A high-end restaurant in Portland, Oregon, had to shut down after it served a group accused by left-wing protesters of being white supremacist.

Clarklewis was vandalized on Sunday after leftist activists allegedly confronted the group. A window was broken, and employees at the restaurant were traumatized.

‘I totally support the protest. … I support what they’re doing, but they totally misplaced it on this restaurant.’

Joe Rogers, one of the owners of the restaurant, said the establishment doesn’t support white supremacy and did not know anything about the group because it had a nondescript name.

“We knew people were coming for brunch, and we knew they were called the Oregon Group,” he said, according to the Oregonian. “We knew that they had some Christian affiliation, which, of course, we allow Christians into our business.”

He told KOIN: “Sure, if they walk in and they’re awful, and they’re obviously somebody that’s not going to be kind to our staff or to other guests, we’re going to ask them to leave.”

The left-wing activists reportedly planned a protest against the group in part because of flyers they saw online.

The confrontation between the allegedly racist group and the left-wing protesters led to one worker quitting on the spot and others going home for the day, according to Rogers. Some also hid upstairs, he added, according to the Oregonian.

He said the group paid about $2,000 to rent a space but that he would be donating the money to a charity in order to show goodwill to the community.

RELATED: Liberals are lashing out at Guy Fieri after he was photographed with Donald Trump at UFC event

Even more ironic is that the restaurant is LGBTQ+-owned and has displayed a Pride flag for many years.

A spokesperson for the Portland Police Bureau said that police initially responded to the restaurant at about 2 p.m. that day but that there was no property damage, so they left. They were called once again, and when they returned, they found a window broken.

Rogers said one person in the group wore a shirt with a white nationalist slogan.

“Nobody was paying attention to what their T-shirt said,” he added. “And I think at the end, when they were handing out pamphlets, I think the reason if they’re handing out pamphlets at the end, it’s because they knew they had started doing it before they would have been kicked out.”

Police said they tried to determine who broke the window but were unsuccessful, and no arrests were made.

“I totally support the protest,” Rogers said to the Oregonian. “I support what they’re doing, but they totally misplaced it on this restaurant.”

It is unclear whether the restaurant has reopened.

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​Oregon, Politics, Pride flag, White supremacy 

A resurfaced video showing a Democrat U.S. Senator waving an upside-down American flag at a 2017 rally with the Somalian community is going viral online.

The video on social media is taken from a speech Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) gave at a Somalian celebration for a presidential election in the African country.

‘We have more to do, but we will continue to fight for you!’

In the video she promises to remove restrictions on cash remittances to Somalia and uses a traditional Somalian phrase to show her support for the interests of the Somalian community in Minnesota.

“As you know, we are home to the largest Somali population in the United States, and we are so proud of that fact in Minnesota!” she yells to loud applause.

At one point someone hands her the upside-down U.S. flag, and she waves it haphazardly.

“Oh, thank you. Very good!” she says.

While it might have been an oversight on her part, the video shows Somalian attendees waving U.S. flags upside down. Mostly, they wave the Somalian flag and others wave the U.S. flag right side up.

One apparently upside-down U.S. flag can even be seen in the background of a photo Klobuchar posted from the event on social media.

“Congressman [Keith] Ellison and Senator [Al] Frankin and I worked so hard to reduce the redundant regulations on remittances to Somalia, lessening the burden for banks!” she added, referring to other Democrat officials. “We have more to do, but we will continue to fight for you!”

A short clip on social media showed the objectionable parts spliced together, but the longer video is available for context on the YouTube channel for Somali TV of Minnesota.

A Blaze News request for comment from the Klobuchar campaign was not returned before time of publication.

RELATED: ICE deports Somali man accused of torture and war crimes who was found driving for Uber in DC

In 2025, BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo and his colleague at City Journal reported on how some of the remittances to Somalia have ended up funding terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab.

This is not the only time Somalians in Minnesota have seemingly treated the American flag with irreverence. For example, a similar incident unfolded years later when community leaders accidentally raised a large U.S. flag that was upside down during a Somali Independence Day event in July in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The St. Cloud Police Department told Fox News they were alerted to the incident and an officer was sent to the event. The officer was able to correct the flag “without objection,” and the event’s organizers “indicated to City staff that the flag being flown upside down was not intentional.”

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​Amy klobuchar, Minnesota, Somalia, Us flag, Politics 

Lea Martin arrived in America expecting to find the country she’d heard about her entire life: uncultured, superficial, and different from Europe in all the wrong ways.

