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Rep. Allen West’s Wife Joins Husband In Attacking Gays

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Angela West, the wife of Tea Party Republican Congressman Allen West, joined her husband’s attack on his gay constituents Monday, by calling them “intolerant,” after her husband was uninvited from a speaking engagement at local Florida business owners’ group. The group, the Wilton Manors Business Association, revoked their invitation to Rep. West after a boycott was threatened by a local LGBT activist group, the Florida Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Caucus, for West’s negative and offensive comments about LGBT and other social issues. In response, Rep. West had sent a letter to the Wilton Manors Business Association calling the LGBT group that threatened a boycott, “intolerable individuals.”

“So, it is better to make sure that the congressman does not speak. That he does not address small businesses in the area, politics and the economy? Sometimes it might be better to listen,” Angela West wrote in a Facebook note.

“However, if tolerance were to be achieved by an evening of discussion, it would have been discovered that Congressman West’s close relative is gay and married to his partner — we love and adore them both. It might have been interesting to meet a good fellow soldier, Sgt. Tammy Barnwell and her partner Lydia. They all served together with the Congressman in the Middle East. And maybe you could have discussed, after the business meeting of course, his views on DADT. What a novel idea, having a personal discussion with a Congressman.”

Perhaps Mrs. West is unaware that her husband forced the Wilton Manors Business Association to change the format of the event, from a meeting open to the public, to a closed-door meeting?

Perhaps Mrs. West is unaware that her husband, Rep. West, has said that “gay marriage is an oxymoron,” which will destroy society?

Perhaps Mrs. West is unaware that her husband has said, gays can change, but, “unless I’m Michael Jackson, I can’t change my color?”

Perhaps Mrs. West is unaware that her husband, despite his supposed friendship with the same-sex couple she just outed on Facebook (no, Don’t ask, Don’t Tell isn’t gone yet, thank you very much Mrs. West,) might be a bit encumbered by his statement, “it’s just a matter of time until [gays] break down the military.”

Perhaps Mrs. West is unaware that a “partner” in a male same-sex married couple is also called a husband — that marriage is the same for all couples.

And perhaps Mrs. West is unaware that it’s not only Rep. West’s stance on LGBT issues that offend many people. Comments like, “when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool,” certainly don’t make people want to embrace him. Nor do his anti-Islam activities. Nor his misogynistic actions.

Angela West, the Congressman’s wife, clearly is uninformed about her husband’s activities. Mrs. West is a political appointee — Republican Governor Rick Scott appointed Angela West to the Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees, in addition to her full-time job as a financial advisor for Raymond James and Associates.

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Trump Disavows Prediction Markets — His Family Has Financial Ties to Them: NYT

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President Donald Trump on Thursday told reporters that he was “never much in favor” of prediction markets. “I don’t like it conceptually. It is what it is. I’m not happy with any of that stuff.”

“Well, you know, the whole world unfortunately has become somewhat of a casino,” Trump, a former casino owner, told reporters. “And you look at what’s going on all over the world, in Europe and every place they’re doing these betting things.”

“I’m not happy with any of these sites,” Trump said. “They have predictive markets — it’s a crazy world, it’s a much different world than it was.”

And yet, Trump and some of his family members stand to benefit financially from those very markets, according to The New York Times.

“The president’s publicly traded media company unveiled its own prediction market product last year,” the Times reports. “And the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has ties to two of the industry’s top firms, including Polymarket.”

READ MORE: ‘Now Do Hanging’ Republican Demands After DOJ Announces Firing Squads for Executions

Ethics experts the Times consulted say Trump’s public statements directly contradict his family’s financial interests in the industry.

Despite Trump’s admonition, new regulations are not expected. Last year, the Trump administration “backed away from enforcement efforts against Polymarket, and it is unclear whether regulators will adopt any new oversight measures.”

The Times reports that the White House “has warned staff not to wager on government decisions, but his family’s involvement with these firms undermines the president’s message.”

