Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From Kay Chronister’s The Bog Wife Five siblings unearth long-buried secrets when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured… By Kay Chronister | Published on October 1, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Bog Wife, a Gothic Appalachian horror novel by Kay Chronister, available now from Counterpoint. Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.” Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself. Before her return, Wenna thought many times about what it would be like to see her family again and a few times, with half-guilty yearning, of how it would feel to see the land where she had grown up, but she had not considered how it would feel for the land to see her, and now she thought that was what she should really have been worried about. The bog looked eyelessly; it felt knowing. The white pines and maples, leaning on their above-ground roots, seemed to incline their heads toward the car. Her husband Michael would have said she was anthropomorphizing the plants. The first time he used that word, she asked him what it meant. He shrugged. It was a word he’d learned in school. Acting like things that aren’t human have human intentions, he said. Everyone learns that? Wenna asked. In school? She’d tried, after that, to see the vacancy in everything, but she felt now that Michael was wrong. The bog was not vacant. It had presence and intelligence, and, she realized, it had changed while she was gone in ways barely perceptible and too subtle to name. Were the trees farther apart? Were they taller? Had the moss on the trunks thinned some? When the car rounded the driveway’s final corner and the house came into view, Wenna drew in a breath. The Haddesley manor was a massive old heap of stone that had been crumpling for longer than Wenna had been alive, but now almost the whole west wing was collapsed. The trunk of an enormous tree stuck through the roof and impinged on the front second-story windows. The east wing was intact, but just barely. The entire house had the look of a rotting vegetable. The ground was puckered up around the foundation. Years’ worth of rotted leaves and soil lapped at the rubblework stone walls. Mud piled up before the front door. “We usually go in the back,” her brother Charlie explained. Wenna opened the passenger door and was almost flattened by the stench in the air. She closed the door with the quickness of a reflex. Charlie had gotten out of the car already. He seemed not to notice or to care about the smell. Cautiously, second-guessing her own senses, Wenna opened the car door again. The stench remained. It was an unwholesome, poisonous odor. The bog had never smelled like that to her before. Bogs were, in their own way, exceptionally clean places, all the stink of vegetable death sealed discreetly away under the surface. There was something wrong with a bog that had a perceptible odor. She was momentarily annoyed that Charlie didn’t offer to carry her bag to the door, until she noticed he was leaning on a cane that he’d gotten out of the back seat, his face wrinkled with an expression of intense focus. “The back door’s unlocked,” he said, before she could ask what had happened to him. This announcement was also the end of any conversation between them. Wenna carried her bag to the door. Buy the Book The Bog Wife Kay Chronister Buy Book The Bog Wife Kay Chronister Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget In the kitchen, it was the almost-comforting house-smell that she registered first: something between the musty paper-and-glue odor of an unkempt library and the putrid scent of vegetables left to rot in darkness. After a moment, her eyes adjusted. Every visible surface was so crowded with objects that Wenna could only register the whole as clutter. Even the stove was mostly covered, old magazines spilling from the mouth of a saucepan, a single burner perfunctorily cleared for use. Racks of dried herbs and greens hung from the ceiling, so long forgotten that they trailed dusty strands of cobweb; Wenna wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they had been harvested the summer before and left there through the winter. The floor was streaked with a palimpsest of dried boot prints. From one corner, a white possum regarded her warily. “Did you know that was in here?” Wenna said with a nod to the animal. She had a suspicion that the possum was a full-fledged member of the household. “It’s Nora’s,” Charlie said. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “Eda said there was no point in cleaning, so.” He was embarrassed; Wenna was not hiding her disgust successfully. “I’m sure it’s been difficult,” she said, at a loss for any other vaguely appropriate response. “Sort of.” He cleared his throat, girding himself to say something else, but then Nora and Percy came thudding down the stairs. Her siblings had gone through growth spurts and puberty in Wenna’s absence and become young adults. They seemed to Wenna to have uncannily grown into each other, even more alike now than they had been as children. Their upturned Haddesley noses and indignant sharp Haddesley chins; even the feathery mushroom-colored hair that they wore in a cloud around their ears. Only, Percy wouldn’t really look at her, and Nora was looking at her as if her gaze could fix Wenna in place. “You came home,” she said, with a kind of awe. “I can’t