Jake Tapper has CNN facing a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit. I say he’s not worth a billion dollars. What say you? Jake Tapper ran a vicious story on The Lead without evidence. U.S. Navy veteran Zachary Young and his company, Nemex Enterprises Inc.,  are suing. They could sue for punitive damages, bringing the lawsuit to one […] The post Jake Tapper Might Have Cost CNN $1B! Is He Worth It? appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

U.S. Marshals assigned to protect U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly shot an alleged carjacker who pulled a gun on them outside her home in Washington, D.C. The incident happened around 1:15 a.m. on Friday when Kentrell Flowers, 18, pulled up next to the Marshal’s car, approached the driver’s side door, and pulled a firearm on two Marshals who were in the vehicle, The Hill reported. One of the Marshals quickly drew his weapon and fired several shots at the suspect, hitting him in the mouth, the report said. The suspect was later transported to the hospital and arrested. The vehicle that the suspect arrived in had been carjacked, police said. It’s not clear whether Sotomayor, a leftist who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, was home during the incident. “The Deputy U.S. Marshals involved in the shooting incident were part of the unit protecting the residences of U.S. Supreme Court justices,” Abigail Meyer, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service, said in a statement. “As a general practice, the U.S. Marshals don’t discuss specifics of protective details.” Sotomayor has strong anti-Second Amendment views, including believing that the Second Amendment does not protect gun rights at a state level, attacking conservative justices who overruled the federal government’s bump stock ban, and more.

The Daily Wire’s Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro is set to testify to Congress on Wednesday for its hearing on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is under investigation by the House Judiciary Committee for organizing its member organizations to work in coordination to demonetize disfavored news outlets. The Judiciary Committee’s investigation into GARM began more than a year ago, when Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) wrote to the head of GARM and its parent organization, the World Federation of Advertisers, to alert them that the committee believed GARM was “potentially violating U.S. antitrust law by coordinating their members’ efforts to demonetize and eliminate disfavored content online.” In the past year that investigation has gotten more targeted, with the committee specifically charging that GARM targeted conservative outlets including The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and Fox News. Shapiro has also long had GARM in his sights — the advertiser coalition which controls 90% of global advertising dollars and counts the biggest corporations in the world as its members was the subject of the first episode of his Facts series. He described GARM as part of “a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce ‘approved’ narratives and punish disapproved ones.” Also testifying at the Judiciary hearing will be executives at Unilever, a consumer goods giant, and GroupM, the world’s largest media buying agency. Both are on the steering committee of GARM, and have been scrutinized by Jordan’s committee. Jordan in letters to GARM members has said that documents the committee has obtained “directly connect” the steering committee with efforts to suppress conservative news, and show that the censorship efforts are due to politics, not the so-called “brand safety” claims that GARM bases its existence on. “Evidence the Committee has obtained suggests that GARM members, led by Steer Team members, are colluding to demonetize conservative platforms and voices,” Jordan wrote in public correspondence to the companies. “Further, this coordination does not always revolve around ‘brand safety’ and ‘harmful’ content as GARM publicly claims, but instead the desire to censor conservative and other views that GARM members disfavor.” GARM is a relatively new creation, created by the World Federation of Advertisers in 2019. Its flagship creation was the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework, which it hopes will be used by the entire ad industry to address the “challenge of harmful online content.” Just months after GARM was launched, it was announced by the World Economic Forum that it would become a flagship project of its “Platform for Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture.” GARM’s stated goal is to create a “common understanding” in the whole industry of “what harmful and sensitive content is” as well as “where ads should not appear,” basing it all on the importance of “brand safety” for its members. Shapiro has said that brand safety is “a dog whistle for censorship,” and that GARM has laid out subjective guidelines that can be used to censor news it doesn’t like. “The framework lists subjective terms like hate speech as a problem — it says that anything surrounding transgenderism that they decide is dehumanizing or discussing what they deem to be a debated social issue in an insensitive way is off limits,” Shapiro said. “The framework is deliberately vague, allowing those in control to pick and choose how they enforce it and against whom.” The Judiciary Committee under Jordan has already uncovered emails showing the White House pressuring social media giant Facebook to limit companies like The Daily Wire, which was the top publisher on the platform. In 2021 emails uncovered by Jordan’s committee, White House digital director Rob Flaherty suggested to Facebook that it “change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people.” Members of the ad industry have called Jordan’s investigation an assault, complaining that the probe could have a “chilling effect” on its efforts to help companies responsibly spend their ad dollars. The Judiciary Committee said the member companies know the Judiciary Committee has obtained evidence that will expose how “personal biases” drive its operations. “These companies know the evidence collected shows that members of GARM have worked for years to spread their personal biases and censor conservative voices and journalists online,” a committee spokesman said. “These companies are simply trying to get ahead of the incriminating evidence before it becomes public.” The Judiciary Committee subpoenaed both GARM and the WFA after it failed to produce requested documents last year. The head of GARM, Rob Rakowitz, agreed to voluntarily appear for transcribed testimony after he was called on by the committee in April. The hearing is scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. (EST).

