Ad Links Warnock to ‘Defunding the Police’

A conservative group’s deceptive TV ad suggests that Democrat Raphael Warnock supports defunding the police. He has said multiple times that he doesn’t.

The ad, from the American Crossroads super PAC, features Harris County, Georgia, Sheriff Mike Jolley accusing Warnock of being against police officers.

“Warnock is an anti-police extremist,” Jolley says in the ad, which debuted Nov. 24. “That’s why he’s backed by defunding the police radicals. Defunding the police is crazy. It’s dangerous. While we’re stopping real criminals, he’s calling us thugs. Warnock cannot stand up to the radicals because he’s one of them.”

But Warnock doesn’t support efforts to defund law enforcement. He also didn’t call all police officers “thugs,” as we wrote when fact-checking a similar attack from Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who Warnock hopes to unseat in one of Georgia’s two upcoming runoff elections. In that case, he was addressing the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. 

Checking the Facts in the World of Trump

I guess I picked the right year to take up fact-checking.

I had been in journalism for a very long time. I had managed a national radio station, overseen news operations in many cities, covered Washington during the Bush era, written columns about the media for a national newspaper. But this assignment was new.

Sure, I had written columns about the phenomenon of news outlets checking the assertions of political figures and ascertaining which were true and which were false. And I was a fan. For too long, I felt, news operations would run stories saying X said this, Y said that — and leave it there. And leave readers, viewers, and listeners completely unenlightened about what was true.

No ‘Landslide’ for Biden, Either

Provided President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College margin of victory holds — and we have seen no reason so far to believe it will not — it will be the same margin won by Donald Trump in 2016.

That would leave Biden (as it did Trump) in the bottom third when ranking presidents by the percentage of Electoral College votes.

Back in 2016, Trump wrongly called his victory a “landslide.” Now, some are taking a page out of Trump’s book to claim Biden won in a landslide. But it wasn’t accurate for Trump then, and it’s not accurate for Biden now.

Here’s how Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, who will be Biden’s director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, put it on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Nov. 22:

Richmond, Nov. 22: This was a fair election. Joe Biden won by over 6 million votes in the popular vote. 306 electoral votes, which is the exact same number that Donald Trump had that he called a landslide. So, Joe Biden won with a mandate and a landslide and now it’s time to transition.

Air Force Special Ops Must 'Ruthlessly' Cut Legacy Systems, 3-Star General Says

Air Force Special Operations will have to adapt to major changes in mission and organization while coping with tighter budgets in the new era of great power competition, Lt. Gen. James Slife said Monday.

"One thing that's clear to us is that the future doesn't look a lot like the present to us," Slife, head of Air Force Special Operations Command, said in a virtual discussion with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

If predictions within the Defense Department for flat or declining budgets in future years come true, "the only conclusion one can come to is we have to stop doing some stuff," he said.

"We have to divest in order to invest" in systems and equipment more suited for generational competition against China and Russia than the conflicts with violent extremist organizations that have dominated missions for Special Forces since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Slife said.

Mattis Calls on Biden to Scrap 'America First' Policy, Slow Pullout from Afghanistan

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has broken his silence on the election with a public call to President-elect Joe Biden to alter the course of current defense policy.

Alongside three co-authors, Mattis published a piece in Foreign Affairs on Monday warning against abrupt departure from Afghanistan and calling for the elimination of "America First" as a tenet of defense strategy.

"To dismiss U.S. involvement today in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere as 'endless' or 'forever' wars -- as both Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden do -- rather than as support to friendly governments struggling to exert control over their own territory misses the point," Mattis and his co-authors wrote. "It is in the United States' interests to build the capacity of such governments to deal with the threats that concern Americans."

As defense secretary, Mattis was the main architect of the National Defense Strategy, which directed the military to prepare for potential conflict with Russia and China. But Mattis and the others urged Biden and his new national security team to give the NDS a major rewrite and soften the confrontational tone.

"In January, when President Joe Biden and his national security team begin to reevaluate U.S. foreign policy, we hope they will quickly revise the national security strategy to eliminate 'America first' from its contents, restoring in its place the commitment to cooperative security that has served the United States so well for decades," the authors wrote.

Mattis was joined by Kori Schake, a long-time collaborator and now director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; retired Adm. Jim Ellis, former head of U.S. Strategic Command; and Joe Felter, a West Point graduate and Special Forces veteran of Afghanistan who now serves as a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Grammy Awards Nominations 2021: The Complete List

The nominations for the 63rd annual Grammy Awards were revealed in a lifestream Tuesday. Beyoncé came out on top with nine nominations, followed by Taylor Swift, Roddy Ricch, and Dua Lipa with six apiece. Brittany Howard, of Alabama Shakes fame, picked up a surprising five nods for her solo debut.

Among those picking up four nods: last year’s Grammy queen, Billie Eilish, along with Megan Thee Stallion, Phoebe Bridgers, Justin Bieber, DaBaby, jazz musician John Beasley and classical composer David Frost.  (One of the predicted leaders, The Weeknd, was shut out.)

The complete list of nominees for the 2021 Grammys:

‘Chappelle’s Show’ Removed From Netflix at Dave Chappelle’s Request

Netflix has removed Dave Chappelle’s comedy sketch series “Chappelle’s Show” after the comedian requested them to do so.