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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

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Health Reform’s House Breakout The GOP needs to show the country—and Trump—it can govern.

By on May 4th, 2017

Against the odds, House Republicans have regained momentum on health-care reform, and they’re nearing a majority coalition. While there may be more swerves before a vote, they ought to appreciate the importance of demonstrating that a center-right Congress—working with President Trump —can govern.

There are still holdouts and others are undecided in the GOP’s moderate and conservative wings, but their differences are narrowing. More members are also recognizing their political mistake in trashing the original ObamaCare repeal and replace bill. The House now has a rare second chance, and a generational opportunity to start to solve some U.S. problems.

On Wednesday Fred Upton of Michigan and Billy Long of Missouri worked out the latest compromise, meant to assuage concerns about insurance for pre-existing medical conditions. The amendment would add $8 billion over five years to a 10-year, $130 billion fund to create risk pools to protect people in the individual insurance market who need high-cost treatments.

Pre-existing conditions are an understandable concern, but the critics traffick in demagoguery, not substance. Their opposition has less to do with vulnerable patients than preserving ObamaCare. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that risk pools are “like administering cough medicine to someone with stage 4 cancer,” which exploits cancer victims and shows he knows nothing about risk pools.

By targeting funds at the sickest patients, states can make insurance markets more affordable and stable. These subsidies siphon off some of the costs that contribute to rising premiums in the overall market, and the idea is that the resulting cheaper plans for everyone else will encourage more people to enroll.

In Alaska, ObamaCare premiums rose 40% annually over multiple years, one of the two participating insurers exited the business, and the other was on the brink. So the state received a federal waiver last year to create a risk pool. Premiums rose 7.3% on average for 2017.

Opponents say risk pools are underfunded, but the Alaska rescue mission cost merely $55 million (albeit in a low-population state). The results came despite ObamaCare’s restraints, and the GOP’s American Health Care Act promises more regulatory flexibility to experiment. Opponents also argue that risk pools are ghettos for the sick, but the Alaska payments are “invisible,” meaning that all consumers use regular insurance.

We’ll learn soon if risk pools are enough to win over GOP moderates, but they should know that Democrats will demagogue the pre-existing conditions issue in the 2018 election whether the bill passes or not. Better to pass the bill, and explain to their voters why their reform is better for patients, than defend a failure. HillaryCare’s crash didn’t save vulnerable Democrats in 1994—though unlike Democrats, this time Republicans have a good product to sell.

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The Death of Facts by Douglas Murray

By on May 3rd, 2017

Needless to say, none of this is true. Nowhere has Heather Mac Donald suggested that black people or any other type of person has “no right to exist”. The accusation is levelled without evidence. But as with all anti-free-speech activists today, the line is blurred not merely between actual words and violence, but between wholly imagined words and violence.

Every week in America brings another spate of defeats for freedom of speech. This past week it was Ann Coulter’s turn (yet again) to be banned from speaking at Berkeley for what the university authorities purport to be “health and safety” reasons — meaning the health and safety of the speaker.

Each time this happens, there are similar responses. Those who broadly agree with the views of the speaker complain about the loss of one of the fundamental rights which the Founding Fathers bestowed on the American people. Those who may be on the same political side but find the speaker somewhat distasteful find a way to be slightly muted or silent. Those who disagree with the speaker’s views applaud the banning as an appropriate response to apparently imminent incitement.

The problem throughout all of this is that the reasons why people should be supporting freedom of speech (to correct themselves where they are in error, and strengthen their arguments where they are not) are actually becoming lost in America. No greater demonstration of this muddle exists than a letter put together by a group of students at Claremont McKenna College earlier this month to protest the appearance on their campus of a speaker with whom they disagreed.

Heather Mac Donald is a conservative author, journalist and fellow of the Manhattan Institute in New York. Her work has appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious journals. Of course, none of that was enough to deter students at Claremont from libelling her as much as possible in advance of her speech and then preventing her speech from taking place. At Claremont McKenna College, where Mac Donald was due to speak about her recent book, The War on Cops, angry students surrounded the building, screamed obscene words and banged on the windows. Mac Donald ended up giving the speech to a mainly empty room via live video-streaming and then fleeing the university under the protection of campus security. As recent events, such as the hospitalisation of a professor at Charles Murray’s recent speech at Middlebury College have shown, intimidation and violence are clearly regarded by today’s North American students as legitimate means to stop people from speaking.

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Hijab-Wearing Journalist Awarded for Being Hijab-Wearing Journalist by Robert Spencer

By on May 3rd, 2017

She then preemptively claims victim status.

