Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa claimed on Sunday that she’d seen no evidence thus far that Iran posed a direct and present threat to the United States — and CNN Republican commentator Scott Jennings fired back immediately. During a panel discussion on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Jennings pointed to decades of Iranian threats against Americans, American interests, and allies, saying that they amounted to a nearly-constant threat. WATCH: ?NEW: @ScottJenningsKY FIRES BACK at ex-DNC spox who suggests it wasn’t apparent Iran posed direct threat to U.S.?? “You’re arguing that after 46 years of the Iranian regime killing Americans, threatening Americans, saying over and over and over again, ‘Death to America,’ that… pic.twitter.com/1qzHuBYnap — Jason Cohen ?? (@JasonJournoDC) June 22, 2025 Hinojosa raised the question of President Donald Trump’s authority to act in striking Iranian nuclear targets on Saturday, arguing that without a clear and present threat to the United States, he had no authority to take such and action without first going through Congress. “Normally you would need Congressional approval for something like this,” she said. “And I know that my friend here is laughing a little bit, but —” “Yes, I am laughing,” Jennings interjected. “In order for the president to take action without congressional approval, he needed to show a real true threat to the United States and that the strike would not cause escalation,” Hinojosa continued, going on to claim that Trump had failed to present any kind of legal justification for the strike. “So what will be critical in the weeks to come is Congress must see the underlying intelligence about how they were in direct threat and how the U.S. needed to respond without Congressional approval, but as of right now, I have not seen that,” she declared. “You’re arguing that after 46 years of the Iranian regime killing Americans, threatening Americans, saying over and over and over again, ‘Death to America,’ that maybe they just didn’t mean it?” Jennings replied. “That they’re fiery but mostly peaceful Iranian butchers? I mean, I don’t understand! This is a righteous strike!”

Republicans are roasting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for suggesting on Saturday evening that President Donald Trump should be impeached for ordering strikes on three facilities in Iran to prevent that country from achieving nuclear weapons. “The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers,” the high-profile member of the leftist “Squad” declared in a post on X. “He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene quickly shot back at Ocasio-Cortez. “Shut up you pathetic little hypocrite,” Greene said on X. “YOU fully supported our military and IC running the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. And you VOTED to fund the Ukraine war under your President with dementia. You don’t get to play anti-war and moral outrage anymore.” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) contended on Fox News that Democrats did call for impeachment after former President Barack Obama attacked Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen during his tenure. “For my colleagues that are now demanding impeachment, it’s absolutely absurd … these folks are truly reaching new levels of Trump derangement in the aftermath of yesterday’s decision,” he added, alluding to what has become widely known as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Dan Turrentine, who worked for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she was serving as a Senator from New York, agreed that the action was not impeachable — and decried his Democratic colleagues who were asserting that it was. “It was too depressing to write this last night, after we got off air, so I went to bed. But, it needs to be said by more Democrats: this was not an impeachable offense, and Trump did not need congressional approval for one precision attack under the circumstances, just as Obama did not when striking Bin Laden,” he posted early on Sunday. “Why can’t our Party just say it’s great we achieved the objective and destroyed Iran’s nuclear sites, God bless the soldiers who carried this out and made it home safely, God bless our country, military, allies, and we look forward to a full intel briefing.” “If one must then assert Congressional authority at the moment, add that any escalation will require congressional approval. And if you must, express concern for where this may go and what might come next. But, for so many in my Party to knee jerk with unhinged calls for impeachment — and sadly omit in their statement support for Iran not having nuclear weapons, which has been a principle of our Party for 40 years — is truly TDS,” he added. It was too depressing to write this last night, after we got off air, so I went to bed. But, it needs to be said by more Democrats: this was not an impeachable offense, and Trump did not need congressional approval for one precision attack under the circumstances, just as Obama… — dan turrentine (@danturrentine) June 22, 2025 During his first term, Trump was impeached twice when the Democrats commanded the House. One inquiry dealt with Ukraine, and the other with January 6. Both efforts ended in acquittal by a GOP-led Senate. Some Democrats have already been pushing for Trump to be impeached in his second administration, including for “dastardly deeds,” but they are powerless to press ahead because Republicans control both chambers of Congress. However, that could change after next year’s midterm elections, as noted by Sen. James Lankford (R-LA) during an interview on “Fox News Sunday” with anchor Shannon Bream. “If Democrats get control of Congress, we are most certainly headed towards impeachment again. That has been the playbook that they’ve played twice on President Trump. So, certainly, if they get control of Congress in this next election, they will work towards impeachment. That’s their favorite play to be able to do,” Lankford said.