U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) who is sponsoring legislation to ban government officials from betting on prediction markets using classified information, has raised concerns about national security risks. Chances that the bill would pass through a GOP-majority Congress are uncertain.

“It’s too politically dicey,” she said. “There is not a single important issue of the day where I don’t feel the shadow of Trump and his sons.”

READ MORE: Trump Believes He’s a ‘Savior’ Sent by God and Will Never Cede Power: Stoddard

 

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‘Now Do Hanging’ Republican Demands After DOJ Announces Firing Squads for Executions

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A Republican member of Congress is calling for death row prisoners to be hanged after the U.S. Department of Justice announced it will move to expedite death row executions, including — for the first time in federal civilian history — by adding firing squads. The DOJ also said it will readopt lethal injections.

Declaring that it has a “solemn duty to seek, obtain, and implement lawful capital sentences,” the DOJ said in a statement that it will work to clear the way for the Department to “carry out executions once death-sentenced inmates have exhausted their appeals.”

The Department called the executions critical steps “to deterring the most barbaric crimes, delivering justice for victims, and providing long-overdue closure to surviving loved ones.”

The DOJ said it “has rescinded the Biden-Garland moratorium on federal executions and has authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.”

Before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life in prison.

READ MORE: Trump Believes He’s a ‘Savior’ Sent by God and Will Never Cede Power: Stoddard

“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”

“Now do hanging,” demanded U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee.

Burchett last year suggested that House Republicans might offer convicted sex trafficker and Epstein partner Ghislaine Maxwell the possibility of a reduced sentence in exchange for her testimony.

In 2023, after the mass shooting deaths of three nine-year-olds and three adults at a Nashville Christian elementary school, Burchett told reporters nothing could be done.

“We’re not gonna fix it. Criminals are going to be criminals,” he told reporters.

READ MORE: Trump Found His New Favorite Reason to Void 2020

 

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Trump Believes He’s a ‘Savior’ Sent by God and Will Never Cede Power: Stoddard

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President Donald Trump has little intention of leaving the White House says veteran political analyst A.B. Stoddard, arguing that he believes he is a “savior” and will either try to find some way to run for another term, cancel the election, or do something else radical.

“I don’t think he has any intention of leaving,” Stoddard told columnist Bill Kristol.

She believes there are “two paths” for Trump.

“He does not want to fall apart in public,” Stoddard said, adding that he will be forced to “make a calculation at some point.”

Asking if Trump can “serve and walk across stages, make speeches, be as visible as he wants to be, which he really needs?” she noted that the president “needs to be on camera as many days a week as he can.”

“I think he will make the calculation that he cannot run again if he’s feeling that he’s aging too quickly” for another term, she said.

READ MORE: ‘What Evil Looks Like’: Columnist Says Trump Presides Over a ‘Circus of Death and Chaos’

“He has no intention, I believe, of having any kind of successor that’s not in his family. So he’s either going to find a way to try to run for [another] term, or cancel the election, or do something very radical,” which is “not beyond him,” she said.

Stoddard says she could see Trump trying to pass his presidency off to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his son, Donald Trump Jr. or his daughter, Ivanka Trump — but not Eric Trump. And he’s not going to walk away from the money he is making now — the most he’s ever made in his life.

It’s “absolute lunacy” to think that he is going to walk away from “the two things that soothe his demons,” which are “adulation and money.”

“I genuinely believe, Bill, that he believes that he is some kind of, you know, savior,” Stoddard declared.

“I mean, it’s always about how he was brought here by God,” she continued. “I don’t know that he has [the] specifics down, but he certainly believes he is special, and he craves that, that central, you know, all the attention has to be on him.”

She also said that had Trump lost the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton and never been president, he would have “just sat on Fox three days a week, just bashing her.”

She concluded that she cannot see Trump just going off “like an old man into the sunset.”

READ MORE: Pope Leo: Church Should Focus More on Justice and Less on Same-Sex Blessings

 

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