stay long.” Wenna was surprised and vaguely appalled by her impulse to disappoint her sister, but Nora’s happiness felt oppressive. No one was supposed to be so affected by her coming back. “Just for the burial,” she added, lowering her voice as if it were a secret that their father was right now lying in bed dying. “I know.” Nora’s voice carried a defensive edge. She glanced sideways at Percy, as if checking to see whether he had noticed. Regaining herself, she asked: “Do you want something to eat?” “What have you got?” Wenna hadn’t eaten since getting on the bus, but she was less than confident that anything passably edible could be prepared with the kitchen in its current state. Percy went to the refrigerator, a 1980s behemoth that had been with the house since the Haddesleys, forty-some years late to the game, first acquired electricity. “Pickles,” he said. “Swiss cheese. Eggs.” “We should make eggs,” said Nora. “Eggs are for breakfast.” She sounded as though she were reciting something she’d read in a book but had not personally experienced. “Do you want coffee, Wenna?” “She can’t have both,” said Percy. “Not at once. There’s only one clean burner.” “I’ll have whichever,” Wenna said, and she settled into a spindly little dining chair that she recalled from childhood. The kitchen table was from the same familiar set, but it was now so deeply buried in clutter that barely any of the tabletop was visible. As Percy and Nora negotiated the single functioning stove burner, she fidgeted with a paper box of spoons, some of them ornate and expensive-looking, others bent and tarnished and otherwise unremarkable. All of them glossed by dust. Percy and Nora sat across from Wenna as she ate, their eyes politely averted, even their breaths measured. As if she were a wild animal they’d been lucky enough to stumble upon in its natural habitat. Only when the kettle began to shriek was their attention diverted. Nora rose and poured coffee for all three of them. “If we had milked Matilde, you could have had milk,” she said as she set Wenna’s cup before her. “But Percy is supposed to do it, so—” “I didn’t have time,” Percy insisted. “I had to do Charlie’s chores.” “It’s no trouble,” Wenna said, to head off whatever meaningless bickering was brewing. At least that much had not changed. She looked down into the cup, at the grounds adrift on the surface. “By the way, what happened to Charlie?” she asked, putting off her first sip. Nora’s eyes searched Percy’s as if he were responsible for the answer. Percy drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. “Is he all right?” Wenna heard the panic in her own voice. She hated that already she’d become entangled. She’d been in the house for ten minutes. “Well,” said Nora. She hesitated. “Did you see the tree on the roof?” “Of course.” “The place that the tree fell was Charlie’s room.” Wenna looked at Percy, who only nodded. “And he got hurt,” Nora continued. “He can walk now, but he can’t really do stairs and he mostly stays in his room.” “The room where the tree fell,” Wenna said, incredulous. “He sleeps in what used to be the study now,” Percy clarified. Wenna couldn’t even decide what to ask first. She felt as if she should have been told as soon as the accident happened, as if she had somehow been lied to, even though she would have said that she didn’t want to know. “What did he hurt?” she asked. Percy and Nora exchanged glances again. Neither of them answered her question before Eda came down the stairs, bearing a tray piled with empty dishes. It hurt to look at her older sister. In the malnourished light that the windows admitted, Eda might have been sixty instead of thirty-three. Her skin had the same waxy lusterless quality as Charlie’s. The dark half-moons beneath her eyes formed furrows down to her cheekbones. Wenna didn’t know whether she was supposed to embrace her sister or shake Eda’s hand or take the tray from her, and in the end she did nothing, paralyzed by the sensation that she and Eda were about to resume a fight they hadn’t finished ten years ago. “Wenna,” her sister acknowledged, as if she had been asked to identify Wenna in a lineup. Then, after a long and conspicuous silence, “Dad wants to see you.” Wenna steadied herself in her chair. She had not prepared herself for the trial of interacting with her father outside of the mercifully scripted context of the burial rites. “Does Dad know that I’m here? I mean, did someone tell him that I was coming?” “He knew that you were coming for the burial,” Nora offered. “Right, but—” “He might not be happy to see you,” Eda interrupted, sounding more exasperated than Wenna thought she had any right to be. “If that’s what you’re asking. He’s not happy to see me, most of the time, and I’ve been changing his bedpan for the past month.” “I didn’t have to come out here,” Wenna said. “Didn’t you?” Eda said, with a dismayed little huff of laughter. “Don’t go up there, if you don’t want to. Just know that he heard you downstairs and asked for you.” * * * Wenna ascended the stairs with the grim sensation that she was proving something. Her father’s bedroom was the first one to the left, the door open. She stood for a second in the hallway and absorbed that the figure on the curtained bed was really her father. It occurred to Wenna that she didn’t know what he was dying of. His skin had the same blanched waxy quality as Charlie’s and Eda’s, but worse. As she entered the