“I’m wondering if there is data supporting the need for bills regulating this in Missouri or if this (is) a solution in search of a problem,” Jeffress wrote. “As an educator who has worked at the middle school and high school level in Missouri, I know how hard it is for transgender students to be accepted by peers, parents, churches and some teachers. If they are able to participate on an athletic team, they may find acceptance important to their well-being. I hope you would sponsor bills that support positive mental health for each citizen of the state of Missouri instead of proposing bills that attack a population already at risk. Thank you for your time,” she said in closing. The next morning, she received this far less respectful reply:

“Nedra, Do your own research. I don’t care about your feelings nor do I care about your resume. “Bottom line, my intent is to keep women’s/girl’s sports for the female gender.

“If a person was born with a penis, that individual doesn’t belong in sports designed solely for females. “Now go ahead and have your meltdown and/or temper tantrum. Remember, Let’s Go Brandon!!”

Firearms surpassed car accidents as the No. 1 killer among children and teens, according to startling new data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday.

10. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: The more obvious path for the 32-year-old congresswoman would be to bide her time for the right opportunity to run for Senate. She passed on a primary against Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) this year, but she would have a good shot against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) in 2024. Or she could go for an even higher office, for which she polled at 6 percent in that YouGov poll. She doesn’t seem to be taking the kind of steps that others on this list are, but she would have a built-in base, and the progressive lane will be significantly more open this time, since Sanders has said he’s very likely out. (Previous ranking: 10)

While many aspects of Hunter Biden’s financial arrangement with CEFC China Energy have been previously reported and were included in a Republican-led Senate report from 2020, a Washington Post review confirmed many of the key details and found additional documents showing Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.

Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records, court documents and newly disclosed bank statements, as well as emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter Biden.

The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC, which took place after he had left the vice presidency and before he announced his intentions to run for the White House in 2020.

But the new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.

Everybody has their own idea of what makes a best picture winner at the Oscars. Perhaps a biopic or a war movie, or something huge in scale such as a "Dances With Wolves" or "Titanic."

What's pretty clear if you undertake watching all 93 (so far) films to take that vaunted prize – and it's not for the fainthearted, trust us – is that you come out of it changed. You love movies a little bit more.

All of these films bear Hollywood's highest honor – but how do they compare with one another? To celebrate Sunday's 94th Academy Awards ceremony (ABC, 8 EDT/5 PDT), we're ranking every best picture winner, from iffy stuff where a recount seems in order to the very best of the best.

“Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point,” he acknowledged. “I think Fox has changed over the course of the last year and a half. But I can certainly understand where somebody would say, ‘Gee, you were a slow learner, Chris.’”

...

But Mr. Wallace also acknowledged that he felt a shift at Fox News in the months after Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020—a period when the channel ended its 7 p.m. newscast, fired the political editor who helped project a Trump loss in Arizona on election night and promoted hosts like Mr. Carlson who downplayed the Jan. 6 riot.

He confirmed reports that he was so alarmed by Mr. Carlson’s documentary “Patriot Purge” — which falsely suggested the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was a “false flag” operation intended to demonize conservatives—that he complained directly to Fox News management.

Not that it seemed to have mattered much. “I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Wallace said. “But when people start to question the truth—Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection?—I found that unsustainable.”

But the really interesting reminder the Post provides is that from the first moment, Trump's plan was to take this fight to the Supreme Court. There, the election would not be decided by the 158 million Americans who voted, but by nine people in black robes—three of whom he personally put there. (And wherever did he get that idea?) Of the six remaining justices, Samuel Alito is probably the most dependable right-wing vote possible, a true ideologue who starts at his preferred conclusion and backfills the justification from there, even if it means taking the question at issue in a case and treating your preferred answer as a premise of the argument. And the last, fifth vote he'd need was...Clarence Thomas, husband to GITMO Ginni. This doesn't mean all five would have delivered for Trump, but he certainly thought they would.

The beauty of Republicans pulling the battering ram out to get Amy Coney Barrett on the Court in almost comic disregard of their previously stated principles regarding the appointment of Supreme Court justices in an election year was that Trump no longer needed RINO Chief Justice John Roberts, who seems to still harbor some concern for the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an institution. Like it or not, Notorious R.B.G. fans, but this is part of her legacy. When you play the Game of Robes, you resign under a normal president or you wait long enough to hand over your seat to The Windmill Guy.

Speaking of which, Ol' Donny Windmills is, if we can believe a word of what his erstwhile ally Congressman Mo Brooks has to say, even farther off his rocker than could once be imagined. The two had a falling out where Trump withdrew his endorsement of Brooks in the Alabama Republican senate primary, probably because Brooks is floundering in the polls. Some payback for the kind of friend who wears body armor to your pre-riot shindig and tells the frothing crowd, "Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass. Now, our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives … Are you willing to do the same? My answer is yes. Louder! Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?"

According to the report, the arrest came after infighting led to a confrontation that escalated at the rally. The discontent had been brewing for a few days after bad weather and a lack of direction and purpose coupled with a smaller insurgent group reportedly trying to take control over the protests led to general frustrations, desertions, and dissatisfaction.

Earlier in the week at the Hagerstown Speedway, where the truckers meet before wasting time, money, and diesel riding around in circles outside of Washington, D.C., a man calling himself Ricky Bobby took the microphone. He rambled on for a bit, as is par for the course at such an event, and then tried to get truckers to go to another rally point where he promised “indoor bathrooms.”

Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan.

At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, flew from Moscow to Minsk. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.