Further evidence that the business model of Fox News is to feed -- and then feed upon -- the paranoia of its gullible audience:
The Judicial Watch report, which cited an unnamed Mexican Army officer and a Mexican police inspector, raises new fears that the fight with ISIS is closer to the U.S. than previously thought.
The report identified the locations of the two bases, and said one is as close as 8 miles from Texas in a town west of Juarez. Mexican authorities found possible evidence -- plans written in Arabic and Urdu -- last week in the town of "Anapra," the sources said. These sources told the watchdog that "coyotes" who work for drug cartels assist in smuggling terrorists between Fort Hancock, Texas, and other undisclosed locations."
I'm not sure which explanation for that story is more disturbing: That supposedly professional "journalists" at Fox filed that story because they believe that such a cock-and-bull story is credible, or that they know it's BS but publish it anyway. The options, in short, are between utter incompetence and complete cynicism. I report, you decide.
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Back in 2011, the Georgia General Assembly adopted legislation allowing health insurance to be sold to Georgians across state lines, thus implementing one of the core conservative alternatives to ObamaCare. As I reported back in February, the total number of health-care policies sold under that legislation in the past four years has been ... zero.
By comparison, the health-insurance exchange that then-House Speaker Marco Rubio pushed to create back in 2008 for the state of Florida must be deemed an enormous success. Florida Health Choices offers health-insurance products free of government regulations such as mandated coverage of certain procedures. “It’s about competition, it’s about choice, and it’s about the marketplace,” Rubio bragged at the time.
Politico checked to see how the program is faring:
"By the Feb. 15 Obamacare enrollment deadline, Florida Health Choices had signed up 56 individuals, and as of the middle of this week it had gained 24 more, CEO Rose Naff said in an interview. The state has set aside $2.4 million for the exchange since 2008 — an initial $1.5 million infusion that year and $900,000 in 2013."
So, seven years, $2.4 million, 80 customers. "It's about the marketplace," as Rubio put it, and it seems to me the marketplace has spoken. Meanwhile, in Washington, Republicans have yet to offer a replacement plan for ObamaCare.
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According to the Winston-Salem Journal, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry and her husband, James Perry, have been hit with tax liens for about $70,000 in unpaid back taxes by the IRS.
Not surprisingly -- and probably justifiably -- the news has brought scorn and derision from conservative news sources such as Breitbart. I'm certainly not going to try to defend Harris-Perry and her husband -- they owe the taxes and they ought to pay them.
But frankly, I thought that tax-dodging might have made Harris-Perry into something of a cult hero to the anti-IRS, "don't tread on me" right. It was just last week that another such hero, Cliven Bundy, held a party with supporters to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their armed standoff with federal officials who were trying to collect delinquent grazing fees that Bundy owed Uncle Sam.
"We want to make a statement that we’re still here, ranching on Nevada land," Bundy said in announcing the gathering. "The federal government hasn’t made any kind of moves.”
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ROME (AP) — Italy's migration crisis took on a deadly new twist Thursday as police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants had thrown 12 Christians overboard during a recent crossing from Libya ....
Palermo police said they had detained 15 people suspected in the high seas assault, which they learned of while interviewing tearful survivors from Nigeria and Ghana who had arrived in Palermo Wednesday morning after being rescued at sea by the ship Ellensborg.
The 15 were accused of multiple homicide aggravated by religious hatred, police said in a statement."
The Christians were reportedly refugees from Nigeria and Ghana. The 15 murder suspects were from Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea Bissau. Such stories will inevitably fuel calls demanding that Christians respond in kind to Muslims and recognize that some sort of religious war is underway between the groups. I'm not sure that's the reaction that Jesus would recommend.
Instead, it seem to me that the murder suspects were ignorant, uneducated and brutal, and that the better solution is to fight ignorance, lack of education and a rush to violence. The alternative would be to succumb to such forces, to become what we claim to abhor. That is the reaction of the weak, not of the strong and confident.
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