Sawsan Morrar, says the Washington Post, is “a multimedia journalist at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism,” and “was chosen as a 2017 White House Correspondents’ Association Scholar.” She also wears a hijab. And that is no doubt why she was chosen as a 2017 White House Correspondents’ Association Scholar.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which is overwhelmingly made up of Leftist journalistic propagandists who hate President Trump and will stop at little or nothing to bring him down, quite clearly chose her to tweak the president for his supposed “anti-Muslim bias.”

There is just one problem: Sawsan Morrar doesn’t want people to see her as a symbol.

She doesn’t appear to realize that the Left, for all its preening about tolerance and multiculturalism, couldn’t care less about her as a person. But she senses something is wrong, and so is falling back on that tried-and-true response that so many Muslims in the U.S. have employed before: she is claiming victimhood.

Victimhood status is currency these days. If you’re a victim, all manner of doors open to you that might otherwise have remained closed: doors to the adulation of the Left; doors to free passes from scrutiny (legal or otherwise) that you might otherwise have received; doors to a privileged status that elevates you above ordinary non-victim folk. And few, if any, groups are more skilled and indefatigable at pursuing victim status than U.S. Islamic advocacy groups.

They have successfully established in the public discourse the wholesale fiction that Muslimas who wear hijab are routinely insulted, harassed, and brutalized in the United States.

Her piece in the Washington Post is an extension of that endeavor, sans (as always) evidence of the insults, harassment, and brutalization.

This award-winning, hijab-wearing journalist, award-winning solely because she is hijab-wearing, writes:

Those who tune in to watch this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday will hear my name called as I take the stage to accept a journalism scholarship. They won’t see my portfolio of work, and they will likely forget my name. But they’re sure to notice and remember one thing about me: my headscarf.

Maybe so. But isn’t that the idea?

She continues:

And as I prepare to attend, I know some at the event may not perceive me as a fellow reporter who, like them, relishes the thought of meeting journalists I admire. Muslims don’t have the luxury of being a fusion of their achievements, interests and uniqueness. Rather, in the eyes of others, we are only Muslim.

On what does she base this claim? Nothing whatsoever, of course.

But this is the Washington Post during the Trump administration, so anything goes for Muslims wishing to claim victim status. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Not Draining the Swamp The latest budget deal is mostly a win for government as usual.

By on May 3rd, 2017

Republicans and Democrats are jousting over who won the battle over this week’s omnibus spending bill, and we’ll give the call to Democrats because they fought to a draw while in the minority. Republicans will be hard pressed to use the power of the purse to set priorities until they return to regular budget order.

The $1 trillion agreement to fund the government through the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30 is essentially a modest trade: Republicans got a boost in defense spending and a few policy riders, while Democrats got money for some domestic priorities. The agreement provides $15 billion in supplemental defense spending, which is overdue, even if that is only half of President Trump’s military request. The deal does not include Mr. Trump’s proposed cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

Republicans are right that the bill finally breaks the Obama -era rule that every defense dollar be matched by a domestic-spending dollar. Mr. Obama held the military hostage to his domestic agenda, and some Democrats wanted this damaging parity to continue as a price of their votes in the Senate. The GOP made clear this was a nonstarter, which is at least a down payment against military decline.

Democrats are crowing that they killed scores of Republican policy and spending “poison pills” and also won money for their priorities. They blocked funding for Mr. Trump’s border wall, though Republicans included some $12 billion for border and customs security. Democrats got an increase in National Institutes of Health spending, though many Republicans also supported that. Despite their claims, Democrats did not “preserve” funding for Planned Parenthood. The bill contains no direct dollars for that group, but rather funds grants that will be issued by Health and Human Services, which is unlikely to approve any for the controversial abortion provider.

Most of the domestic funding increases and decreases are GOP priorities. The bill contains $45 million to fund three more years of Washington, D.C.’s popular school voucher program, as well as money for western wildfire fighting and disaster-related repairs at NASA.

Conversely, the bill zeroes out dollars to the international Green Climate Fund (set up as part of the Paris climate accord), and it rescinds, consolidates or terminates more than 150 federal programs or initiatives, including such high priorities as the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation or the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program. The bill cuts $81 million from the Environmental Protection Agency, returning it to 2009 levels.

The bill also continues the GOP deregulation drive. In particular, the bill forbids the IRS from spending to issue regulations that would change political standards for nonprofit social-welfare organizations, and it bars the Securities and Exchange Commission from issuing rules that require corporations to disclose political contributions. It also ends the federal attempt to regulate lead in ammunition or fishing tackle—a particular sore point with hunters and rural Americans.