One of the top Democrat-aligned dark money organizations has experienced massive growth, with donations surging to over $120 million in its most recent disclosure, according to tax forms obtained by The Daily Wire. The Washington D.C.-based organization, called Majority Forward, raked in a whopping $122 million in tax year 2022, according to the organization’s IRS form 990. The sum marks a massive increase from the tax year 2021, when the 501(c)(4) organization had just $75 million in revenue. The 2022 figure also surpassed the organization’s revenue of $108 million in 2020, a presidential election year. Majority Forward’s tax designation allows it to raise and spend an unlimited amount of money, all without disclosing the names of its donors. The organization’s 2022 IRS form lists 125 anonymous donors along with their donations, with contributions ranging from lows of $10,000 and $15,000 to astonishing highs of $10 million and $12 million. Parker Thayer, an Investigative Researcher at the Capital Research Center, says the filing is proof that Democrats are fully embracing “dark money.” “The skyrocketing revenues of Majority Forward over the years is proof that the Democratic Party establishment is leaning more and more into the use of ‘dark money,’” Parker Thayer, an Investigative Researcher at the Capital Research Center, told The Daily Wire. “We can expect that the group’s fundraising will increase even more in 2024. Even though tax forms have a two-year delay in reporting, campaign finance disclosures show that Majority Forward has already moved nearly $40 million to Democrat-aligned Super PACs during the first half of the 2024 cycle.” The influence of “dark money” on political elections has been criticized by high-profile Democrats despite members of the party benefiting from dark money organizations. President Joe Biden blasted dark money organizations in 2022, arguing that “dark money erodes public trust” despite efforts to elect Biden receiving $174 million in secret funds, more than six times the amount of dark money as did efforts to reelect former President Donald Trump. “‘Dark money,’ a term originally coined by the Left, has now become one of the Left’s favorite tools, so much so that even the New York Times wrote that Democrats won the 2020 election with dark money, using much more of it than Republicans,” Thayer went on to explain. “Left-wing ‘dark money’ groups are the tail that wags the Democratic Party dog, and they will remain massively influential during the 2024 election.” Majority Forward’s sizable increase in revenue could lay the groundwork for the organization to be a key player in the 2024 elections, with multiple vulnerable Democrats up for reelection. Democrat Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio are both facing significant competition that could threaten the Democrat’s slim Senate majority. Thayer explained how Majority Forward fits into the broader network of leftwing dark money organizations, and how they could impact the upcoming elections. “Majority Forward is enormously influential, even for a dark money group. We’re talking about a $100 million group that is run by the head of, and generously funds, the Senate Majority PAC, which is Chuck Schumer’s super PAC. It’s very hard to get more influential than that,” Thayer said. “The group doesn’t have a wide network, and it doesn’t spread around its money much, but it sends enormous checks to the groups that count; groups that move money into every election, up and down the ballot, across the country.” The president of Majority Forward, J.B. Poersch, received a salary of $380,000 from the organization in 2022 while working an average of 15 hours a week, while national finance director Tonya Fulkerson received $150,000 and treasurer Chris Koob received $90,000. Poersch is also the president of the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic political action committee that works to elect Democrats to the United States Senate, and shares office space with Majority Forward. “Majority Forward is essentially a large financial funnel, taking in money from anonymous donors and sending it down the pipe to Chuck Schumer’s super PAC,” Thayer noted.  Majority Forward did not respond to a request for comment.