Things are changing rapidly at home décor retailer At Home. The company announced it would close 26 locations earlier this week as part of bankruptcy proceedings. Just days later, At Home released details about the closures and what customers can expect. According to information obtained by Parade, At Home customers can expect up to 30% off as closing sales begin. “Shoppers can expect truly incredible savings on a massive inventory of home furnishings and decor. From wall art and rugs to patio furniture and kitchen essentials,” a spokesperson shared. “Everything must go — and prices have been reduced across the board.” At Home Customers Can Expect Discounted Prices Before Closures, But There Is A Catch While the stores intend to stay open until September 30, the shopping experience will be a bit different. The prices at At Home will go down, but they will no longer offer exchanges or returns. The all-sales final model will help to liquidate the inventory more quickly. The following At Home stores are slated for closure, and sales have begun. New York: Rego Park, Bronx California: San Jose, Tustin, Costa Mesa, Pasadena, Chico, Foothill Ranch, Sacramento, Long Beach Florida: North Miami Minnesota: Rochester Washington: Bellingham, Yakima New Jersey: Middletown Township, Ledgewood, Princeton Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh Massachusetts: Shrewsbury, Dedham Illinois: Peoria, Crestwood Virginia: Manassas, Leesburg Montana: Billings Wisconsin: Wauwatosa “We are pleased to have reached this agreement with our lenders, which represents a critical and positive advancement of our work to best position At Home for the future,” At Home Chief Executive Officer Brad Weston said in a news release. “Over the past several months, we’ve taken deliberate steps to strengthen the foundation of our business – sharpening our focus, elevating our customer value proposition, and driving operational discipline.” It is unclear if At Home will announce additional closures, but at this point, Weston seems optimistic they will bounce back. This story’s featured image is by Rosamar via Shutterstock. The post Retailer Announces Major Policy Changes Amid Dozens Of Store Closures appeared first on InspireMore.

A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week.

"'MDA teams went out to search the scenes where reports were received,' emergency service Magen David Adom said in a statement following the attack"

'They have all the elements'

Tiny robots could help fix leaky water pipes without having to dig up roads and sidewalks, thanks to a British team. The miniature machines called ‘Pipebots’ are the same size as a toy car and can track down leaks underground. They can also identify potential issues before they even become a problem. University researchers say […] The post Tiny Robots Could Help Fix Leaky Water Pipes Without Having to Dig Up Roads appeared first on Good News Network.