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Climate Editors Have a Meltdown How did science reporting get so detached from the underlying science? By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on May 3rd, 2017

I’ll admit it: I would have found it fascinating to be party to the discussions earlier this year that led to oscillating headlines on the New York Times home page referring to the new EPA chief Scott Pruitt alternately as a “denier” or “skeptic.” At least it would have been fascinating for 20 minutes.

Ditto the hysterical discussions undoubtedly now arising from an anodyne piece of climate heterodoxy by the paper’s newest columnist, a former Journal colleague who shall remain nameless, in which he advises, somewhat obscurely, less “certainty” about “data.”

Whether or not this represents progress in how the U.S. media cover the climate debate, a trip down memory lane seems called for. In the 1980s, when climate alarms were first being widely sounded, reporters understood the speculative basis of computer models. We all said to ourselves: Well, in 30 years we’ll certainly have the data to know for sure which model forecasts are valid.

Thirty years later, the data haven’t answered the question. The 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, voice of climate orthodoxy, is cited for its claim, with 95% confidence, that humans are responsible for at least half the warming between 1951 and 2010.

Look closely. This is an estimate of the reliability of an estimate. It lacks the most important conjunction in science: “because”—as in “We believe X because of Y.”

Not that the IPCC fails to offer a “because” in footnotes. It turns out this estimate is largely an estimate of how much man-made warming should have taken place if the models used to forecast future warming are broadly correct.

The IPCC has a bad reputation among conservatives for some of its press-release activities, but the reports themselves are basically numbing testimonies to how seriously scientists take their work. “If our models are reliable, then X is true” is a perfectly valid scientific statement. Only leaving out the prefix, as the media routinely does, makes it deceptive.

We don’t know what the IPCC’s next assessment report, due in 2021, will say on this vital point, known as climate sensitivity. But in 2013 it widened the range of uncertainty, and in the direction of less warming. Its current estimate is now identical to that of the 1979 Charney Report. On the key question, then, there has been no progress in 38 years.

For journalists, the climate beat has been singularly unrewarding. It has consisted of waiting for an answer that doesn’t come. By now, thanks to retirements and the mortality tables, the beat’s originators are mostly gone. The job has passed into hands of reporters who don’t even bother to feign interest in science—who think the magic word “consensus” is all the support they need for any climate claim they care to make. CONTINUE AT SITE

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UCLA: Coddling Hamas on Campus While Trampling the First Amendment Supporting terrorist propaganda on the taxpayer’s dime. Sara Dogan

By on May 2nd, 2017

Editor’s note: UCLA is the latest school to be named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” It joins the campuses of Brooklyn College (CUNY), Tufts University, Brandeis University, and Vassar College on the list. These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

Last night, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas terrorists on the UCLA campus. UCLA administrators such as Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Jerry Kang have previously labeled similar Freedom Center posters “ethnic slander” and an effort to “trigger racially-tinged fear.” These posters pose a challenge to the UCLA administration to abandon these attacks on speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism, and to fulfill its constitutional obligation to uphold the First Amendment on campus.

University of California-Los Angeles: Jerry Kang, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and Gene Block, Chancellor:

UCLA Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang has undergone extreme intellectual and political contortions in defending the UCLA chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as “an officially recognized student organization, based on political commitments, that is also in good standing” despite SJP’s constant manifestation of Jew hatred on the Los Angeles campus.

In one widely noted expression of the group’s anti Semitism, SJP members illegally questioned student government candidate Rachel Beyda about whether her status as a Jew would bias her decisions on campus matters. It also attempted to create a litmus test for student government candidates by introducing an initiative that would require them to sign a pledge to not take trips to Israel sponsored by pro-Israel organizations.

Such incidents violate UCLA’s Principles of Community which state, in part, “We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue, in a respectful and civil manner, on the spectrum of views held by our varied and diverse campus communities.”

Despite his title as the UCLA administrator in charge of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Vice Chancellor Kang has ignored SJP’s continual violation of these Principles of Community, disregarding the harassment of Jewish students forced to endure SJP’s mock “apartheid walls” plastered with Hamas propaganda and its rallies decrying the founding of the Jewish state as “Al-nakba” or “the catastrophe.” But when the David Horowitz Freedom Center hung posters on campus exposing SJP’s ties to anti-Israel terror group Hamas, and naming campus activists who had worked to bring about the destruction of the Jewish state, both Kang and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block were quick to condemn them. In an email to the entire 50,000 member UCLA community, Kang said the posters were “designed to shock and terrify,” and accused the Freedom Center of using “the tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially-tinged fear.” In a second diatribe, he claimed the posters caused “chilling psychological harm” and “focused, personalized intimidation.”