room, his eyes narrowed, became unfocused, then regained their intensity. “Tell Eda that I don’t want more peas,” was the first thing he said. “I will,” Wenna said, too taken aback to protest. She took a deep breath, fortifying herself. It would have been easier if only he had been dead already. Her father’s eyes drifted from Wenna’s face to the other end of the room, the opened door, the dark hallway. He wanted something other than her. “Easier for everyone,” he said dreamily, “if I am empty when I go.” Wenna lowered herself into the dining chair at his bedside, awkwardly folding into her lap the worn old throw blanket that had previously occupied the seat. Everything in the room emanated a scent fainter but no less morbid than the rancid odor outside. “Empty?” she repeated. “My stomach,” he said, assuaging any fears she might have had that he was becoming philosophical at the end of his life. “People shit when they die, you know.” “Right,” Wenna said. “Do you think,” she ventured, knowing that she was being impolite but deciding that maybe they were past that now, “you’ll die today?” “It must be soon.” He looked entreatingly at her. “I have dreamed,” he said, with urgency, “of meeting on the road a man walking with a cart pulled by a mare impaled on a post.” Wenna crossed her arms to hide the gooseflesh that lifted on them. “I don’t know what that means,” she said firmly. “I should have gone a long time ago,” he whispered. “It never was right, after her.” Wenna’s throat closed as rage tightened her belly and her lungs. She could not think of one single thing to say that Alyson the therapist would have approved of. “I’m sorry that you’re dying,” she managed at last, staring ahead, inwardly cringing at herself for saying something so transparently insincere, when what she wanted to say was I am never going to forgive you, not even after you’re gone. When she dared to glance over at him, his gaze was distant. “You cannot go back, you know,” he said, “to wherever you have been. They need you here.” Wenna was perversely impressed. She should have known that the summons to bury her father was only a pretext. Of course she could not simply come back and then leave. She had been stupid to think that she was ending anything by coming here. But even her father could not possibly be so brazen as to think that on his deathbed he could make any demands about what she did or where she went after she had already squirmed free from the Haddesley noose once. “What right do you have?” she said under her breath, not really wanting or expecting an answer. “Tell me,” whispered Charles Haddesley with the rhythm of an incantation. “Tell me you will stay with them.” Wenna lost her patience. “You can’t ask me for things! I came for the exchange. That’s all you get. And it’s more than you deserve.” Her father’s look became urgent, almost wild. “I never hurt her,” he said imploringly. “You must know.” Wenna’s stomach turned. “If you didn’t do anything to her,” she said, slowly, “then where did she go?” Her father hesitated, and for a second Wenna felt a small gasp of hope that he was going to really answer her, that somehow there’d been a misunderstanding left for ten years uncorrected. But instead he exhaled, and a terse silence unspooled around them. He had no answer for her. “Like I thought,” said Wenna, and she stood to go. She hesitated at the doorway, thinking how disappointing it was that those were the last words she might ever exchange with her father. She did not look back at him. Excerpted from The Bog Wife, copyright © 2024 by Kay Chronister. The post Read an Excerpt From Kay Chronister’s <i>The Bog Wife</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.  Social Security is almost out of money. They broke it, we bought it. This comes from the Congressional Budget Office, who just released a new report saying Social Security has just nine years until it runs out of money. Why? Because it’s a Ponzi scheme. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Basically, imagine you contributed to your pension company for 40 years, but they spent it all invading Ukraine. You turn 65, ask them for the money, and it’s gone. So first, what does this mean. Social Security actually ran out of money a long time ago or, putting it more accurately, it never had any money. Because giving Congress a dollar for safekeeping is like giving a Kardashian a Botox gift card. The dirty little secret of Social Security was they took the money and spent every last dime. Like that scene in “Indiana Jones,” they swapped out the money for IOUs and treasuries. For decades, those IOUs built up since Social Security was collecting more than it was paying in benefits. But starting in 2010, it went negative and they were paying out more than they were collecting. They were losing IOUs. So, when the CBO says it will run out of money, it means the IOUs will be gone. At which point the full annual Social Security deficit, $150 billion and rising fast, goes straight to deficit. At that point, they either have to cut benefits, raise taxes, or eat it and let the deficit ride. Cutting benefits could mean starting benefits later, maybe at age 70 or 75. Or means-testing benefits so if you work hard and save, you lose your Social Security. Or, the simplest, a 24% cut in benefits perhaps disguised by manipulating the inflation adjustment so seniors don’t realize they got robbed. The other way is taxes. You