A lawyer who worked for Kamala Harris’ Senate office and President Joe Biden’s National Security Council now works in President Donald Trump’s administration as an ostensibly non-political staffer in the Department of Defense, even though she wrote an op-ed calling Trump “unfit to hold office.” While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in ostensibly nonpolitical, career positions. The Office of Personnel Management tracks when political appointees transition to career positions—a process often referred to as “burrowing in” to the bureaucracy—and Samantha Goldstein did so in 2023. Goldstein went from senior counsel at the Office of Legal Policy in the Department of Justice to attorney-advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel in the DOJ. OPM approved her move on Jan. 15, 2023. Goldstein received a pay bump from $110,460 annually to $127,942 annually. According to her LinkedIn profile, Goldstein left the DOJ in July 2024 to serve as deputy legal advisor on Biden’s National Security Council until February, when she joined the Department of Defense as associate deputy general counsel. Goldstein graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2013, and clerked for two U.S. appeals courts: the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. She interned with the left-leaning NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 2016 and served as a special counsel for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., in 2018. Between these two positions and before she joined the Justice Department, Goldstein worked at the firm O’Melveny & Myers. Legistorm confirms this history. During her second stint at O’Melveny, Goldstein wrote a Washington Post op-ed with Walter Dellinger, a partner at O’Melveny who had worked in the Clinton administration. (Trump fired Dellinger’s son Hampton, who had served as the special counsel in the Office of Special Counsel, earlier this year, sparking a legal battle.) In that op-ed, Goldstein and Dellinger insisted that Trump is “unfit to hold office.” “In the face of an unprecedented attack on American democracy by a hostile foreign power, Donald Trump and those who worked for him both as a candidate and a president failed to defend the United States,” they wrote regarding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report into accusations of collusion between Trump and Russia. “For this alone, he is unfit to hold office.” Golstein and Dellinger wrote that the Mueller report “demonstrates that the president and his closest aides violated … fundamental duties imposed by their oaths of office,” namely the duty to protect and defend the Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic.” Deep State Opposition A recent poll found that a whopping 75% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees making $75,000 or more per year who voted for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November said they would not follow a lawful Trump order if they considered it bad policy. While some political appointees who took “career” positions may faithfully work for the U.S. government under any president, this poll suggests that some staff inside the federal government may work against the goals of the current president, in this case Donald Trump. Furthermore, a recent Foundation for Government Accountability study found that Democrat employees outnumber Republican employees by a 2-to-1 margin across federal agencies. In the 2024 presidential election, 84% of the money that federal employees gave in political contributions went to Harris. Federal workers enjoy workplace protections that make them very difficult to fire. The new administration is seeking to reform these rules to enable the president to fulfill his duties as head of the executive branch without facing opposition from hostile bureaucrats. Goldstein did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal by publication time. The Daily Signal also reached out to O’Melveny & Myers, the offices of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Defense Department, and the White House for comment. The post Former Kamala Harris Attorney Who Wrote That Trump Is ‘Unfit to Hold Office’ Now Works at Defense Department appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On Iran, Democrats -- Except Fetterman -- Have Gone Underground

