A reporter covering Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie’s appearance at a town parade Saturday was violently arrested by a half-dozen police after a woman reportedly associated with the Gillespie campaign spoke to the officers.

Mike Stark, who covers Gillespie’s race for the site ShareBlue, was attempting to film Gillespie as he drove past during the annual Annandale Parade when he got into conflict with Fairfax County law enforcement over whether where he was standing counted as sidewalk or roadway.

Video of the encounter and arrest show a woman in red approach the officers and speak with them just prior to Stark’s arrest. ShareBlue reports the woman “had raised an objection to Stark’s presence at a Gillespie campaign event just the evening prior.” Gillespie campaign spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for information on the woman’s connection to the campaign, instead directing all questions to police. Stark had hoped to ask Gillespie some questions during a public appearance, according to his employer.


more
https://thinkprogress.org/gillespie-virginia-arrest-reporter-25b31eaaa7b5/

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Kelly


NC


Fox







Drugs



Harassment

The FBI is reportedly investigating the $300 million contract Whitefish Energy had to repair Puerto Rico's crumbling infrastructure in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that FBI agents from the San Juan field office are examining the deal.

The report comes after Puerto Rico's state-run electric utility said Sunday it has accepted the governor's request to immediately cancel the contract with Whitefish, a small Montana-based energy firm headquartered in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's hometown.

more
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/357818-fbi-investigating-whitefish-energy-deal

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Syria



Halloween

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Virginia



Moore



Taxes

Before Donald Trump, GOP elites — policymakers, intellectuals, DC operators — were in the grips of a comforting illusion: that their party was united around the principles of limited government and free markets. The family values and national security stuff rounded out the picture, of course, but small-government economics was the core.

That is how the elite — with help from a compliant media — interpreted the Tea Party uprising that followed Obama’s election. Here were patriots devoted to reducing burdensome regulations and defending economic freedom.

Post-Trump, this illusion has become untenable. Trump never paid lip service to conservative economic ideology. He doesn’t even possess the vocabulary, the catechisms that virtually every Republican candidate can recite by heart. He bypassed small-government ideology almost entirely in favor of white resentment. And Republicans, at least a plurality of them, embraced him for it.

"We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism," said conservative intellectual Avik Roy in an interview with Zack Beauchamp. "In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism."

more
https://www.vox.com/2016/9/9/12843120/rolling-coal-government-overreach