could tax a wider range of earnings, you could push beyond the $170,000 earnings cap. Or, again the simplest, a 35% hike in Social Security taxes. That would take the payroll tax to 19.6% on top of income taxes. Happily, there is a better way: Let people keep their Social Security accounts like a 401(k). The South American country of Chile, for example, does not spend the national pension. Instead it makes you invest it, like a mandatory 401(k). You can put part in high-risk that pays better, or low-risk that pays less. The result is Chile’s system is actually overfunded to the point they’re increasing pensions for poor Chileans. Why? Because in the 40 years their system existed, assets grew by over 8% per yearafter inflation. To his credit, then-President George W. Bush actually proposed this 20 years ago, and the left-wing media pilloried it as “privatization,” so it went nowhere. So, what’s next? Social Security is a Ponzi scheme headed for collapse. And it’s accelerating. My Heritage Foundation colleague Rachel Greszler estimates that unfunded liabilities are getting worse by more than $1 trillion per year. The Social Security office in Alexandria, Virginia (Peter Parisi/The Daily Signal) That’s on top of our $2 trillion deficit. And don’t forget Medicare, which is even worse. The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way: Other countries have shown how to manage an sustainable national pension. As always, they served us up rusty nails and an old boot for dinner, and it’s up to voters to throw it away and make something else. A new episode of the Peter St Onge podcast just dropped, rounding up all the week’s top stories. Check it out at Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post Social Security’s Financial Time Bomb Is Ticking. Why Doesn’t Congress Hear It? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

New York Democrats Push for Radical Change to 'Equal Rights'

Google is at it again, forcing users to dig through 13 pages of search results before finally finding a story by Fox News in one search, and 14 pages before finding a story by the New York Post in another. These two results were the first U.S.-based right-of-center publications in two separate searches using the leftist search platform. Is Google living up to former President Donald Trump’s accusations of election interference?  Using the media list provided by AllSides that classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias, MRC researchers found that tech giant Google blanketed search results for “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024” with leftist, legacy media sources like CNN, The New York Times, NBC News and Politico. On Oct. 1, MRC researchers did not find any U.S.-based “lean-right” media outlets until Fox News appeared as the fifth result on the 13th page of Google search results for the aforementioned Harris search prompt. Likewise, Google buried the first U.S.-based “lean right” result for the aforementioned Trump prompt as the third result on the 14th page, as Google featured an article by the New York Post. This overt leftist bias is especially concerning considering that according to a November 2023 Pew Research survey, a rising number of American adults receive their news from search. The study found that 15 percent of U.S. adults prefer to get their news from search engines which is up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2021. Equally concerning, the Google search results are not only filled with radical leftist websites such as Vox and Al Jazeera, but also include publications owned and supported by wealthy Democrats. Billionaire and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post. SalesForce CEO and longtime Harris donor Marc Benioff owns Time magazine. FactCheck.org—a member of the George Soros-funded Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network—appeared before any U.S.-based sources on the right, as determined by AllSides.  Google did display a U.K.-based “lean right” website earlier in its results. However, the search giant even buried the U.K.-based outlet The Telegraph on the 10th page of the Harris prompt search results and on the seventh page of the Trump prompt search results. An earlier MRC study showed extraordinary bias in Google search results, revealing that the search engine had forced users trying to find the Trump campaign’s website to wade through a gauntlet of leftist articles before reaching it. Following the MRC study, Trump condemned Google’s behavior in a post on Truth Social, vowing legal action in a potential second administration. Google, on the other hand, absurdly tried to dismiss the study.  Now MRC has caught them again, but Google has a long record of bias and election interference dating back to 2008. Before Google began making users run the gauntlet of negative coverage to see the Trump campaign’s website, the search engine frequently buried the former president so far down that it did not appear on the first page of results. Google did this during the Republican National Convention and ahead of the July presidential debate between Trump and Biden. Google also did this while Trump was in the news due to a guilty verdict following Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s politicized prosecution of him.  