Instead, she found something she never anticipated.

Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck has read her new book, “Dear Land of the Free,” and he calls it “almost like a love letter” about his beloved country.

Martin explains that she wrote the book after she broke up with her ex-boyfriend and felt “disassociated.”

“I felt like, oh my god, I need to write this love letter to this country that gave me so much and helped me transform so much,” she tells Glenn.

“So, it’s just my whole love for this country that gave me so, so much,” she adds.

“What was it that flipped you … because I know what people say in Europe about America, and it’s almost a cartoon version of us. But what was it that you either saw that you were like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have this all wrong,’ and what flipped you to this?” Glenn asks.

“When I arrived in the U.S., I had so many cliches, and I’ve never dreamed about moving to the U.S. It just happened because of my ex,” she explains. “And then when I arrived here, I realized how wrong I was because we have so many cliches around food, around Americans, around so many things here.”

“And I realized I was so wrong,” she says, noting that “one of the biggest cliches” is that Americans are “uncultured” because they don’t travel as much as Europeans.

“And I’ve realized there’s a lot of nuance in this cliche,” she says.

“It’s so easy for us to travel because also the flight tickets there are way cheaper, while in the U.S. it’s more complicated. This country is so huge. Like, when even I was in Pennsylvania, I did a road trip in Pennsylvania, and I was like, I’m still in the same state, but I can drive hours and hours and hours,” she explains.

When she road-tripped through Texas, she found the same thing, calling it “endless.”

“Each state has its own specialties, people, mindset. It’s so interesting,” she adds.

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​America, Europe, Glenn beck, Lea martin, Love letter, Pennsylvania, Texas, Blazetv show 

The Republican Party in Michigan issued a mocking response after Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said former President Barack Obama will be joining him on the campaign trail.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) announced his retirement 18 months ago, and El-Sayed is trying to win the seat to keep it in Democrat control. Losing it to Republicans would significantly bolster the GOP’s efforts to maintain control of the U.S. Senate.

‘President Obama is parachuting into Michigan, in a desperate to attempt revive Conman Abdul’s floundering campaign.’

On Monday, El-Sayed said Obama would attend a rally in Detroit at the end of October in his campaign to defeat Republican Mike Rogers. Black voters in Detroit have expressed misgivings about El-Sayed.

“It is my honor and privilege to announce that President @BarackObama is joining us on the trail in Detroit,” wrote El-Sayed on social media.

If El-Sayed wins, he would become the first Muslim to hold office in the U.S. Senate. Republicans have lambasted him for extremist statements he has made in the past and for his associations with anti-American extremists like influencer Hasan Piker.

Greg Manz, the senior communications adviser of the Michigan GOP, mocked the development in a statement to Blaze News.

“President Obama’s upcoming trip to Detroit proves Conman Abdul El-Sayed has a severe base problem. It’s no surprise to us that Democrats are playing defense in the very city where ‘Democrats for Rogers’ launched — Motor City voters are abandoning the Conman because working families have zero interest in having their taxes hiked to pay for a government-controlled health care scheme that costs $32 trillion,” he said.

“President Obama is parachuting into Michigan, in a desperate to attempt revive Conman Abdul’s floundering campaign,” Manz added, “because Democrat support is evaporating daily in Detroit — it’s a Hail Mary for an extreme candidate who can’t even energize his own base.”

The Democrats for Rogers group also released a statement including comments from El-Sayed slamming Obama when he was re-elected in 2012.

RELATED: WATCH: 9/11 hero’s father narrates powerful ad against Abdul El-Sayed

“[Obama] has perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him, and the list of his failures goes on,” said El-Sayed at the time.

Failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris has already campaigned for El-Sayed.

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​Abdul el-sayed, Islam, Muslim, Us senate, Barack obama, Politics 

Christa Pike was sentenced to death for one of Tennessee’s most brutal murders — she led her roommate into the woods, tortured her, and killed her. Three decades later, the state attempted to carry out that sentence.

But it failed.

Pike survived two lethal injection attempts and was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is not happy about it.

“So now you have this headline I can’t wrap my brain around, actually. ‘Christa Pike getting lifesaving medical care after surviving Tennessee execution,’” Gonzales says, noting that Tennessee taxpayers are footing the bill.

“[They’ve] paid for her to live up until this point, and the point of that, I guess, was that she needed to go through all of her appeals or whatever until the state found that they could execute her in good conscience,” she explains.

