Founding Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley cancelled his 2025 dates earlier this month after suffering a fall

"Ace’s memory will continue to live on forever!" The former Kiss guitarist's family have confirmed his passing in a statement

President Donald Trump issued a stern warning to Hamas via his Truth Social platform, stating that if the terrorist group continues executing Palestinians in Gaza, those working to stabilize the recent peace agreement would have "no choice but to go in and kill them."

John Bolton was indicted on 18 counts of mishandling secret and confidential government documents, including some that revealed sources and methods; one document was labeled “weapons of mass destruction.” He sent the documents unsecured over his Google and AOL emai accounts. His email account was hacked by a party tied to the Islamic Republic of […] The post The Indictment of John Bolton appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

There’s a story from POLITICO making the rounds and creating an enormous amount of dyspepsia on the Right. The story is titled, “’I Love Hitler.’ Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat.” It is questionable whether the actual line “I love Hitler” was said in jest or whether it was said authentically. All those quotes from the chat have been released by POLITICO. They reported: Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway. They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery. William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.” Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old. “Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued. Two members of the chat responded.   A lot of this is edgelord-ism. It has existed on the Right, particularly among young right-wingers, for a very long time. Back in 2015 or 2016, I was speaking at a college campus in California, and some kid came over and started using some Groyper memes in jest. I said to him, “Listen, I understand that you’re just being edgelord right now. If you actually, authentically think that stuff, you’re wrong. But second of all, if you put that stuff online, there are social consequences to saying and believing truly terrible things.” I’m not talking here about whether we should ban people from Facebook. Obviously, the answer is no. Whether you ban people from YouTube or X, I’ve argued in favor of the restoration of people’s accounts on these platforms because they are platforms. They are not publications. However, there are social consequences to people who say things that you believe are terrible. They don’t get to come over to dinner at your house. They don’t get to marry your kids. You don’t date them. We all have social lines we draw all the time, and the question is where to draw those lines and how those lines ought to be drawn. There’s no question that the shutting tight of the Overton Window by the Left means that the explosion of the Overton Window in response has let in an enormous amount of garbage. That is reality. This sort of language is routinely used now among a segment, not all, not even a majority, but among some fragmented segment of the right-wing ecosystem among young people. So here is what I hope will represent an honest rubric for dealing with issues like this one. Obviously, it is very cynical for POLITICO to target young GOP group chats while leaving left-wing chats untouched. I would promise you those same left-wing chats exist and are just as bad, if not worse. There are university chats among professors that are just as bad, if not worse. All of that is true. The Right does not have an obligation to go totally insane over such chats. What the Left and the media love to do is to take stuff like this and say to every member of the Republican Party, “You must personally condemn all of this.” The answer should be, “I’m happy to condemn the crap in there, but why? Why am I responsible for it? I’m not responsible for that.” You claim that everyone on the Right is responsible for a group of young Republicans who say terrible things in private to one another, that what they did somehow implicates the entire Republican Party. Meanwhile, the attorney general candidate in Virginia publicly says horrible things and that doesn’t implicate the entire Democratic Party? Zoran Mamdani, who likely will be New York mayor, is openly pro-terrorism, and that doesn’t implicate the entire Democratic Party? This POLITICO story, which is gaining all sorts of traction, is not comparable to actual people running for high office in Virginia or in New York City or the Democratic Party at high levels engaging with this sort of nonsense. When you’re asked about somebody saying a bad thing, whether you’re Right or Left, of course you ought to condemn the bad thing that is being said. I don’t even understand the logic of not doing that. Are you obligated to defend the bad thing being said, because the person who is questioning you is “on the other side?” Because that’s precisely how you get to a Left that defends Jay Jones. That’s how you get there. That’s how you get to a Left that openly defends Zoran Mamdani. Forgiveness ought to be easily obtained, as I’ve said. But — if you want forgiveness, you ought to ask for it. You ought to disassociate from the things that you say, and admit, “I was saying stuff that was dumb. I got caught up in the edgelord moment online.” You only get out of jail free if you ask to do so. You don’t get it preemptively. If you say something terrible or you do something terrible and people preemptively forgive you, doesn’t that incentivize you to do more of that thing? Finally, it is not sufficient to publicly proclaim that you’re not going to condemn these people, say nothing about their comments, and instead just project to the other side. That’s because on a strategic level, this is how your party ends up being taken over by the ambulatory psychotics. With the Left, that’s what happened. They decided they would not, under any circumstance, condemn their own ambulatory psychotics because those people were part of their coalition, and they couldn’t do it or they would lose. You know what ended up happening? The alligator ate them first, not last. They ended up being taken over by the crazy wing. That’s because if you lose your systemic immunity, the crazy tends to be really, really, really infectious. There’s this weird idea on the Right that the Left wins because they’re totally unified and they completely side with one another. But here’s the central point: The Left is not winning. I think we on the Right have somehow become depressive, even possibly gotten addicted to the depressive. The Left is not winning. Donald Trump has been president twice. Republicans are in control of the Senate. Republicans are in control of the House. Republicans are in control of the majority of governors’ mansions. Republicans are in control of a majority of state legislatures. The Left is not winning because of their unity. They are being destroyed because they decided that the nutjobs and the radicals in their own party could not be condemned under any circumstances. They decided to feature Ilhan Omar on the cover of magazines and unite around the crazy college protesters, the BLM rioters, and the transgender radicals. And guess what? They got their asses kicked because of it. Yes, they didn’t expel people from their party, but moderates walked away. The non-crazy walked away. This is the dirty little secret of how Donald Trump won the election of 2024. He ran as a moderate. People were moderate and picked him above the unified Left that was siding with and defending and massaging all of the radicals. This is a very big country with an awful lot of people, and the vast majority of them are not loon bags, and the vast majority of them don’t like the lunacy. And we need to be real about the agenda of the people who are continuing to rely on the kindness of the “traditional Republicans” who “don’t want to attack.”

Fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv have been banned by Aston Villa

Neighbors reportedly say James doesn't live there

The federal judge who blocked the Trump administration’s ouster of federal employees on Wednesday has a record of controversial rulings spanning from siding with environmentalists to presiding over the trial of baseball legend Barry Bonds. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California determined the administration’s Office of Management and Budget as well as the Office of Personnel Management “have taken advantage of the lapse in government spending-function to assume all bets are off and that the laws don’t apply to them.” “It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs, and it has a human cost. It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated,” she wrote in her opinion.  Illston has been reversed by both the U.S. Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court on high profile cases during her 30 years on the bench.  Here are six things to know about her. 1. A Clinton Appointee Illston was nominated to the bench in January 1995 by President Bill Clinton on the recommendation of California Democrat Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.  She was confirmed in May of that year by a voice vote at a time when most lower court judicial nominations sailed through the U.S. Senate.  She was previously in private practice for 20 years and was a partner at the firm of Cotchett, Illston & Pitre in Burlingame, California, which focused on labor and personal injury litigation.  Illston was born in Tokyo in 1948 and graduated from Stanford Law School.  2. Overruled on Stopping Federal Hiring Freeze In July in a separate federal employees case, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 to suspend an injunction Illston had issued to stop a hiring freeze resulting from recommendations from the new Department of Government Efficiency.  President Donald Trump had issued an executive order in February that included a federal hiring freeze and a large-scale reduction in force throughout federal agencies.   The American Federation of Government Employees sued and was the lead plaintiff challenging Trump’s order. In May, Illston issued the preliminary injunction to prevent the federal government from carrying out the order. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t reverse her.  The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court for an emergency ruling. On July 8, the high court issued a two-paragraph opinion siding with the administration.  “Because the government is likely to succeed on its argument that the executive order and memorandum are lawful—and because the other factors bearing on whether to grant a stay are satisfied—we grant the application,” the high court said in its opinion.  “We express no view on the legality of any Agency RIF [reduction in force] and reorganization plan produced or approved pursuant to the Executive Order and Memorandum,” the ruling read. “The District Court enjoined further implementation or approval of the plans based on its view about the illegality of the Executive Order and Memorandum, not on any assessment of the plans themselves.” The high court’s decision to reverse Illston effectively cleared the way for the Trump administration’s reduction of the bureaucracy. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. 3. Ruling Against Trump’s Immigration Enforcement  In November 2020, Illston blocked the Trump administration policy preventing foreign asylum seekers from entering the country if they had a criminal record.  The Trump administration attempted to add domestic violence, assault, re-entering the country illegally, identity theft, public benefits fraud, immigrant smuggling, and driving under the influence as disqualifying factors for those seeking asylum.  Illston said the policy “sweeps too broadly” and sided with Pangea Legal Services, a legal service provider for immigrants. She determined that since drug trafficking, money laundering, and counterfeiting already disqualified asylum seekers, additional crimes were not necessary.  4. Scrapping Part of the Sex Offender Law After just over a decade on the bench, Illston issued a temporary restraining order to a provision of a California law barring sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park she determined was unconstitutional.  California’s Proposition 83, also known as Jessica’s Law, had bipartisan support in the state and was approved by 70% of voters. Shortly thereafter, an anonymous convicted sex offender sued specifically over the provision about living close to parks and schools.  Key to the sex offender’s argument in challenging the state law was that it could not be retroactively applied to anyone convicted before Proposition 83 was in effect.   Illston didn’t rule on the merits, and state courts took the case. In February 2010, the California Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that Proposition 83 can apply to all prisoners paroled after the law was passed, regardless of the conviction date.  5. Siding With Environmental Groups In September 2009, Illston knocked down a federal road management plan in California, siding with environmental groups.  She determined the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s designation of about 5,000 miles of off-road vehicle routes did not consider the impact on public lands, archaeological sites, and wildlife. She wrote that the plan, approved in 2006, was “flawed because it does not contain a reasonable range of alternatives” to reduce the number of miles of off-road routes. The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of environmental groups that included the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, and Desert Survivors. 6. Barry Bonds In one of her highest profile cases, in March 2009, she presided over the steroid-related trial of Barry Bonds, a former baseball player for the San Francisco Giants. Bonds had been indicted in 2007 for perjury and obstruction of justice. She ruled a mistrial on the three perjury charges. A jury convicted Bonds of obstruction. However, the jury’s conviction was later vacated by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015. The next step in the current case where Illston is blocking the Trump administration from firing federal employees during the shutdown is likely the administration appealing to the 9th Circuit Court. Or it could seek an emergency ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. The post 6 Things About Judge Who Blocked Trump From Culling Bureaucracy During Shutdown appeared first on The Daily Signal.