This is just one of a myriad of ways that Google has interfered in American elections on behalf of its favored candidates. In fact, Google meddled in American elections no fewer than 41 times from 2008 to 2024, including by burying 83 percent of the Republican campaign websites for the most competitive Senate races of 2022. Methodology  For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Oct. 1 Google search results of the innocuous words “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” MRC Free Speech America utilized a VPN and private window utilizing the Brave privacy browser to analyze Google search results to limit the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies. MRC Free Speech America also utilized the AllSides media bias chart as a gauge to determine which outlets are “right” and “lean right.” AllSides notes it has a “patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,” not a homogenous group or an algorithm. “Our methods are: Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a multipartisan team of panelists who look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and third party data.” Readers should be aware that this report only uses the AllSides list to analyze ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “right” and “lean right” and does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets. Editor’s Note: Assistant Editor Gabriela Pariseau contributed to this report.

A Democrat senator with an anti-free speech ax to grind is once again attempting to trigger Big tech-government collusion just before the 2024 elections. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) insisted that President Joe Biden’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) coordinate more with social media platforms to crush alleged election “disinformation,” in a Sept. 26 letter to CISA director Jen Easterly. CISA was one of the notorious federal agencies exposed by the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit as working with tech companies on censoring free speech. Warner claimed now is “an opportune moment to ramp up such collaborations” with Big Tech. Big Brother approves. Warner wrote at length whining about alleged “disinformation,” including AI-generated Joe Biden messages and supposed Russian influence campaigns. His censorship aims became particularly clear as he urged First Amendment-violating coordination. “Within the vein of collaborative efforts, I also encourage CISA to work closely with all relevant parties, including academics and researchers, state and local officials, and private sector entities (such as technology companies and social media platforms) in an effort to increase information sharing,” he wrote.  He continued to hammer the proposal of increased government pressure to silence Americans. “I strongly encourage the agency to again coordinate efforts with platforms to combat election disinformation,” he pontificated. “In an election cycle where threats persistently grow but some platforms are dedicating fewer resources towards election integrity and content moderation efforts.” Warner even suggested CISA should be the middle-man for “facilitating communication between election offices and platforms,” allowing a triumvirate of Big Tech-government-election official censors targeting supposed “misleading information,” especially AI content. Warner has a track record not only of urging for government-tech censorship collusion, but also of falsely labeling users as Russian “disinformation” spreaders. For instance, in 2017, he aggressively urged tech companies like Twitter to censor alleged Russian disinformation, and lawmaker pressure ultimately contributed to Americans being wrongly censored as supposed Russian-affiliated users, according to the Twitter Files. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

On September 27, ICE revealed that it estimates there are roughly 13,000 non-citizen murderers running loose in the country, but of the three (ABC, CBS, NBC) broadcast networks only NBC found time to mention it on the September 27 Nightly News and on Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. It should be noted the mention on Meet the Press (made by Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute) was immediately “fact-checked” by moderator Kristen Welker: “And DHS has said some of those stats actually go back as far as 40 years.”  But at least the stat got airtime on NBC.  It’s been three days since the report was released and so far ABC and CBS have remained silent on the shocking number, despite both networks doing stories on Vice President Kamala Harris’s border visit.  Over on CNN, Senator Linsey Graham brought up the 13,000 statistic on Sunday’s edition of State of the Union only to have host Jake Tapper immediately “fact-check” it:  Jake Tapper: “OK. So I saw that statistic. We dove into it, our fact-checker, that statistic is actually over decades. So some of those people you're talking about are people that came into the country during Trump. And second of all, some of them are in prison. A lot of them are in prison for- not ICE prisons, but federal prisons for their- for their crimes.” The September 30 print edition (September 29 online version here) of the Washington Post covered the 13,000 number on page 2 but only did so to trash Donald Trump in an article headlined: “Trump Skews Data in Ice Letter to Lambaste Immigrants.” The fact that ABC and CBS still refuse to report on the number shows how far they are willing to go to cover for the Biden-Harris administration.

