight fatal cases of severe systemic infection (also called sepsis). There have also been nearly 600 women experiencing such severe blood loss that they required transfusions. A 2014 report from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute estimated that abortion drugs were used for 23 percent of all abortions—an increase from 17 percent in 2008.
The Franciscan University three-year study, which was conducted by a team of behavioral neuroscientists who do not have ties to the abortion industry, clearly indicates that there are negative consequences such as depression, anxiety, loss of appetite and decreased self-care after terminating a viable pregnancy using mifepristone and misoprostol.
Dr. Stephen Sammut, a neuroscientist and psychology professor at Franciscan University who led the research, explained that rats are commonly used in these types of studies because of their similarities in physiology and neurophysiology to humans. “This is breaking new ground. In the animal model, we observed depression-like behaviors and we saw anxiety-like behaviors. The biochemistry indicated potentially long-term effects,” said Sammut.
According to Sammut, the findings suggest that social pressure or stigmas—long suggested as cause of depression and anxiety in women who have had abortions—do not adequately explain the potential adverse effects caused by abortion-inducing drugs. “There is something more than social pressure on a person who feels depressed after an abortion. There are potential physiological consequences that have not been investigated,” said Sammut, whose team plans to continue studying the effects of the drugs.
Battleground no longer: Here’s the Almanac of American Politics’ overview of Tennessee
The latest version of the Almanac of American Politics declares Tennessee’s battleground days to be in the past. The folks over at the Almanac have graciously given the TNJ: On the Hill blog permission to post this sneak peak at the state profile to be published in the latest edition, which comes out in August. Stay tuned for a profile of first-year Gov. Bill Lee later this week.
Tennessee, once a political battleground, is no longer. It has become one of the most solidly Republican states in the country, with just a few pockets of blue in its biggest cities. And while Tennessee has long been home to an influential strain of moderate Republicanism, two of the tradition’s prime exemplars — Sen. Bob Corker and Gov. Bill Haslam — are now out of politics, succeeded in 2018 by harder-edge conservative Republicans. A third, Sen. Lamar Alexander, announced that he would not run in 2020, leaving another seat likely to be filled by a more ideological warrior. Tennessee is almost 500 miles across, closer in the east to Dover Delaware than to Memphis, and closer in the west to Dallas Texas than to Johnson City. It has had a fighting temperament since the days before the Revolutionary War, when the first settlers crossed the Appalachian ridges and headed for the rolling country in the watersheds of the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Tennessee became a state in 1796, the third state after the original 13. Its first congressman was a 29-year-old lawyer who was the son of Scots-Irish immigrants: Andrew Jackson. Jackson, who killed two men in duels, was a general who led Tennessee volunteers — it’s still called the Volunteer State –to battle against the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 and against the British at New Orleans in 1815. He was the first president from an interior state, elected in 1828 and 1832, and was a founder of the Democratic Party, now the oldest political party in the world. Jackson was a strong advocate of the union, but 16 years to the day after his death, Tennessee voted to join the Confederacy. (Today, Jackson’s own party largely disowns him, while President Donald Trump made a pilgrimage to his gravesite and keeps his portrait in a prominent spot in the White House.)
A visitor walks by the tomb of James K. Polk tomb in Nashville on March 13, 2018. (Erik Schelzig, Tennessee Journal)
Tennessee is a state with a certain civility: Both Confederate and Union generals paid respectful calls on Sarah Polk, the widow of President James K. Polk who stayed carefully neutral, in her Nashville mansion. Yet it was better known as a cultural battleground for much of the 20th century. On one side were the Fugitives, writers like John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, who contributed to “I’ll Take My Stand,” a manifesto calling for retaining the South’s rural economy and heritage. (Today, the state ranks fourth in tobacco production and in the top five states for tomatoes and snap beans.) Tennessee is also known for the momentous 1925 trial in Dayton in which high school biology teacher John T. Scopes defied a state ban on teaching evolution in public schools. In 1960, John Lewis, a student at Nashville’s Fisk University, organized sit-in protests at segregated lunch counters at Kress, Woolworth and McClellan stores. The protests sparked confrontations, arrests and ultimately a bombing that destroyed the home of the defense attorney for the protesters. That prompted Nashville Mayor Ben West to make a public appeal calling for an end to discrimination in the city. Within a few weeks, stores began to integrate their lunch counters and Nashville later became the first major city in the South to desegregate public facilities. The campaign became a template for student-run civil rights efforts throughout the South that Lewis, who eventually became a Georgia congressman, would heroically lead. Against this backdrop were business leaders who created the first supermarket (Piggly Wiggly), Holiday Inn and Moon Pies, and who made FedEx a global leader. The New Deal-era creation of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority also provided the state with bountiful energy, from a mix of coal, nuclear and hydropower plants.