“And now Tennessee taxpayers are spending more money and more resources to try to save the life of the person who was on death row who was supposed to be executed,” she says.

Gonzales also points out that the execution squad was all women.

“This actually was a DEI execution squad. It was an all-female execution squad,” Gonzales says. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she says, answering herself. “But they injected her twice with pentobarbital. And they couldn’t find the vein. I don’t know. They tried to establish an IV line for an hour, using at least seven needles.”

“So maybe, instead of figuring out how we can get all-female execution squads, we should just get people who understand how to put an IV line in, because now this chick is in the hospital in critical condition,” she explains.

“And her attorney is arguing, like, ‘Oh, actually … this should all just be canceled and she should just be allowed to go home because of what she’s been through,’” she continues.

“So all I’m saying is I think we need to bring back the firing squad,” she adds.

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​Sara gonzales, Christa pike, Tennessee, Taxpayers, Execution, Lethal injection, Blazetv show 

The Justice Department published a damning report from the Weaponization Working Group on Monday detailing how elements of the Biden administration allegedly conspired during the pandemic to characterize concerned parents as domestic terrorists.

How it started

Parents around the country made their voices heard during the pandemic about various matters impacting their children, including COVID-19 restrictions, mask mandates, anti-white propaganda in the classroom, and the abuse that inevitably followed districts’ embrace of gender ideology-formed school policies.

‘Find a reason to suggest that such protests could be federal crimes regardless of the initial skepticism.’

This exertion of political agency by parents apparently enraged the powers that be.

On Sept. 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association claimed in a letter to then-President Joe Biden, “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat. The National School Boards Association respectfully asks for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.”

In addition to complaining about the alleged dissemination of “misinformation,” the NSBA suggested in the letter that school officials and educators around the country were “susceptible to acts of violence” and faced threats over their role in pushing COVID-19 and leftist measures.

From the NSBA’s Sept. 29, 2021, letter. Justice Department

The NSBA letter also asked the Biden administration to:

“investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials”; consider treating alleged “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes”; and”examine appropriate enforceable actions” against the supposed crimes under the PATRIOT Act and other statutes.

The NSBA also insinuated that certain individuals who attended school board meetings were potential terrorists, the DOJ Weaponization Working Group noted in its report.

Among those referenced was Scott Smith of Virginia. Smith criticized Loudoun County Public Schools officials after his disabled daughter was anally raped by a trans-identifying man in the girls’ restroom at Stone Bridge High School.

RELATED: Parents weren’t asked. Many still don’t know. Inside the new school surveillance nightmare.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The DOJ’s new WWG report makes mince meat of the NSBA’s letter, which was recognized at the time by Republican state attorneys general as a “massive fraud” and “designed to intimidate parents into giving up their constitutional rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

The WWG report claims, for instance, that the NSBA identified “numerous instances of constitutionally protected speech and protest as ‘threats'”; implored the Biden administration to treat such protected speech as criminal; and falsely suggested that school boards generally faced “angry mobs” and disruptions.

In an Oct. 22, 2021, letter, the NSBA board of directors walked back some of the claims and admitted that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.” The damage was, however, done.

The NSBA did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

Despite its political bent and inaccuracies, the NSBA’s Sept. 29, 2021, letter set the stage for the October 4, 2021, memo sent from then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to relevant Biden officials in the FBI and the DOJ, treating the association’s claims as fact and their concerns as warranted.

From Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4, 2021, memo.

According documents reviewed by the WWG, Garland’s subsequent memo “and its suggestion that such protests could constitute federal criminal activity, including domestic terrorism, was the product of pressure by the White House and high-ranking Department of Justice officials to find a reason to suggest that such protests could be federal crimes regardless of the initial skepticism.”

Elements inside the Justice Department and the FBI strongly doubted whether school-directed protest and criticism from parents qualified as criminal conduct.

An attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division noted in an Oct. 3, 2021, email, “I read the letter from NSBA, and looked at the links for a handful of the footnotes, and it appears to me that the vast, vast majority of the behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law.”

Justice Department.

One attorney in the DOJ’s Criminal Division reportedly noted that an early version of the Garland memo tied supposed school board threats to election threats and would therefore be regarded “as a partisan exercise aimed at those who do not support the Administration.”

Notwithstanding such internal criticism, Garland apparently rushed out his memo. The Biden administration then took steps to implement it, subjecting multiple parents to federal investigation.