Foreign policy reporting can be tricky. You have to explain what bad people think in an honest way without coming across like you endorse their position. Christiane Amanpour failed in this on Tuesday’s CNN News Central as she omitted key facts related to a recent ceasefire proposal that she claimed could have prevented Iran’s salvo of 180 ballistic missiles on Israel. Amanpour recalled, “And what the Lebanese foreign minister told me, and this is really extraordinary, and I had not heard it before. That just before the Israeli targeting of the Hezbollah headquarters that assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, that there had been a ceasefire, which the U.S. announced, but what the Lebanese prime minister said to me was that they had got Hezbollah to agree to that ceasefire and apparently they thought that Netanyahu would agree too.”     The ceasefire proposal Amanpour is referring to was for a 21-day temporary ceasefire that would have allowed for negotiations towards a permanent one parallel with a similar ceasefire in Gaza. Israel opposed it because if the first stage ended in failure, all it would have accomplished was allowing Hezbollah to regroup after much of its chain of command had been wiped out and communications sabotaged. Opposition to the plan was widespread in Israel. The leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, declared any temporary ceasefire should last no more than seven days, while the head of the Democrats—a new party formed from the merger of the left-wing Labor and Meretz parties—suggested it be three days, not three weeks. As it was, Amanpour proceeded to give the Iranian view of things, “Now, the Iranian foreign minister told me in New York during the United Nations that they were showing, and this is again before Friday's assassination, that they were showing restraint and that Hezbollah was showing restraint as well. And that it wanted, you know, to deescalate all of this.” She continued: That was the word also from the podium at the United Nations by the Iranian president and they were saying that they are being entrapped and they're trying to resist the notion of being trapped into this war. So, then comes the assassination of their client, Hassan Nasrallah. Now, Hezbollah is not but there—Iran is not there to protect Hezbollah. It's the opposite, Hezbollah is meant to be the frontline troops of Iran. So, this response from Iran is more likely because it feels it has been left no choice, as [Javad] Zarif said to me, in New York, that they may be pushed into this kind of response because everyone is asking, hang on a second, what are you going to do now that your best friend has been assassinated in Lebanon and certainly the so-called Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei’s was very close to Hassan Nasrallah. Amanpour claims Iran wanted a ceasefire, but it could’ve told Hamas and Hezbollah to quit, but it chose not to. Iran has taken the region to the brink. First by arming Hamas, then by watching as its Hezbollah friends joined the war for no justifiable reason, and now by launching a second massive missile barrage at Israel in the last six months. The tensions in the Middle East can be laid right at Khamenei’s door step. Here is a transcript for the October 1 show: CNN News Central 10/1/2024 1:01 PM ET CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: The second thing is that I've been speaking to foreign ministers from the region just today, the Lebanese foreign minister, who is currently in Washington speaking with the Biden administration and trying to get them, as he told me, to really use all their diplomacy and their influence with Israel and with whoever else they have influence with to stop this escalating. And what the Lebanese foreign minister told me, and this is really extraordinary, and I had not heard it before. That just before the Israeli targeting of the Hezbollah headquarters that assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, that there had been a ceasefire, which the U.S. announced, but what the Lebanese prime minister said to me was that they had got Hezbollah to agree to that ceasefire and apparently they thought that Netanyahu would agree too. Anyway, as you saw what happened on Friday night, which has led to this escalation. As for Iran, and now the Lebanese prime minister is very concerned that there will somehow be an attempt, whether it's to come to the rescue of Israel or whether Israel tries to get U.S. in. But the U.S. may end up joining this escalation in the Middle East, the foreign minister said. Now, the Iranian foreign minister told me in New York during the United Nations that they were showing, and this is again before Friday's assassination, that they were showing restraint and that Hezbollah was showing restraint as well. And that it wanted, you know, to deescalate all of this.  That was the word also from the podium at the United Nations by the Iranian president and they were saying that they are being entrapped and they're trying to resist the notion of being trapped into this war. So, then comes the assassination of their client, Hassan Nasrallah. Now, Hezbollah is not but there—Iran is not there to protect Hezbollah. It's the opposite, Hezbollah is meant to be the frontline troops of Iran. So, this response from Iran is more likely because it feels it has been left no choice, as Zarif said to me, in New York, that they may be pushed into this kind of response because everyone is asking, hang on a second, what are you going to do now that your best friend has been assassinated in Lebanon and certainly the so-called Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khameni was very close to Hassan Nasrallah. And there's been a lot of internal divisions inside Iran about how best to respond to what happened with the assassination of Nasrallah. So that is essentially what seems to be going on right now in terms of the big picture.