University Chancellor Gene Block also reacted to the posters by stating “Islamophobic posters appeared on campus, in complete disregard of our Principles of Community and the dignity of our Muslim students. But we can, and we will, do our best to hold ourselves to the standards of integrity, inclusion, fairness and compassion that are the hallmarks of a healthy community.”

Quick to defend SJP and its violent rhetoric, Kang and Block have been missing in action when Jewish students faced intimidation and harassment from anti-Semitic speakers and Hamas propaganda plastered across campus.

In addition to the incidents listed above, UCLA SJP holds an annual “Palestine Awareness Week” on campus featuring speakers who endorse the genocidal BDS movement against Israel. SJP’s 2016 event featured journalist Max Blumenthal, who stated during his address that suicide bombing against Jews is justified by “the occupation” and described Palestinian terrorists as “young men who took up arms to fight their occupier.” He also compared Israel to the Islamic state, calling it “‘JSIL,’ the Jewish State in Israel and the Levant.” Another speaker, Miko Peled, also defended Palestinian terrorism, renaming it “a struggle for freedom and justice and equality,” and describing terrorists as “very brave Palestinians who are engaged in fighting this brutal occupation.” Peled also described Jews as analogous to Hitler, calling Jewish soldiers “young little Jewish gestapos,” and further accused Israel of “massive, violent, brutal oppression,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and of being “a colonialist, apartheid, racist system.”

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Illegal Alien Day The Left used May Day to push its open-borders agenda this year. Matthew Vadum

By on May 2nd, 2017

There were loud, violent, disruptive protests across America yesterday for International Workers’ Day, but American workers’ issues were barely discussed as they took a back seat to the Left’s current mania for illegal aliens and open borders.

This May Day comes after R. Alexander Acosta, 48, was sworn in as the 27th Secretary of Labor by Vice President Mike Pence last week. Acosta, whose nomination was endorsed by the Laborers’ International Union of North America and other unions, was a U.S. Attorney and dean of Florida International University College of Law. He was easily confirmed by the Senate on April 27 by a vote of 60 to 38.

In America, May Day is typically a violent observance. Its purpose is to serve as a rallying point for communists and socialists. Despite that, it hasn’t been that difficult to take the focus off the plight of American workers on May 1 over the years. Perhaps this is because America has never been a left-of-center country perpetually boiling over with class resentment. Americans don’t care much about labor issues or the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them.

Like every president since Dwight Eisenhower, President Trump declared May 1 Loyalty Day. In his proclamation, Trump said Loyalty Day is meant “to express our country’s loyalty to individual liberties, to limited government, and to the inherent dignity of every human being.” Last year President Obama used his Loyalty Day proclamation to blather on about “our diversity” and about the importance of delivering a “fairer Nation to the next generation.”

In the late 19th century, the Left hijacked May Day, a perfectly good ancient celebration of spring and fertility in the British Isles and elsewhere. It used to be a day of dancing around the maypole, singing, and eating cake.

May Day was celebrated in early America but today it is largely forgotten in this country. And so it was easy for the Left to fill this cultural vacuum and co-opt May Day for its own anti-American purposes.

And with Democrats and the rest of the Left in disarray after Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in November, radical immigration activists were seemingly able to wrest May Day away from organized labor this year.

This year’s May Day observances ranged from indifferent to conspicuously hostile to American workers as organizers used May 1 to largely ignore the plight of native workers pushed out of their jobs by cheaper illegal alien labor. The so-called rights of illegal alien workers took center stage yesterday.

On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Carlson mocked leftist campaigners for sounding like agents of the pro-open borders, pro-immigration amnesty U.S. Chamber of Commerce and for refusing to condemn illegal alien workers for driving wages down and leaving legally present workers unemployed or underemployed.

Steven Choi, executive director of the George Soros-funded New York Immigration Coalition, wasted a valuable prime time spot on Carlson’s Fox News Channel show ducking questions about how immigrants put downward pressure on wages.

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Do Not Be Fooled by These “Moderates” in Florida by Joe Kaufman

By on May 2nd, 2017

Since its creation, the Deobandi movement has produced a number of militant offshoots, most notably the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and spread its tentacles around the world, including in the United States. Shafayat Mohamed returned from India and set up one such tentacle in Florida.

As Thomas Friedman wrote, “We talked to the boys. All of them thought America was evil and that Osama bin Laden was a hero.”

Much like its sister madrasa in Pakistan, the Darul Uloom Institute and its imam, Shafayat Mohamed, follow in the line of the most extreme elements of the Deobandi movement. The only difference is that one is more than 7,000 miles away from American shores, and the other is right in our backyard.