President Joe Biden’s doctor at the White House is a family friend and a one-time business partner of the president’s brother, ties that warrant serious skepticism of his integrity, according to experts. White House physician Kevin O’Connor, a primary source of information on the president’s health that the administration has relied on to deflect questions about his fitness, wrote in a letter on Monday that Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical despite records showing a Parkinson’s Disease expert visiting the White House multiple times in the past year. However, as concerns about Biden’s health swirl following a poor debate performance, experts say O’Connor’s reliability in giving accurate information to the public is not only compromised by a history of White House doctors misleading the public about the president’s health, but also O’Connor’s past business dealings with the president’s family exacerbate the conflicting interests. “That compounds the problem,” historian Matthew Algeo told POLITICO. “You’re working for the guy you’re examining, and he’s your buddy. It’s just a lose-lose situation.” Bert Park, a doctor and author of “The Impact of Illness on World Leaders,” said O’Connor’s ties to the Biden family are “one of the many concerns” undermining trust in O’Connor’s public statements on the president’s health “We cannot depend on the presidential physician to come clean,” Park told the news outlet. “That’s a fool’s game.” O’Connor’s relationship with the president and his family began when Biden served as vice president in the Obama administration. O’Connor served as the then-vice president’s government-provided physician. The doctor was an Army colonel on the White House medical staff at the time, according to Politico. After serving Biden for eight years in the White House and advising members of the Biden family on myriad medical issues, including taking a role in the care of Biden’s son Beau who died of brain cancer in 2015, O’Connor left his role as Biden’s physician with the end of the Obama administration. O’Connor’s relationship with the Bidens then shifted from medical to business after the physician began aiding Joe Biden’s brother, Jim Biden, in a pursuit involving the then-struggling hospital chain Americore. The extent of O’Connor’s work on the venture is not clear, but emails obtained by Politico show Jim Biden and O’Connor coordinating in at least one meeting with an executive of a Pennsylvania hospital soon to be acquired by Americore. “It was a pleasure to meet with the two of you on Wednesday,” the executive wrote to Jim and O’Connor. “I am very excited about the possibility of bringing help to the Veterans in our area.” “I truly enjoyed our time together the other day,” O’Connor replied. “You and your team clearly share our vision, and I look forward to seeing you again in coming months.” White House visitor logs show that Kevin Cannard, a movement disorders specialist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, visited the White House nine times in the past year. At least one of those visits involved a meeting with O’Connor that took place at 5 p.m. ET on January 17. Medical experts sounding off on Biden’s appearance have said the president seems to be suffering mental and physical degeneration of some kind. Neurologist Tom Pitts said that Biden “definitely” is suffering from Parkinson’s based on what Pitts has seen of Biden’s behavior. “Oh yeah, I see him 20 times a day in clinic,” Pitts said, referring to his own patients who exhibit the same sort of symptoms as the president, during an interview with NBC News. “It’s ironic because he has just this classic features of neurodegeneration: word-finding difficulties — and that’s not just ‘Oh, I couldn’t find the right word’ — that’s from degeneration of the word retrieval area.”