The FBI previously confirmed to congressional investigators that it had opened at least 25 counterterrorism “Guardian assessments” based on alleged school board threats. Six of these probes were run by the bureau’s Counterterrorism Division.

How it’s going

The WWG concluded that the Garland memo “was the product of pressure by senior leadership to support the NSBA and to bring federal pressure to bear on parents protesting school districts that had enacted certain policies.”

The WWG emphasized that by suggesting that concerned parents were breaking federal law or on the verge of doing so had a chilling effect on First Amendment rights.

While the Trump DOJ cannot turn back the clock and undo the damage generated by the previous administration, it is offering several remedies.

It will, for instance, enable those Americans targeted by the Biden administration for their participation in school board meetings to see the FBI Guardian assessments that were created for them.

The DOJ will also add a disclaimer to every Guardian assessment associated with the Garland memo, noting that “the Garland Memorandum raised serious constitutional concerns, and so any Guardian assessment resulting from it should be read with caution.”

Additionally, the department will review the files of all persons investigated pursuant to the Garland memo to determine if their constitutional rights were trampled.

“Parents are children’s natural providers and protectors,” stated Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. “The Biden-Harris DOJ labeled concerned parents as threats for exercising their right to know what was happening at their kids’ schools. This Civil Rights Division stands with parents, and we will continue to partner with the Department of Education to enforce parents’ rights under federal law.”

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​Biden administration, Domestic terrorists, Gender ideology, Justice department, Parental rights, Loudoun county, Politics 

If a rock concert in 2026 isn’t overtly political, is it really a rock concert?

Apparently not if the Strokes are involved.

‘As we as we fight fascism and genocide, raise wages, and guarantee health care to everyone.’

Fight the Powers

The New York band performed before roughly 40,000 fans at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens on Friday, with a lineup that included Beach House, TV on the Radio, and Fcukers — plus a couple of considerably more political special guests.

One famous audience member made sure everyone knew he was there.

“Austin Powers” star Mike Myers posted several photos from the concert to Instagram while wearing a black T-shirt reading “FIGHT FASCISM,” emblazoned with the familiar red raised fist of left-wing protest movements.

Myers described the Strokes with fire emojis before writing, “#voteinnovember #fightfascism.”

The leftist love wasn’t limited to the crowd.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took the stage before the Strokes’ set and heaped praise on the band.

“The greatest city in the world is now welcoming the greatest rock band of our generation, who have always been committed to a better future for all of us,” Ocasio-Cortez declared, “as we fight fascism and genocide, raise wages, and guarantee health care to everyone,” she continued, as the crowd cheered.

The audience got even louder when AOC introduced the next guest: Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.

RELATED: GRAVE ‘DIGGER’: Will Tom Cruise’s $100 million eco-flop bury Warner Bros.?

Bern there, done that

AOC escorted Sanders to the microphone, the two raising their arms together as the crowd roared.

Sanders opened by joking that he had come to sing a few songs.

“You wouldn’t want to hear that,” he added.

He then thanked the Strokes for “standing up for economic justice” and “fighting racism,” while praising the band’s “understanding that health care is a human right.”

Sanders closed by urging the audience to vote and to “stand up to authoritarianism” in November.

The Strokes have been “feeling the Bern” for a few years now. The band performed at a Sanders campaign rally in New Hampshire during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, with frontman Julian Casablancas calling Sanders America’s “only truly non-corporate candidate” and declaring, “This is why we support him.”

Friday’s event — which the band’s website noted was taking place in “one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods in the world” — also featured a live edition of Casablancas’ podcast, “S.O.S. Earth Is a Mess,” devoted to climate change.

RELATED: Did these 6 movies about Satan accidentally summon him to their sets?

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Citizen Mike

As for Myers, this was hardly his first recent political outing.

The Canadian-born actor endorsed Liberal Party leader Mark Carney during Canada’s 2025 federal election and helped popularize “Elbows Up,” a hockey-derived rallying cry that Canadians adopted while pushing back against President Donald Trump’s tariff threats and repeated talk of making Canada the 51st state.

Myers is also an American citizen. In a previous interview, he spoke about being grateful for that citizenship and described living in the United States as a privilege.

Apparently dual citizenship also means never having to choose just one country’s politics.