Music is another strong Tennessee tradition. East Tennessee is one of the original homes of bluegrass music and mountain fiddling. Gospel music has long been centered in Nashville, which is also home to the Southern Baptist Convention and a center for religious publishing; justifiably, Nashville is known as the “buckle of the Bible Belt.” Country music got its commercial start in Nashville, with broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry from Ryman Auditorium in 1925, and it remains the capital of country music today. The Mississippi lowlands around Memphis, which is economically and culturally the metropolis of the Mississippi Delta, gave birth to the blues in the years from 1890 to 1920, and the blues were in turn the inspiration for Elvis Presley and countless other rock n’ roll musicians beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Presley’s Graceland mansion is now one of the country’s major tourist destinations.
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Maryville), left, and Gov. Bill Haslam attend an event at the state Capitol in Nashville. (Erik Schelzig, Tennessee Journal)
While Tennessee’s economy trailed the nation’s through much of the 20th century, its open climate for entrepreneurism enabled it to grow mightily in the 1980s and 1990s. The absence of strong unions made Tennessee attractive, as did the relative lack of bitter racial discord, with the obvious exception being the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968. Alexander, governor through most of the 1980s, was a deft salesman in his efforts to bring foreign auto plants to Middle Tennessee; Nissan opened a plant in Smyrna, south of Nashville, where the land was flat and the bedrock was strong. It has since built another and relocated its U.S. headquarters to Tennessee. Volkswagen built a $1 billion “green” plant for the Passat in Chattanooga that, after a $900 million investment, is now being used to build the Atlas, a new midsize crossover SUV. Among domestic producers, General Motors built the short-lived Saturn, a cult favorite, at Spring Hill; the plant is now producing the GMC Acadia SUV and the Cadillac XT6. All told, the state’s factories now produce a new car every 20 seconds, and the broader auto industry, including suppliers, employs 134,000 people at more than 900 establishments in 88 of the state’s 95 counties. Automotive exports totaled $5.8 billion in 2017, up 59 percent since 2010.
The state’s population has grown 6.5 percent since 2010, with especially rapid expansion in the Nashville area. Davidson County grew by 10.7 percent, while suburban Rutherford and Williamson counties increased by 19.1 percent and 21.7 percent, respectively. In 2018, the economic-analysis firm POLICOM rated Nashville fourth among the nation’s metro areas in “economic strength,” up from 10th the previous two years. Meanwhile, the populations of Knox County (Knoxville) and Hamilton County (Chattanooga) grew by mid-to-high single digit percentages during the same span; among big counties, only Shelby County (Memphis) lagged with growth of 1.6 percent. Tennessee’s population is 17 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic; it has almost 327,000 immigrants, about 5 percent of the state population. Tennessee ranks among the bottom 10 states in median income and in the attainment of bachelor’s degrees, and the 2018 edition of America’s Health Rankings placed Tennessee 42nd in overall health status, due in part to high rates of obesity and smoking. In 2018, the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy rated Tennessee’s tax system the nation’s sixth most regressive, thanks in large part to its heavy reliance on the sales tax, which does not exempt food and clothing. Tennesseans seem to prefer it. In 2014, voters by an almost a 2-1 margin ratified a constitutional amendment banning the adoption of any state or local personal income or payroll tax.