If you haven't noticed, Mark Zuckerberg is having a midlife crisis, and unfortunately for the rest of us, he's got billions of dollars to work through it.After fumbling Llama — Meta's answer to ChatGPT that landed with all the impact of a jab from Joe Biden — and watching OpenAI's ChatGPT become a household name while his chatbots gathered digital dust, Zuck is now throwing nine-figure salaries at anyone who helps usher in superintelligence. In other words, godlike AI. The kind that will apparently save humanity from itself.The warning signs were all there. First came the pivot to jiu-jitsu. Then the hair. Out with the North Korean intern bowl cut, in with a tousled look that whispers, “I read emotions now.” And then — God help us — the gold chains. Jewelry. On a man who once dressed like a CAPTCHA test for “which one is the tech CEO.”We're likely looking at AI trained on the digital equivalent of gas station hotdogs — technically edible, but nobody with options would choose them.Call me a skeptic. I've been called much worse. The same man who turned Facebook into a digital landfill of outrage bait and targeted ads now wants to control the infrastructure of human thought. It’s like hiring an arsonist to run the fire department, then acting confused when the trucks keep showing up late and the hoses are filled with gasoline.Diversifying dopamineFacebook's transformation from college networking tool to engagement-obsessed chaos engine wasn't an accident — it was the inevitable result of a company that discovered outrage pays better than friendship. While Google conquered search and Amazon conquered shopping, Meta turned human connection into a commodity, using Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to harvest emotional reactions like a digital strip mine operated by sociopaths.The numbers tell the story: Meta's revenue jumped from $28 billion in 2016 to over $160 billion today, largely by perfecting the art of keeping eyeballs glued to screens through weaponized dopamine. The algorithm doesn't care if those eyeballs are watching cat videos or cage fights in a comment section; it just wants them watching, preferably until they forget what sunlight feels like. Now, Zuckerberg wants to apply this same ruthless optimization to artificial intelligence.The pattern is depressingly familiar: Promise connection, deliver addiction. Promise information, deliver propaganda. Promise intelligence, deliver ... what, exactly? Given Meta's track record, we're likely looking at AI trained on the digital equivalent of gas station hotdogs — technically edible, but nobody with options would choose them.The growth trapZuckerberg's AI pivot reveals a fundamental truth about modern tech giants: They're trapped in their own success like digital King Midases, except everything they touch turns to engagement metrics instead of gold. Sure, Meta still owns three of the most used platforms on Earth. But in the age of AI, that’s starting to feel like bragging about owning the world’s nicest fax machines.Relevance is a moving target now. The game has changed. It’s no longer about connecting people — it’s about predicting them, training them, and replacing them. And in this new arms race, even empires as bloated as Meta must adapt or die. This means expanding into whatever territory promises the biggest returns, regardless of whether they're qualified to occupy it. It's venture capital Darwinism: Adapt or become irrelevant.RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg is lying to you Photo by Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhen your primary product becomes synonymous with your grandmother's political rants and your uncle's cryptocurrency schemes, you need a new story to tell investors. AI superintelligence is that story, even if the storyteller's previous work involved turning family dinners into ideological battlegrounds.The Altman alternativeComparing Zuckerberg to Sam Altman is like asking whether you'd rather be manipulated by someone who knows he's manipulating you or someone who thinks he's saving the world while doing it. Altman plays the role of philosopher-king well. Calm and composed, he smooth-talks AI safety as he centralizes power over the very future he's supposedly protecting. Zuckerberg, by contrast, charges at AI like a man chasing relevance on borrowed time: hyperactive, unconvincing, and driven more by fear of obsolescence than any coherent vision.The real question isn’t who is worse. It’s why either of them — men who have already reshaped society with products built for profit, not principle — should now be trusted to steer the next epoch of human development. Altman at least gestures toward caution, like a surgeon warning you about risk while sharpening the scalpel. Zuckerberg’s model is simpler: Keep breaking things and hope no one notices the foundations cracking beneath them.Zuckerberg's real genius (if you can call it that) lies in understanding that controlling AI isn't about making the smartest algorithms. It's about owning the infrastructure those algorithms run on, like controlling the roads instead of building better cars. Meta's massive data centers and global reach mean that even if its AI isn't the most sophisticated, it could become the most ubiquitous.This is the Walmart strategy applied to AI: Undercut the competition through scale and distribution, then gradually degrade quality while maintaining market dominance. Except instead of selling cheap goods that fall apart, Meta would be selling cheap thoughts that fall apart — and taking your society with them.The regulatory voidThe most alarming part of Zuckerberg's AI crusade isn't his history of turning every good intention into a cautionary tale. It's the total absence of anyone capable of stopping him. Regulators are still trying to untangle the damage social media has done to public discourse, mental health, and America itself, like archaeologists sifting through digital rubble. And now they're expected to oversee the rise of artificial superintelligence? It's like asking the DMV to run SpaceX: painfully unqualified, maddeningly slow, and guaranteed to end in catastrophe.By the time lawmakers figure out what questions to ask, Zuckerberg will already own the answers and probably the lawmakers too. The man who testified before Congress about data privacy while reaping user info like a digital combine harvester now wants to build the systems that will make those hearings look quaint. It's regulatory capture with a time delay.Zuckerberg's AI venture will likely follow the same trajectory as every other Meta product: promising beginnings, rapid scaling, quality degradation, and unintended consequences that make the original problem look like a warm-up act. The difference is that when social media algorithms prioritize engagement over accuracy, people share bad takes and ruin Thanksgiving dinner. When AI systems optimize for the wrong metrics, the collateral damage scales exponentially, like going from firecrackers to nuclear weapons.The man who promised to "connect the world" ended up fragmenting it like a digital sledgehammer. The platform that pledged to "bring the world closer together" became a master class in division, turning neighbors into enemies and family reunions into MMA fights. Now he wants to democratize intelligence while building the most centralized cognitive infrastructure in human history.Mark Zuckerberg has never built anything that worked as advertised. But this time is different, he insists, with the confidence of a man who has never faced consequences for being wrong. This time, he's not just connecting people or sharing photos or building virtual worlds that nobody visits. He's building artificial minds that will think for us, decide for us, and presumably share our private thoughts with advertisers.What could go wrong?Everything. And if and when it does, there won't be a "delete account" button. The account will be your mind, and Mark Zuckerberg will own the password.