Fox News responds to Trump’s attacks on Megyn Kelly

Fox News is done trying to be diplomatic with Donald Trump. Apparently no longer concerned about a possible boycott after all three remaining Republican hopefuls dropped out of a scheduled March 21 debate in Salt Lake City, the cable news network has decided to go all out in its defense of anchor Megyn Kelly. Fox News said Trump’s “vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate.”

 

The apparent gloves-are-off statement came after Trump’s latest series of anti-Kelly tweets that began on Tuesday and continued into Friday with the real estate mogul calling on supporters to boycott her show. “Everybody should boycott the @megynkelly show,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday. “Never worth watching. Always a hit on Trump! She is sick, & the most overrated person on tv.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/19/fox_news_says_donald_trump_has_sick_obsession_with_megyn_kelly.html

U.S. Veteran Is First to Be Convicted in American Courtroom of Supporting ISIS

A federal jury found U.S. Air Force veteran Tairod Pugh guilty Wednesday of trying to join ISIS in Syria in the first ISIS-related verdict to be reached in an American courtroom. The 48-year-old American citizen was arrested in New Jersey last year after a stint working as an airplane mechanic in the Middle East. Pugh was deported back to the U.S. from Egypt where the FBI kept tabs on him.

Pugh watched online ISIS propaganda content and went so far as to pen a letter to his wife pledging his support for ISIS and referencing their life together in paradise after he died a martyr. “But [Pugh] had not sent the letter, giving his defense an opening to argue that although Mr. Pugh was an ardent ideological supporter of the Islamic State, his visions of joining the group were just fantasies,” the New York Times notes. “The jury rejected that defense, convicting him of crimes that carry a potential 35-year sentence.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/09/air_force_vet_tairod_pugh_convicted_of_supporting_isis.html

Bernie Sanders Isn’t Interested in Your Bipartisan Solution

The students of Concord High School had just finished a week of exams but remained in school for an afternoon assembly. The New Hampshire school’s guest speaker was 74-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders. Rather than groaning about having to stick around for another couple of hours, though, the students were elated.

It’s so funny, we’ve been bringing some candidates in throughout the year, and everyone’s really excited and been asking good questions and having a great time,” said Chrigus Boezeman, a social studies teacher doubling effectively as Sanders’ hype man on this Friday in January, a few weeks before the New Hampshire primary. “And everyone’s saying to me, ‘Mr. Boezeman, gosh, it’s really great that you’re having all of these candidates come in. But … do you think Mr. Sanders can come in?’ ” The students, who were about to get the candidate they’d wanted to see for months, whooped with approval, breaking out into periodic chants of “BER-NIE, BER-NIE!” while they waited.

 

A high school student body is never the most voter-rich crowd to address on a cramped two-day swing through a crucial primary state. But for Sanders, whose campaign message rests on expanding voters’ realm of the possible in an age of frustratingly static politics, the opportunity to mold impressionable young minds was too good to pass up. These are the same sort of minds that then-Sen. Barack Obama, the last candidate to successfully inspire voters to look beyond the stale politics of the day and imagine something better, captivated in 2008.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/02/bernie_sanders_grassroots_revolution_isn_t_interested_in_barack_obama_s.html