For more than a century, Tennessee’s political divisions were rooted in Civil War loyalties. In two referenda on secession (one that failed in February 1861 and one that embraced it in June after the attack on Fort Sumter) most East Tennessee counties voted heavily for the Union and have remained heavily Republican ever since. Pro-secession counties in Middle and West Tennessee long voted heavily Democratic. Reform-minded liberal Democrats Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. became national figures, with reliable enough backing from Tennessee’s yellow-dog Democratic majority to vote for civil rights bills. Gore was defeated in 1970, but he lived to see his son twice elected vice president before his death in 1998. As the Democrats’ cultural liberalism strained the ancestral loyalties of rural voters in West and Middle Tennessee, and as the surging growth in the ring of counties around Nashville created a new voting bloc that was conservative both economically and culturally, Republicans gained the upper hand. In 2004, as George W. Bush was handily carrying the state, Tennessee voters elected a Republican majority in the state Senate. By 2012, with President Barack Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket, Republicans won supermajorities in both chambers. In the space of a decade, Democrats went from controlling all three branches of state government to barely being relevant in the capital. Now, the American Conservative Union ranks the Tennessee legislature as the nation’s most conservative. The rump Democratic Party has become largely urban and more progressive as old-style conservative Democrats have died or become Republicans. The only significant base of power for Democrats at the moment is in mayoral offices, which they now hold in Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville. This political lineup was reinforced in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won by 26 points.
Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn speaks at a rally in Franklin on Oct. 17, 2018. (Erik Schelzig, Tennessee Journal)
The 2018 elections may have represented a death blow to a long tradition of pragmatic, technocratic Republicanism. On the strength of Republican support in rural and exurban areas, the GOP candidates for senator and governor-Rep. Marsha Blackburn and businessman Bill Lee-won their races by 11 and 21 points, respectively. The winning party label may not have changed, but the brand of Republicanism did. Both Blackburn and Lee, along with the incoming state House speaker, Glen Casada, hail from Williamson County in Middle Tennessee, and all of them articulate a more confrontational message than was typical of politicians in the East Tennessee mold, such as former Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker, former Sen. Bill Brock, Alexander, Corker and Haslam. Places like Williamson County are “white, affluent and in the past decade have been a breeding ground for Tea Party supporters,” wrote Tennessee political journalist Steve Cavendish. Just months into his speakership, Casada said he would step down in August amid controversy over lewd text messages.
The other pattern that can be seen in the 2018 electoral returns is the widening divergence between Tennessee’s rural and urban areas. Even as moderate former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen was losing the Senate race to Blackburn by double digits, he performed strongly in the state’s most populous counties. Between the 2012 and 2018 Senate races, Bredesen not only flipped Davidson County, where he had served as mayor of Nashville, but he shifted the county’s margin of victory 46 percentage points in the Democrats’ direction. In strongly Democratic Shelby County, Bredesen shifted the Democratic margin of victory by 25 percentage points, and while Blackburn did manage to win both Hamilton and Knox counties, the former governor whittled the GOP margins of victory in those counties by 36 and 44 percentage points, respectively. Even in Williamson County, Blackburn’s home base, the GOP margin of victory fell from 59 points in the 2012 Senate race to 19 points in the 2018 race, with Bredesen jolting the Democratic vote total by 150 percent. Still, the outlook remains grim for Democrats. The performance of Karl Dean, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, lagged Bredesen’s, and even the gains notched in the Senate race by Bredesen — an unusually well-known and respected candidate — weren’t enough to come within single digits of Blackburn. Prior to the election, the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin framed the Senate race as “a test of whether Tennessee will remain politically distinct or become just one more reliably red bastion, like Mississippi to the south or Kentucky to the north.” For now, it looks like the latter.
Copyright @ 2019 The Almanac of American Politics. This feature was provided by and is included in The Almanac of American Politics 2020 edition set to be released August 2019. To learn more about this publication or purchase a copy, visit www.almanacofamericanpolitics.com.
NBC News: ‘Growing Number’ of Pregnant Migrants Waiting to Deliver Anchor Babies in U.S.
A “growing number” of pregnant migrants from across Central America are waiting in Mexico as they hope to deliver their babies in the United States to secure them birthright citizenship, NBC News reports.
A report by NBC Newschronicles how pregnant migrant women are increasingly flowing into shelters in Mexico along the southern border as the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy mandates they wait there while their asylum claims are reviewed.
NBC News reports:
A growing number of expectant mothers are among the migrants coming in daily from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador — even Haiti — to more than 30 already overflowing shelters in Tijuana, Mexico. [Emphasis added]
“More women are arriving pregnant or with babies,” said pastor Gustavo Banda of the Embajadores de Jesús (Ambassadors of Jesus) church, which operates a shelter in Cañón del Alacrán (Scorpion’s Canyon) on the outskirts of Tijuana. “We have a lot of Haitian women and some Central American.” [Emphasis added]
…
It’s a period of great anxiety, if only because many want their children born in the United States. The U.S. Constitution guarantees that every child born on American soil automatically becomes a U.S. citizen. Mexico also offers birthright citizenship, but it’s not exactly the same: A child born in Mexico, regardless of their parents’ nationalities, automatically becomes a Mexican citizen when they turn 18. [Empahsis added]
The report sheds light on the dangerous journey that pregnant migrants endure, often risking their lives and their unborn child’s life, to attempt to deliver their baby in the U.S. to secure American citizenship.
