Clear dividing line

'The goal is to reach all sides'

Longtime Senate chaplain Barry Black delivered a stern prayer Monday, telling the Senate there are “no gold medals” for extending the federal government shutdown. “When our children and grandchildren want to know what we were doing in the 119th Congress during the famous shutdown, may we not have to give these answers: I helped set a new record for keeping the government closed,” the Rev. Black prayed, adding: “I failed to appeal to the better angels of my nature. I forgot Matthew 7:12, which states, ‘Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and prophets.’” "When our children & grandchildren want to know what we were doing 119th Congress during famous shutdown may we not have to give these answers: I helped set new record for keeping government closed …No gold medals are given for breaking shutdown records"– Senate chaplain Black pic.twitter.com/5KHY8hfo8p— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) October 27, 2025 The current shutdown, which began on Oct. 1, is the second-longest federal government shutdown ever.  Black, who has served as the Senate’s chaplain since 2003 and who will turn 77 on Saturday, is a Seventh-day Adventist and previously served as chief of chaplains of the U.S. Navy. He continued, “Lord, remind our lawmakers that no gold medals are given for breaking shutdown records, but a crown of righteousness is given to those who take care of the lost, last, and least.” This is not the first time that Black has exhorted lawmakers to end a shutdown. During a 2013 shutdown, he prayed for God: “Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable.” The post WATCH: Senate Chaplain Scolds Lawmakers for Government Shutdown in Prayer appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The warnings aren’t new. For year, think tanks, the government, and the media have all raised concerns over America’s lack of military readiness. Solving the crisis could hinge on government contracts, one expert says.    “U.S. military readiness has been degraded over the last two decades due to a variety of challenges,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office wrote in a report back in March.   gao-25-108104Download The Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Index of Military Strength concluded that “U.S. does not have the necessary force to address more than one major regional contingency and is not ready to carry out its duties effectively.”   2024_IndexOfUSMilitaryStrength_ASSESSMENT_POWER_ALLDownload And on Monday, Politico warned that the “U.S. doesn’t have enough weapons for a major conflict.”   As Politico noted in its report, and as Heritage’s research associate for national security and European affairs, Jim Fein, concurred, manufacturing is a major issue. But Fein told The Daily Signal that the issue goes a step beyond defense manufacturing companies simply not making enough weapons and “comes down to government orders.”  Government Contracts   “The U.S. government orders weapons on a year-by-year basis, and most of the time roughly at or below current manufacturing capacity,” Fein explains. “In order to get added capacity, orders need to be above capacity, [which is] basic supply/demand economics.”  “It isn’t just a problem with prime contractors,” he added, noting that production can’t expand without well-functioning supply chains for both raw materials to intermediate components.  “The companies that make these intermediate parts are often small, and have a more difficult time acquiring capital to make investments, especially without a contract,” he said. “Even if prime contractors increased their capacity, their supply chains are inadequate and require investment that will only come about once they have contracts and a long-term demand signal.”   Warnings over the lack of America’s military readiness have gained additional attention in recent years, given the growing threat from the Chinese Communist Party.   “China has built a capacity to sustain a protracted war of any type. More directly, China is well-postured to sustain a protracted high-intensity war of attrition. The United States is not currently capable of doing so,” the Army War College’s War Room wrote in 2023.   Tensions between the U.S. and China have remained high in recent months amid trade talks and tariffs. President Donald Trump has threatened to impose 100% tariffs on China, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent assuaged fears of the threat over the weekend, telling NBC News a trade deal framework is now in place ahead of Trump’s meeting Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping.   Trump’s meeting with Xi in South Korea on Thursday is expected to focus on economic issues between the two countries.   The post Weapons Contracting Process Seen as Hurdle to Military Readiness   appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s a big controversy that President Donald Trump is not just leaving his mark on the country, but he’s leaving his mark on the White House. For years, decades, maybe over a century, people have complained that the world’s superpower has nowhere at its capital, i.e., its executive branch, at the White House to entertain people. And usually, tents are constructed when there’s diplomatic or state dinners or there’s festivities. Donald Trump, the builder, comes along in his second term and says: You know what? I’m going to solve the problem. I’m going to refashion the East Wing of the White House complex and build a beautiful 90,000-square-foot ballroom, which will allow 650 guests to eat and be entertained and to have official functions. And more importantly, I am going to enlist people from the private sector to pay for it, along with myself. And the price will probably be somewhere between $200 and $300 million. The plans are out there. It’s perfectly transparent. There’s