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​Mike myers, Elbows up, The strokes, Alexandria ocasio-cortez, Bernie sanders, New york city, Entertainment 

When it comes to educating your children, never go full woke.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times writer best known for “The 1619 Project” and her work on school segregation, apparently learned that lesson the expensive way. In a lengthy New York Times Magazine essay, she recounts how she deliberately enrolled her daughter, Najya, in struggling Brooklyn public schools because she believed families like hers should live their integrationist principles instead of seeking out better schools.

Hannah-Jones deserves some credit for publishing an unusually candid account of what happened to her daughter. But that candor should lead somewhere.

The experiment did not go well for Najya. Hannah-Jones describes weak instruction, assignments that went ungraded, little homework, disorderly classrooms, and large gaps in basic math. Her parents paid for tutoring and repeatedly intervened on her behalf, but the academic deficiencies accumulated.

By eighth grade, Najya insisted on choosing her own high school. She selected a rigorous screened school, mostly white and Asian, and initially struggled because she had not received the same preparation as many of her classmates. With tutoring and help from her new teachers, she caught up.

Her verdict on the experience was brutal: “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.” Hannah-Jones apologized. “I feel like you got cheated,” she told her daughter. She also wrote that, in the end, “I had not chosen her.”

So Hannah-Jones does recognize that she failed her daughter. What she does not abandon is the larger diagnosis that led her there.

Her essay still treats segregation, school choice, and the sorting of affluent and high-performing students as central explanations for why schools like Najya’s struggle. She closes by arguing that there is “no absolution” as long as families rescue their own children from failing schools while poor black children remain behind.

But her own story points toward a more basic problem: Schools do not become good because more high-performing children are assigned to them. High-performing families are attracted to schools that teach well, maintain order, set clear standards, and hold adults and students accountable.

Money does not explain away what happened, either. New York City Public Schools reports a $45 billion budget and $34,717 in per-student spending for fiscal 2026 — and that per-student figure excludes debt service, transportation, and food. Whatever else New York City schools lack, they are not operating on starvation rations.

The harder question is competence.

In my experience teaching high school English, failing schools are often terribly run. Principals avoid disciplining disruptive students, teachers lower expectations to keep everyone moving, grades cease to mean much, and administrators explain away poor results instead of correcting them. The result is a campus where good teachers burn out, serious students learn to keep their heads down, and everyone gets passed along.

RELATED: Portland schools turned one mom into a culture-war enemy

Lindsey Nicholson/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Hannah-Jones’ reporting describes many of those symptoms, yet she can’t seem to connect the dots. Najya said students received little homework, grades did not reflect mastery, and classrooms could be loud and chaotic. When Hannah-Jones played those complaints for Unison Principal Emily Paige, Paige cried and blamed the larger system: “This is the reality of a segregated system, and it’s not just segregation by race and class; it’s by ability. This is the reality of school-choice systems.”

That answer is revealing. If a school needs an influx of stronger students to make the classrooms function, then sorting may explain who attends the school, but it does not explain why the adults failed to teach the students already there.

To Paige’s credit, she also told Hannah-Jones something far more important: “It is important to not, in our pursuit of being antiracist, lower expectations. Because this is what happens, right? It’s racism under the guise of antiracism.”

That is much closer to the lesson Hannah-Jones’ story actually teaches.

Freddie deBoer, writing from the left, takes the argument in almost the opposite direction. In a response to the Hannah-Jones essay, he argues that schools and teachers have relatively little influence over a student’s long-term academic outcome and that prior performance and innate academic ability matter far more.

Yet Hannah-Jones’ own account makes that hard to dismiss as irrelevant. Najya entered high school with serious gaps in algebra and basic math. Intensive tutoring and direct help from teachers followed. By the end of the semester, she was earning mostly A’s and B’s and later passed the state algebra exam. Whatever one thinks about the size of school effects in the aggregate, instruction and intervention plainly mattered to this particular student.

RELATED: How to fix the woke teacher problem

H. Rick Bamman/Pioneer Press/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

Mississippi offers another useful comparison. Since the state enacted its Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013, its fourth-grade reading score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rose from 209 to 219, while the share of fourth-graders scoring proficient or advanced rose from 21% to 32%. In 2024, Mississippi ranked ninth nationally in fourth-grade reading.

Those gains did not come from simply throwing more money at schools or rearranging their racial composition. Mississippi combined early screening, teacher training and coaching, evidence-based reading instruction, intensive intervention, clear promotion standards, and retention for third-graders who could not meet the reading threshold, with exemptions for specified cases. The state now touts the nation’s largest fourth-grade reading gains since 2013.