In Chicago, Illinois, as Breitbart News recently reported, pregnant women from the Middle East traveled hours to deliver their babies in the U.S. and thus securing them American citizenship.
For illegal aliens, the birthright citizenship policy is particularly enticing as their U.S-born children are granted citizenship despite the parents having broken federal immigration law. The Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled that the children of illegal aliens must be granted birthright citizenship and many legal scholars dispute the idea.
The children of illegal aliens, after being granted birthright citizenship, are able to anchor their illegal alien and noncitizen parents in the U.S. and eventually are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country through the legal immigration process known as “chain migration.”
Today, there are at least 4.5 million anchor babies in the U.S., exceeding the annual roughly four million American babies born every year and costing American taxpayers about $2.4 billion every year to subsidize hospital costs.
In the sanctuary state of California, there are at least 1.2 million anchor babies under the age of 18, as Breitbart News reported. This is about twice the total population of Wyoming. The total of anchor babies under the age of 18 in ten U.S. states is more than four times the population of Boston, Massachusetts.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Parents Confronting Library Over Sex-Game/Toy Events Forcibly Removed
Elizabeth Johnston is the "Activist Mommy" that leftist media blame for putting a library event in Washington on a national protest agenda even as the same media claim the event took place without controversy as a celebration of "pride month." (Charisma News photo)
A library in Renton, Washington, hosted and promoted a pro-homosexual, pro-transsexual youth event celebrating June as so-called pride month, including sex toys and sexual instruction games among the activities offered.
When parents found out and intervened, library officials called police in order to have them forcibly removed from the premises.
The library billed the event a “pride celebration designed by teens for teens” promising “free lunch and dinner! Fun crafts! Loads of activities! Open mic! Karaoke! Advice panels, Safer sex presentations! A drag show! Free swag!”
Some parents who intervened refused to leave when library officials told them to do so, and library officials refused to address parental concerns, according to conservative commentator Todd Starnes who interviewed one of the moms, Lynn Meagher.
“A number of concerned citizens showed up at the King County library wondering what in the name of Dewey Decimal was going on,” Starnes said.
Goodie-bags are a common experience at events with vendor tables where attendees can go by and pick up free stuff, like book markers in the shape of a penis that uses sexual innuendo to communicate sexually aggressive messages. (Guide photo)
“But when the parents started asking questions, librarians called the police and the concerned citizens were physically removed from the property.”
Starnes said that Meagher was offended by the library demeanor, but she was absolutely appalled by what she saw happening as children selected condoms and lubricants from a goodie-bag table and some entered a raffle for free “chest binders” that help girls keep their developing breasts from showing.
The use of the chest binders is for supporting the idea that girls can alter their bodies and become male.
“The entire event was about sex,” Meagher said to Starnes on a recorded podcast interview. “The vendor tables were covered with condoms, lube, bookmarks shaped like an erect penis – all sorts of other sexual information.”
Starnes apologized for the graphic nature of the facts being exposed, “but it is important for you to understand the vile filth that these librarians spewed into the minds of the children,” he said.
AT AROUND 5 P.M. THE LIBRARIANS ANNOUNCED THAT THE BUILDING WAS BEING CLOSED AND ALL ADULTS WOULD NEED TO LEAVE THE BUILDING UNLESS THEIR CHILDREN WANTED THEM TO STAY
Conservative Commentator Todd Starnes
“Public libraries are being turned into indoctrination centers for the LGBT movement,” he added. “Parents and taxpayers should be absolutely concerned about what is going on between the stacks, behind closed doors.”
From what Meagher described, Starnes concluded that the police took action against the wrong people. The parents were told to leave as the events turned to evening scheduled drag performances that children as young as 10 would see.
Starnes noted it was at, “around 5 p.m. the librarians announced that the building was being closed and all adults would need to leave the building, unless their children wanted them to stay.”
Numerous parents were forcibly removed at that point.
