Our list of the 10 Best Rock Music Double Albums Released in the 1980s showcases some of the finest double albums from what is often referred to as the “Big ’80s.” One challenge we encountered with this list was the transition in the music industry from releasing albums on both CD and vinyl to CD-only formats. This shift wasn’t a major issue in the early 1980s, as CDs didn’t become prevalent until around 1984-85. However, by the latter part of the decade, these changes occurred rapidly. We are unsure if we can continue this list into the 1990s, as almost The post 10 Best Rock Music Double Albums Released In The 1980s appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

The Beach Boys wrote some of the catchiest songs of all-time, but did you know that only one of them actually surfed? It's hard to find time to hit the waves when you're on the road so much! What The Beach Boys may have missed on the water, they more than made up for with the smiles they put on the faces of their fans. But as you're about to learn, they weren't always happy. At one point two of... Source

THE WASHINGTON STAND—Data collected between February of 2021 and January of 2024 revealed “464,922 [unaccompanied] children have been encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection police nationwide.” Some experts, such as those from the child immigrant aid organization Kids in Need of Defense, have explained this surplus of unaccompanied minors was “expected” and likely due to “U.S. measures implemented at the border during the coronavirus pandemic.” But what is shocking, experts have gone on to point out, is how the whereabouts of thousands of these children are unknown, with the biggest concern being that many are becoming victims of human trafficking. These concerns flooded the mainstream media as whistleblowers testified in a roundtable discussion on Tuesday. The accusation laid forth is that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Labor are guilty “of covering up how the government and contracted companies have failed to properly care for 500,000 parentless immigrant children in government custody at the border,” the Washington Examiner reported. Acknowledging the outcry, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said, “No child has gone missing under our watch.” But Allison Dyer pointed out on X that not only is Becerra’s statement false, but she used information collected by a New York Times report to highlight that “85,000 unaccompanied children released to sponsors in the United States by our government are unable to be accounted for,” meaning “their whereabouts or welfare are unknown.” Emphasizing a point similar to Dyer, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who also serves on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, argued that the claims that these children are not unaccounted for shows a “blatant lack of transparency with the American people.” He added, “Frankly, it is hard to see this as anything other than an effort to cover up and shield the Biden administration from scrutiny for its mistreatment and mishandling of unaccompanied children, particularly in an election year where the president is behind in the polls.” HHS whistleblower Deborah White described the circumstances as “taxpayer-funded child slavery,” and she noted that part of what led to this was the government “prioritizing speed over safety.” As a result, she stated, children are being sent to abandoned houses, unsafe homes, and even one case in which “a child was sent to an open field,” which only further proves the lack of integrity of the system. White said that even after several concerns were raised, nothing was done to stop children from being sent to dangerous locations. “[I]t’s unbelievable that we’re … talking about government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded child trafficking,” said Tara Rodas on Thursday’s episode of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” Rodas, who formerly worked for the Department of Health and Human Services and testified on Tuesday, explained how she and some of her “colleagues began reporting trafficking cases in June of 2021.” She sighed, “So, if you can imagine, it’s been more than three years” since those first reports. Rodas emphasized how their efforts were received better “in the beginning, and [we] thought they were going to do something about it.” However, over time, they were threatened and warned from “coming forward to speak the truth.” And “this is not just one incident,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins pointed out, further noting that she “began to see … patterns.” Rodas explained that what it boils down to is a system that is not organized or monitored well. “So,” she continued, “you can imagine how easily a system like that is exploited.” The process, she described, is that children are brought across the southern border “from Guatemala, El Salvador, all over Central and South America with smugglers.” Then, “the smugglers give them the name and address to where they’re going, the children turn that into Border Patrol, Border Patrol turns it over to us at HHS, and then we send the child to that person. It’s really end-to-end delivery.” And the issue with this, as Perkins noted, is that there’s “no verification of relationship, family connection, or anything” to ensure these children end up in a safe place. Again, he contended, “[T]his is being funded by tax dollars. I mean, we’re bringing these children to this country and allowing them to be exploited. This is … horrific.” In many cases, Rodas explained that what leads children to these horrible homes is the fact that “there is no ultimate verification because” the government “did not even verify if the person was a legal permanent resident.” But ultimately, she insisted, no sensible “child welfare organization around the globe would send a child to an unknown person. … That doesn’t even make sense. And yet, that’s what the government is doing.” However, Rodas concluded that sitting idle is not an option. “There are children in crisis now, and we need to rescue” them. Originally published by The Washington Stand The post Thousands of Unaccompanied Minors Now Victims of ‘Taxpayer-Funded Child Slavery’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Republican members of Congress and conservative legal experts had long questioned the legality of Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel.  On Monday, federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida tossed out the federal case involving classified documents against former President Donald Trump, determining that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional since he was not appointed by a president or confirmed by the Senate. In December 2022, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed Smith after Trump announced he was running for president.   “Instead of appointing a special counsel devoid of overtly political connections and professional connections to the very individuals that were involved in opening the criminal matters that apparently [Smith] is now directly overseeing, you chose a special counsel that is wrapped-up into both,” the letter from Grassley and Johnson said.  The letter noted that Smith previously supervised one of the Justice Department officials responsible for opening election-related investigations into the debunked allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. Further, the letter noted that Smith helped drive a 2014 Justice Department effort in the Obama administration targeting conservative groups. Garland never responded to the senators.  Former Reagan administration Attorney General Ed Meese and two law professors, Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson, filed a friend of the court amicus brief in December asserting that Garland lacked the power to appoint Smith for a different reason.  