The Darul Uloom Institute — who? — in Pembroke Pines, Florida will hold its annual fundraising dinner and awards ceremony on May 6. If it is anything like last year’s gala, which saw honors go to a prominent local politician, a rabbi, and a pastor, you will hear some “moderate” messaging.

Do not, however, let this radical Islamic center’s attempt to ingratiate itself into mainstream American society fool you. Its history is mired in violence and hate.

The Darul Uloom Institute was founded by its imam, Shafayat Mohamed, in October 1994. Originally from Trinidad, Mohamed left for India in 1975, where he was educated at Darul Uloom Deoband, the school where the hardline Sunni Deobandi movement was established in May 1866. In a show of favor to his student, Darul Uloom Deoband selected Mohamed to lead a group of Americans in a 1979 tour of its facilities.

Since its creation, the Deobandi movement has produced a number of militant offshoots, most notably the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and spread its tentacles around the world, including in the United States. Mohamed returned from India and set up one such tentacle in Florida.

Shortly after its founding, Mohamed’s institute became affiliated with “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, a soon-to-be al-Qaeda operative who plotted to set off a radiological bomb in the U.S. Padilla, then a recent convert to Islam, was a student of Mohamed’s and attended the institute from 1995 through 1997. The following year, Padilla abandoned his wife and home in Florida for Egypt and then Pakistan, on his way to becoming a full-blown terrorist.

Mohamed has his own radical history. He has been thrown off a number of Broward County boards due to his extreme rhetoric against homosexuals. In February 2005, he published an article, “Tsunami: Wrath of God,” on the Darul Uloom website; he claims in it that homosexuality caused the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. Mohamed’s article does not target just gays. It also describes Jews and Christians — whom he calls “People of the Book” — as “perverted transgressors.”

The profile picture on Mohamed’s Facebook page shows him shaking hands with now-deceased Muslim leader Ahmed Deedat, with whom he said he “had a good relationship.” The photo with Deedat was taken in Durban, South Africa, at what was then named the Bin Laden Centre. Deedat, who according to the New York Times was “a vocal anti-Semite and ardent backer of Osama bin Laden,” personally received millions of dollars from Bin Laden and Bin Laden’s family for the center.

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On Obamacare, Republicans Vastly Over-Promised Now that Republicans actually have power, they are falling short. By Rich Lowry

By on May 2nd, 2017

Republicans have put on a clinic on over-promising during the past several years.

Even if you were paying only very little attention, you would have gotten the distinct impression over the past four election cycles that the GOP was unalterably committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare.

It didn’t matter what year the Republicans were running (2010, 2012, 2014, or 2016) or what presidential candidate (earnest, establishment-friendly Mitt Romney or bombastic outsider Donald Trump), repeal of Obamacare remained the consistent theme.

The party didn’t leave anything in doubt. It didn’t rely on weasel words or escape hatches. Republicans pledged to, as Texas senator Ted Cruz put it, repeal “every blasted word of Obamacare.” And not in phases, not slowly over time, but ASAP.

Exaggerating only a little more than other Republicans, Donald Trump said last year that “we will be able to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare. Have to do it. I will ask Congress to convene a special session so we can repeal and replace, and it will be such an honor for me, for you, and for everybody in this country because Obamacare has to be replaced and we will do it very, very quickly.”

With the House on the verge perhaps of getting a repeal-and-replace bill through, it is worth recalling the years of sweeping promises. The House bill will roll back Obamacare taxes and introduce a significant reform of Medicaid, but when it comes to the heart of Obamacare — the regulations — the bill only makes it possible for states to get waivers, based on certain conditions.

This is a bill probably worth having, even if it would have earned the derision of Republicans back in the days when they were winning elections with Churchillian statements of resolve on Obamacare. Then, it would have been considered a contemptible half a loaf — at best. Now, when Republicans actually have power, everything looks different.

First, there are the cold feet. As soon as Republicans were confronted with the possibility of writing law rather than making symbolic gestures, they lost much of their enthusiasm for the repeal-only bill they had sent to President Barack Obama’s desk for a ritual veto in January 2016. (Republican support for that bill at the time was near-unanimous, 239–3 in the House and 52–2 in the Senate).

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Philadelphia Protesters Chant ‘Kill Trump, Kill Pence’ VIDEO

By on May 2nd, 2017

https://pjmedia.com/video/these-philadelphia-protesters-literally-want-to-kill-trump-and-pence/

Mayday protesters in Philadelphia were caught chanting “Kill Trump, kill Pence.” So much for non-violent protests. Maybe these guys should be investigated?

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