Unionized dockworkers halted operations at the 36 East Coast and Gulf Coast ports and took to the picket lines early Tuesday morning as a result of failed negotiations between the International Longshoremen's Association and the United States Maritime Alliance.Port workers told Fox Business they are prepared to continue the work stoppage until their union is able to negotiate a more favorable contract. The six-year agreement between the two parties expired Monday evening.The walkout is the first launched by the ILA, which represents 85,000 longshoremen, since 1977.The ILA is demanding wage increases for its members and job security by banning the automation of cranes, gates, and container-moving trucks used to load and unload freight.The USMX claimed it made an offer to the ILA on Monday that would have raised wages by nearly 50% over the duration of the contract. The offer also reportedly would have tripled employer retirement plan contributions, provided better health care plans, and retained existing language about automation.In a Monday statement, the USMX said, "In the last 24 hours, the USMX and ILA have traded counter offers related to wages. The USMX increased our offer and has also requested an extension of the current Master Contract, now that both sides have moved off their previous positions. We are hopeful that this could allow us to fully resume collective bargaining around the other outstanding issues – in an effort to reach an agreement."Fox Business reported that the ILA rejected the offer and announced it would be moving forward with its plan to strike. Last week, the USMX reportedly filed an unfair labor complaint against the ILA, claiming that the union was breaking labor laws by refusing to participate in negotiations. The ILA called the move a "publicity stunt."In a Monday statement, the ILA accused the USMX of "block[ing] the path toward a settlement on a new Master Contract by refusing ILA's demands for a fair and decent contract" and said it "seems intent on causing a strike at all ports from Maine to Texas beginning in almost 12 hours."ILA President Harold Daggett told Fox Business that the parties' initial negotiations "didn't work out" but that the union is "always willing to sit down when the right number is hit.""Right now, everything is off the table," he told the news outlet. "Nobody's talking right now. We got Congress trying to bring them to the table. And that's where we are right now."The union's decision to push forward with the strike has raised concerns about the potential economic impact. The 45,000 dockworkers participating in the walkout manage approximately half of all goods shipped in and out of the country. Jason Fisk, CEO of Los Angeles-based SalSon Logistics, estimated that the work stoppage could cost $3.7 billion per day.Joe Mosquera, a dockworker in New Jersey, told Fox Business from the picket line on Tuesday, "I started 27 years ago and my wages increased only $25 over the 27 years.""So to me, I believe that we've taken less than we've deserved in the past. So now it's time," Mosquera stated. "We are just looking to be paid fairly and for the goods we take care of every day. And we did not stop during COVID, and we don't want to stop right now.""We are willing to go back as soon as they decide that they'll give us a fair contract," he continued. "What's fair is whatever my union president is willing to negotiate to. But to be lowballed, he's not going to agree to that."From the picket line in New Orleans, the ILA's local chapter told WVUE-DT, "Due to corporate greed, employers refused to compensate the ILA's members fairly.""The ILA is fighting for respect, appreciation, and fairness in a world in which corporations are dead set on replacing hardworking people with automation. Employers push automation under the guise of safety, but it is really about cutting labor costs to increase their already exceptionally high profits," the chapter said.Boise Butler, president of ILA Local 1291 in Philadelphia, made similar remarks to KYW-TV, stating, "Automation puts us all out of work.""This industry controls so much of the economy. It's unbelievable. We may be small in stature ... but what we control as far as the economy is concerned, it's untouchable," Butler continued. "We're not going anywhere until we get what we deserve."