a list of everybody who’s donated. They’re not just right-wing donors. There’s most of the familiar Silicon Valley grandees: Apple, Meta, etc. And it looks pretty much consistent with the style of the White House in general. But people were outraged because to build this huge ballroom—which was sorely needed—you had to demolish the area where it will connect into the east complex. And of course, that’s always messy. So, immediately, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the Left—who have shut down the government—are saying the people don’t have enough food or they’re not getting paid, and Donald Trump is building this luxurious, capitalist, oligarchic, aristocratic hallway. No. It’s for all of America. It’s being privately paid. And if the senators are worried about the people with less means, then just open the government. But more importantly, it wasn’t more than a nanosecond when the media—Left and Right—started to give examples that refurbishing, remodeling, redoing the White House is very common since its or origins. It was burned down—the War of 1812—completely rebuilt. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suffered from paralysis, wanted to put an indoor swimming pool. He did. And it was torn out by a later administration, made into a press room. President Jerry Ford wanted to swim. So, he has an outdoor swimming pool. He just tore up the garden and made a swimming pool. And people use it to this day. President Barack Obama wanted to refashion a tennis court into a basketball court. He did just that. President Harry Truman came in and said: You know, this White House is creaky. I don’t feel that it’s up to code. I’m gonna move to Blair House for four or five years and gut the entire White House. And they did. So, redoing the White House is nothing new. Having private donors pay for it is advisable and nothing new. But then there was also this argument that it belittles the sanctity of the White House. This ugly scar that we’re watching as the demolition crews break up the existing East Wing to attach this ballroom. California Gov. Gavin Newsom was one of the most severe critics. But if you look at the California historic State Capitol, it’s been demolished, almost. There is an ugly wound where the whole side of it has been gutted and you can look into the ruin. And why? Because it’s necessary, if you want to expand the offices, the parking garage, the facilities, the cafeteria, the gym. Everything for the Democratic supermajorities in California. And remember, in California, we only have nine of 52 Republican congresspeople. Both senators are Democratic. No statewide office holder is Republican. And there’s supermajorities in both legislature. And they voted that they wanted to spend not $200 million, not $300 million, not $400 million, not $800 million, not $1 billion, but $1.6 billion. And not from Meta or Amazon or Elon Musk or any of those people, but from the taxpayers, who are facing a $20 to $30 billion deficit. And that wound makes the White House wound look small in comparison. The job is much more vast. And guess what? It will probably suffer the fate of high-speed rail and be delayed and delayed and delayed, as it already has, at the expense, not of private donors, but of the taxpayer. A final note. Do we really want to know what belittles the White House? I mean, we’re just coming off the Biden administration, where cocaine was found in a carrel in the West Wing. And nobody seemed to want to investigate whether it had anything to do with the former cocaine addict and presidential son, Hunter Biden. But it was found there. Do you remember when Barack Obama was president? He brought in a whole cadre of Muslim Brotherhood people that were tied to Hamas Islamic terrorism. He brought an entourage, in 2012, into the White House. I remember, 2016, he thought it would be neat to have his favorite rappers in the White House. Kendrick Lamar—“Pimp a Butterfly.” Remember those lyrics about killing the police in the White House? That rapper—“kill po-po,” as he said. Then there was the rapper Rick Ross. Remember, everybody was sitting in a solemn occasion in our nation’s executive mansion and his beeper went out because he was a criminal who was under house arrest as part of his sentence for assault and battery, and he had been accused of kidnapping. And all of a sudden, in front of this presidential entourage, Michelle Obama here, Barack Obama here, his beeper goes off on his ankle bracelet. We could go on with the embarrassing incidents. I won’t mention what transpired between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton right off the Oval Office in the presidential laboratory. But nonetheless, the ballroom was needed. It’s paid for by private funds. It will be built efficiently, quickly, quite unlike what we see in California with taxpayers’ money and incompetence and regulations. And the Left, who shut down the government, is angry. But it doesn’t really know what it’s angry about, other than it just wants to be angry. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Trump’s Ballroom Broke the Democrats appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In the final stretch before Election Day, Virginia Democrats called a special session of the Legislature to focus on redistricting—a session that may take the Republican candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, off the campaign trail. If this is a last-minute election strategy, however, it may backfire, a former attorney general noted. “I left the campaign trail because my duty is here, in this building, with the people’s Senate,” Earle-Sears said at the Capitol Monday. She condemned the redistricting effort, saying, “Voters choose their representatives—not the other way around.” Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican who served as the Old Dominion’s attorney general from 2010 to 2014, told The Daily Signal that the special session may draw more attention to Earle-Sears, not less. “She’s going to be the highest-ranking, most involved official, she’s going to get a lot of press,” he explained. The special session may help Earle-Sears “not only from prominence but because the Democrats are seizing on the wrong side of a 2-to-1 issue.” He noted that Virginians voted—66.1% to 33.9%—to pass a constitutional amendment in 2020 creating a bipartisan commission for redistricting. Why Redistricting? Redistricting, the process of redrawing districts for representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, gained renewed attention after the Texas Legislature restarted the process earlier this year. President Donald Trump has encouraged Republicans to seek advantages through redistricting, and Democrats responded by demanding redistricting of their own. Virginia Speaker of the House Don Scott, a Democrat, sent a letter to legislators on Oct. 23, calling the session that began Monday. Scott’s letter came one day after the National Democratic Redistricting Committee—an organization founded by Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder to advocate redrawing congressional maps to help Democrats—gave $150,000 each to the Virginia House Democratic Caucus and to Spanberger’s campaign, raising questions about coordination and influence, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. The committee also gave more than $17,000 in three in-kind contributions to the Spanberger campaign. Quid Pro Quo? Hans von Spakovsky, manager of The Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, called foul. “There seems to be almost a direct quid pro quo between this donation and the Democrat call for a special session, a shameful embarrassment for the Democrats in Virginia,” Spakovsky told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “It is almost as if they are saying their legislative duties are for sale.” He mentioned the 2020 constitutional amendment and warned that “Democrats are defying the voters, engaging in electoral corruption of pay-to-play and interfering in the election process currently going on in the state.” “I won’t call it so much a quid pro quo as a fundraising ploy” on behalf of Virginia Democrats, Cuccinelli, the former attorney general, told The Daily Signal. “And it worked.” He warned, however, that the issue will be an albatross around Democrats’ necks. “Every Republican candidate is going to say, ‘I’m not voting for this. The people of Virginia have spoken. I’m not going to spit in their face,'” Cuccinelli explained. Democrats have narrow majorities in the Virginia House of Delegates (51-49) and the Senate (21-19). Why Now? If the redistricting push may cost Democrats voters, why rush to do it before an election? For a constitutional amendment to become law in Virginia, the Legislature must pass it before and after an intervening election, and then the amendment goes to the voters. Virginia Democrats may hope to get this on the 2026 midterm ballot, so they are rushing to pass it before Election Day, Cuccinelli reasoned. Yet the former attorney general pointed to a potential flaw in this reasoning—the 2025 election has already begun. Old Dominion voters cast their first ballots on Sept. 19 through early voting—a process Spanberger herself used. While Election Day doesn’t come until Nov. 4, many Virginians have already voted. “The next intervening election likely can’t happen until 2027, so the earliest this can go to the ballot is 2028,” the former attorney general said. “Do they really want this fought out on a presidential year ballot?” While Cuccinelli admitted the point may be debatable, he suggested the legal argument against presenting the amendment to voters in 2026 will likely prevail. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, condemned the special session as “a desperate grab for power.” “We’re just in shock that they would play this crazy, crazy card and pull everyone back, including Winsome Earle-Sears, who is campaigning—and they’re also doing it to get her off the campaign trail because they understand that this race has tightened so much,” Youngkin told WTOP radio on Friday. As lieutenant governor, Earle-Sears presides over the Virginia Senate and can cast a tie-breaking vote. If she is absent, Democrat L. Louise Lucas, president pro tempore, will preside over the Senate, and Earle-Sears will lose her tie-breaking vote. No More Moderates Cuccinelli said Virginia Democrats called the special session because they represent the more radical wing of the national party. “The Democrats now in the Virginia General Assembly are those foaming-at-the-mouth, rabid, fire-breathing left-wing nutjobs that we say the federal Democrats like [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer are afraid of,” he claimed. “There are no conservative Democrats, there are no ‘blue dogs,’ they’re gone.” Neither the Spanberger campaign, nor the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, nor the office of Speaker Don Scott responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. The post Will the Virginia Democrats’ Special Session on Redistricting Backfire at the Ballot Box? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

'I Was Born the Son of a Poor Black Sharecropper'