“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart sounded off with some strong opinions about President Joe Biden’s debate performance and his chances of winning his re-election bid in November. The 61-year-old political commentator began by lamenting how long of a time there is between primaries and elections in America, which is different from European countries. “Four months is for-f***ing-ever!” Stewart said during his monologue in Monday’s show. Unlike other Hollywood figures — notably Rob “Meathead” Reiner and leftist novelist Stephen King — the host didn’t explicitly say Biden should end his campaign or resign. But he did say a dialogue should take place following Biden’s shaky debate performance last month. “Can’t we stress test this candidacy?” Stewart continued. “Can’t we open up the conversation? Do you understand the opportunity here? Do you have any idea how thirsty Americans are for any hint of inspiration or leadership, and a release from this choice [between] a megalomaniac and a suffocating gerontocracy?” “The debate was a shocking display of cognitive difficulty,” the “Daily Show” host continued. “Recognizable to, unfortunately, anybody who’s dealt with aging parents — and it’s a hard watch.” Stewart went on to claim that former President Donald Trump performed as expected during the debate, which only served to highlight Biden’s incompetency — in his opinion. “The difference is Trump delivered at the debate to expectation. We expect him to be f***ing crazy. But Biden’s performance, and inability to articulate at times, was stunning. I could not believe what I was watching… But then it got worse,” Stewart went on. He said, “Rather than respecting the American people and having an honest, at least partial conversation about what we had all seen, we were told immediately, ‘these are not the droids you’re looking for.’” “Authoritarianism and Donald Trump aren’t the only threats our democracy faces… ‘Get on board or shut the f*** up’ is not a particularly compelling pro-democracy bumper sticker,” he continued in the monologue. Stewart pushed back against critics who claimed there wasn’t enough time to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate, citing European elections as examples. “Britain just held an election in two months. France had two in one month, defeated fascism and still had time to have an affair with Denmark… Four months. It’s 119 days,” the “Daily Show” host insisted. The commentator continued, “On Tuesday, the winners could move on to the next round and then face Biden… Thursday, the party emerges, energized, unified, sanctified. You could televise the entire proceeding for four days.” He concluded the monologue saying, “So, feel free to ignore any obvious weaknesses in your team’s existential fight for freedom and democracy, and then just white-knuckle this thing till November. Or take the advice of your own candidate.” Stewart went on to play a clip of Biden mentioning that there were “about fifty” Democrats who could defeat Trump.

Henry Winkler had a run-in with the FBI. But they weren’t looking for him—they were looking for his Happy Days character. The classic TV icon told his quirky story while speaking to Jason Bateman, Sean P. Hayes, and Will Arnett on the SmartLess podcast. As he shared, he was simply minding his own business at home one day when he heard someone at the door. “So I’m sitting in my apartment,” he said. “I have a Victrola because everything was vinyl; I went to Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. I bought, Dan Fogelberg, and I was listening to Dan Fogelberg on my rented Victrola. The door knocks.” When he opened the door, three men “with badges” were standing there. He immediately wondered what he’d done. “I said, ‘Oh no, you do not smell what you think you’re smelling,” Henry joked. “‘Oh my God.’ ” Henry Winkler Didn’t Mind The “Abuse” Of “Assets” At that time, Happy Days was in its prime, and Henry Winkler was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He admitted that he was used to people showing up and asking for autographs. However, he was definitely taken aback by the agents. “And they said, ‘We’re with the FBI.’ Mhmm. ‘We’re not here for that. We just wanted to meet the Fonz,’ ” he recalled. Jason Bateman pointed out that looking up Henry’s address was “a bit of an abuse of their assets,” but Henry didn’t mind. He was relieved that he wasn’t in trouble. “I was so happy that I was not being put in handcuffs. I didn’t care what they did,” he laughed. This story’s featured image is by Kathy Hutchins via Shutterstock. The post Henry Winkler Details His Hysterical Run-In With FBI Agents Who Were Hunting Down The Fonz appeared first on InspireMore.

Are there more pastors today who are dropping out of ministry than ever before?

Nooooo! Not Bernie

The U.S. Marshal fired several shots at the 18-year-old suspect with the help of his colleague