They argued in the brief that Garland has no authority to appoint a “private citizen to receive extraordinary criminal law enforcement power under the title of special counsel.” The National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group, argued Smith’s appointment was illegitimate, and made a similar argument in 2018 when former FBI Director Robert Mueller was named as special counsel to investigate debunked allegations that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the election. Mueller subsequently issued a report in 2019 concluding there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. It’s not clear whether the federal court ruling in Florida by Cannon will have any impact on the separate Smith prosecution of Trump in Washington, D.C., where federal Judge Judge Tanya Chutkan is presiding, regarding Trump’s challenge to the results of the 2020 presidential election. The post Lawmakers, Legal Experts Were Skeptical of Legality of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Appointment appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Joe Biden addressed the nation Sunday night from the Oval Office in the wake of an assassination attempt on his predecessor and political rival, Donald Trump, urging Americans to “unite” and collectively “lower the temperature in our politics.” It was a speech about fundamentals. “Disagreement,” the president said, was “inevitable,” not just to American democracy but to “human nature itself.” The task before the country, Biden continued the night after the attempted assassination of Trump, was to disagree vigorously without allowing that disagreement to turn the political arena into “a literal battlefield or God forbid, a killing field.” “We stand for an America, not of extremism and fury, but of decency and grace,” the president said, adding that, ahead of the Nov. 5 election, the country faces “a time of testing as the election approaches and the higher the stakes, the more fervent the passions become.” “This places an added burden on each of us to ensure that no matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence,” Biden said. The admonishment didn’t lead to introspection about the rhetoric from the White House or his campaign, a gripe that Republicans were quick to voice. “The sentiments expressed by the president in his remarks just now are very noble,” former Attorney General William Barr said in an interview with Fox News, “and I hope they follow them because if they believe it, they will scale back the rhetoric.” Brinksmanship has been a constant in the 2024 election with the campaigns of Biden and Trump both accusing the other of seeding the destruction of the republic, whipping up the passions of their voters with regular warnings that democracy itself is in danger after November. “A vote for Trump is a vote to save Wisconsin and is a vote to save your country. This country is finished if we don’t win this election,” the former president said at an April rally earlier this year, riffing on a theme fundamental to his opponent. Preservation of democracy has been the stated mission of Biden since his return to politics in 2020, and Trump his existential enemy. Before an Independence Hall lit brightly by blood-red bulbs in September 2022, Biden warned that the extremism of his predecessor threatened the health of the republic, attempting to draw out “extreme MAGA ideology” from the “soul of this nation” like poison is drawn from a wound. Not all Republicans subscribe to that extremism, the president said during those remarks, but “there’s no question the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Trump and MAGA Republicans.” “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” the president proclaimed—and hasn’t stopped proclaiming since. Biden told a crowd in North Carolina after the June 27 debate in Atlanta that “Trump is a genuine threat to this nation.” At a Wisconsin rally the next week, he doubled down, saying Trump “really could become a dictator” and arguing that “we cannot let Trump win.” “No, I mean, that’s not hyperbole,” he said. “We can’t. This is the most dangerous election in American history.” Trump seemed to be joking during a December interview with Fox News when he said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One.” Liberals weren’t laughing. No, the MAGA ideology, as Biden and other Democrats see it, instead represents a real curtailment of fundamental rights from abortion to election access. Trump’s restrictive plans to stop illegal immigration are a real cruelty in their eyes, and his plans to gut and remake the federal bureaucracy extreme. It was this view that inspired Biden in August 2022 to earnestly call MAGA—an acronym for the Trump slogan Make America Great Again—“semi-fascism.” Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, drew a direct line from that rhetoric to the rifle barrel of the foiled assassin who fired on Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening. “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the Ohio Republican, at the top of Trump’s VP list, tweeted. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” [Editor’s note: Trump announced Vance as his running mate Monday, The Daily Signal reported.] The motivation of the 20-year-old suspected gunman, who was killed by the Secret Service, is still unknown. He previously registered as a Republican but reportedly made political donations to at least one liberal group. Investigations of the shooter’s profile are ongoing by law enforcement, a fact the president stressed Sunday night in his remarks. “The bottom line, I think, is that when someone is demonized to the extent Trump was being demonized, you are putting a target on them,” Barr said after Biden’s remarks wrapped, “and you are increasing the risk they are going to become a target for someone who has a mixture of these factors—imbalance, some potential political element to it.” At least one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, agreed not only that temperatures ought to be cooled, a message shared by Biden, but also that painting political opponents as existential threats, a strategy employed by Biden, should be abandoned. “This is the moment for elected officials and candidates for political office to lead us down a better road toward the hopeful future that Americans want and deserve,” Golden wrote in a long X thread Sunday. The White House didn’t return a request for comment when asked about Golden’s bipartisan admonishment. A Biden campaign official said that the president’s broadside about democracy would continue, as it is his “north star” and the “backbone of his campaign.” “Stopping political violence was a central motivation for President Biden’s decision to run in 2020 and why he’s running again in 2024,” the Biden campaign official said. “He has been clear and forceful that in America, we never settle our differences through violence—we settle them at the ballot box,” the official said. From the Oval Office, Biden returned to that theme. “Violence has never been the answer, whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted and shot or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 or a brutal attack on the spouse of former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against the sitting governor or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump,” the president said. Biden did not, however, argue again in that moment that Trump was a threat. Originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire This report has been modified to delete the name of the gunman who authorities say shot Trump and three others, in line with The Daily Signal’s practice. The post Biden Asks for Calm After Years of Calling Trump ‘Threat to Democracy’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.