If the "mainstream media" takes a position within a Democrat primary, they typically favor the most extreme candidate. Take New York democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Former governor Andrew Cuomo is the "mainstream" candidate, but he's apparently an Islamophobic jerk. On Friday's edition of ABC World News Tonight, anchor David Muir lamented Cuomo getting "personal" with Mamdani over 9/11. Nowhere in this story does Muir or his overly general reporter Trevor Ault mention why anyone would suggest Mamdani was cool with 9/11 -- no mention of his smiling picture with radical streamer Hasan Piker, who supports another 9/11 attack on America. No mention of his smiling picture arm-in-arm with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And no mention of his refusal in a Fox News interview to say Hamas should disarm in its terroristic war on Israel. This sounded like a press release from the Mamdani News Channel:  DAVID MUIR: In New York City tonight, the heated race for mayor turning personal, one day after Andrew Cuomo laughed after a radio host said that Zohran Mamdani would cheer if there was another 9/11. Tonight, Mamdani coming before the cameras to respond. His personal and at times emotional message for the voters. Oozing empathy from every pore. Next came Ault, repeating Muir's messaging:    TREVOR AULT: Tonight, in an emotional speech, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner in the race for New York City Mayor, saying that despite recent attacks from his opponents, he will not run from his Muslim faith, pointing out one million Muslims live in this city. They are New Yorkers like everyone else. ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Will we remain in the shadows or will we together step into the light? So would condemning people who cheer another 9/11 constitute "running from his Muslim faith"? Is it okay for "one million Muslims" to support the Pikers and pro-terror imams? Is that "stepping into the light"? ABC ignored that whole context. To them, Mamdani's like an Islamic MLK, a civil rights leader for oppressed Muslim Americans: AULT: Mamdani responding to this moment, his rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo, laughing when a radio host said Mamdani would likely cheer on another 9/11 attack. CUOMO: God forbid another 9/11, can you imagine Mamdani in the seat? SID ROSENBERG: Yeah, I could. He’d be cheering. CUOMO: [Chuckle.] That's another problem. But can you imagine that? AULT: Today, Mamdani calling out those comments. MAMDANI: Yesterday, Andrew Cuomo laughed and agreed when a radio host said that I would cheer another 9/11. AULT: Saying New York Muslims have been forced to live in the shadows. MAMDANI: The dream of every Muslim is simply to be treated the same as any other New Yorker. Yet for too long we've been told to ask for less than that and to be satisfied with whatever little we receive. No more! AULT: Hours later, Cuomo firing back, accusing mamdani of dividing people, calling him an actor and citing his outspoken views on the war between Israel and Hamas. CUOMO: He is not the victim. He is the offender. "His outspoken views" is the closest ABC came to Mamdani having a controversial opinion. They're "outspoken," but we cannot elaborate! They can't explore how he wouldn't condemn the saying "globalize the Intifada." There will be no specifics, just nebulous boasts to draw sympathy:  AULT: Mamdani insisting he will remain true to himself. MAMDANI: There are 12 days remaining until election day, I will be a Muslim man in New York City each of those 12 days and every day that follows. I will not change who I am, how I eat or the faith I'm proud to call my own. What exactly is he "proud" of? Define "true to himself." But ABC doesn't want you to explore any of that.

The U.K. has repeatedly tried to impose its censorship mandates on Americans and American companies but one legal mind is fighting back to end such international overreach. Lawyer and senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute Preston Byrne, proposed a new legal doctrine that would protect the First Amendment rights of Americans, and potentially the rights of those living under authoritarian regimes around the world. In an op-ed for The Blaze, Byrne argued that the laws of the country in which a website or platform operates should be the laws that govern any activity on that website. If widely accepted, this new legal philosophy could be a game-changer for global free speech.  [The story continues on MRCFreeSpeechAmerica.org]

A scientist who helped identify a new butterfly species said it would be named after Iryna Zarutska to "immortalize" her memory.Harry Pavulaan, the president and director of the International Lepidoptera Survey, said that he's still emotional when thinking about the stabbing death of the Ukrainian woman, allegedly at the hands of a repeat criminal.'This will outlast most other tributes because it's a living organism. Her name will be immortalized as a butterfly.'"When I saw the story break," said Pavulaan, "I'm 70 years old, and I'm still driven to tears."Pavulaan told ABC News that the butterfly had been first spotted in South Carolina by researcher Ronald Gatrelle in 1985 but that it had not been officially named. Pavulaan himself collected specimens of the insect in 2018. It took several years to determine that it was the "first known hybrid introgression" for the species.While it had been initially named something else, Pavulaan decided to honor Zarutska after seeing the surveillance videos of her death."This will outlast most other tributes because it's a living organism. Her name will be immortalized as a butterfly," he added.He added that he had been in contact with Zarutska's family, and they had told him they were hopeful the honor would help them find closure about her death. RELATED: Elon Musk pledges $1 million to honor the memory of Iryna Zarutska — and bring down the media blackout Decarlos Brown, 34, was arrested and charged for Zarutska's murder. If convicted, he will be eligible for the death penalty.Zarutska's horrific stabbing death was captured on surveillance video from the light rail system. She had just finished working at her job at a pizzeria and had texted her boyfriend that she was going home, according to her attorney. The new butterfly species will be named "Iryna's Azure."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!