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Actress and comedian Roseanne Barr said the onus fell on her to play a Donald Trump supporter on the reboot of her show "Roseanne" because all the other actors refused to do so.During an appearance on "The Glenn Beck Podcast," Barr spoke about the reboot of the incredibly popular TV show that bears her name. The sitcom originally aired from 1988 to 1997 before returning during the Trump administration in 2018. Despite the massive viewership (18 million for the premiere), the rebooted show was canceled by the network for what was perceived as racist commentary by Barr."They hated Trump so bad," Barr said of the Disney-owned ABC. "I thought, well, when they hear the facts — but then I knew, oh, it's because they know the facts. That's why they hate him.""But it was consistent with the show," Beck retorted. "Donald Trump is the guy for the blue-collar worker.""Even if you personally didn't like him, he's the guy the Conner family would have supported," the host added."Of course," Barr explained. "That's what I said."'I wanted to show both sides still loving on each other in the same family, because that's America.'In the reboot, Barr portrayed a Trump supporter, while her sister was portrayed as a vehement liberal who even wore a pink "p**sy hat" worn by protesters at pro-abortion marches in real life.However, the comedian revealed that she didn't want her character to be the conservative person because it was too true to life."I didn't want to be the one that was for Trump because I thought that was too on the head. I thought it should have been Dan Conner [John Goodman], because it was mostly working-class men that were [pro-Trump] at that time.""But he wouldn't do it. John Goodman wouldn't do it, and neither would any of the other characters on the show portray the Trump voter." — (@) For Barr, she felt there was a need to show that families with differing political opinions, as stark as they may be, can still get along."I wanted to show both sides still loving on each other in the same family, because that's America. And maybe fighting about it, but certainly not trying to kill each other," she explained."That's why I came back, because I didn't want to see America polarized like that. I knew [leftism] was leading to segregation."The 71-year-old also revealed that the network didn't approve of showing an "integrated" working class."I also wanted to show that the working class is the most integrated class in America, and [ABC] hated all that too," Barr told Beck.Following Barr's exodus, the sitcom was revamped into "The Conners," which largely ignored the previous season. In the new show, the Roseanne character died of an accidental opioid overdose. According to People, the character was found to have a mixture of pills hidden in different places around the house.The show is still on the air after six seasons, garnering an average of 9.5 million viewers in its first season and 7.7 million in the second season. The numbers have significantly dropped off but are still in the millions.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Under Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, the United States government has released 13,099 murderers from across the border. They’ve released 15,811 rapists, 425,435 convicted criminals total — and 350 terrorists, or those suspected of having ties to terrorism. On top of all that, 325,000 children have gone missing after being brought into the country. These stats were all released last week by none other than ICE. “What happened to them? Are they now being subjected to essentially child slave labor? Are they part of child sex trafficking rings? These are valid questions that the Kamala Harris campaign doesn’t want to answer, because she doesn’t want people to know her stance on legalizing illegal immigrants into our nation,” Liz Wheeler of “The Liz Wheeler Show” comments. And Wheeler has the receipts. The National Partnership for New Americans is a group funded by George Soros that has been naturalizing hundreds of thousands of individuals — at least a quarter of a million of them. “Their goal is to continue to naturalize these migrants and make them into voters,” Wheeler explains. The group has received $560,000 from Soros’ Open Societies Foundation, with a revenue of $4.1 million in 2023 alone. “George Soros is paying for that because his goal is the same as Kamala Harris’. He wants to change the fabric of our nation, overwhelm our systems, topple our country, and he’s using the border invasion to do that,” Wheeler says. Want more from Liz Wheeler?To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.