The lesson is not mysterious. Schools that insist on order, competent instruction, meaningful grades, and high expectations give students a better chance to learn. Schools that make excuses for disorder and disguise failure with inflated grades do not.

Hannah-Jones deserves some credit for publishing an unusually candid account of what happened to her daughter. But that candor should lead somewhere.

If a child can earn honors grades without learning algebra, if parents must hire tutors to repair years of missing instruction, and if a principal’s first explanation is that the school lacked enough high-performing students, the problem is not that too many families exercised choice.

The problem is that the school was failing the children who were already there.

​Antiracist, Education, High school, New york times, School choice, Segregation, Woke, Children, Nikole hannah-jones, Mississippi, Public education, Math, New york city, Opinion & analysis 

On a recent episode of “The Drive,” my co-host Karl Brauer and I got into a discussion about a pair of bills being considered in my home state of New York.

One sets a goal of reducing driving across the entire state by 20%. The other would tax certain fuel-efficient vehicles by the mile and require an electronic device in the car to keep track.

To calculate the tax, qualifying vehicles would be required to have an onboard electronic unit installed when the vehicle is registered, re-registered, or renewed.

I had a fairly basic question: This might work for New York City, but how exactly are the rest of us supposed to drive 20% less?

Even a Californian like Karl saw the problem immediately.

“There’s this whole area, the politicians might have heard of it,” he joked. “It’s called Upstate New York.”

Exactly.

If you live in Brooklyn, you may have a subway station a few blocks away. Where I live near Buffalo, and across huge stretches of Upstate New York, your car isn’t some luxury you can casually replace with a subway, bicycle, or comfortable pair of walking shoes.

You drive to work. You drive your kids to school. You drive to buy groceries or see family.

For millions of New Yorkers, driving isn’t optional.

Miles to go

So what exactly is Albany proposing?

The Get Around NY Act, sponsored in the Senate by Brooklyn Democrat state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, would establish a goal of reducing the total number of vehicle miles traveled in New York state by 20% by 2050.

Now let’s be precise about what the bill does, because it’s important. Nobody is proposing that a police officer check your odometer on Dec. 31 and issue you a ticket because you drove 12,000 miles instead of 9,600. The 20% target applies statewide, not to individual drivers. The bill would instead use transportation policy to push the state’s total mileage downward.

Under the legislation, state and local highway projects that expand road capacity would have to undergo a “vehicle miles traveled impact assessment.” If a project doesn’t align with the state’s 20% reduction goal, officials would have to change the project or offset its effects through measures designed to reduce driving.

Those measures could include expanded public transportation, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, “micro-mobility” infrastructure, parking-demand management, transit-oriented development, and other land-use changes.

What are the alternatives?

Gounardes has been very clear about the idea behind it. “If we measure VMT, we can work to reduce it,” he said while criticizing the state’s transportation master plan. He added that this doesn’t mean New Yorkers need to travel less because the state can create better ways for them to get to work, school, and everywhere else.

I’ll bite. What exactly are these better options for people who don’t live in New York City?

Even New York’s own climate planners acknowledge the problem. State climate materials say many New Yorkers depend on single-occupancy vehicles because they have limited access to public transit.

Of course they do. New York is a huge state. Once you get beyond its dense urban centers, the transportation equation changes quickly. The state itself administers rural transit programs specifically to help people in smaller communities reach jobs, schools, health care, and stores.

That doesn’t mean nobody should build better public transportation. Build it. If you can give somebody a faster, cheaper, and more convenient way to get where he needs to go, he’ll probably use it.

But you can’t create a subway by passing a mileage target.

Pay as you go

And this isn’t the only vehicle-miles proposal Gounardes has introduced. A separate bill, S4196, would replace some of the gas-tax burden on fuel-efficient vehicles with something entirely different: a tax on every mile they travel on New York’s public roads.

The proposal would apply to vehicles rated at least 30 miles per gallon or 30 MPGe. Owners would pay 1.9 cents for every taxable mile driven.

Drive 10,000 miles in New York and that’s $190. Drive 15,000 and it’s $285.

But here’s the part that really caught my attention. To calculate the tax, qualifying vehicles would be required to have an onboard electronic unit installed when the vehicle is registered, re-registered, or renewed. The device would use GPS or comparable technology to determine how many miles the vehicle travels on New York public roads and regularly transmit the taxable mileage to the Department of Taxation and Finance.

The legislation includes privacy protections. It says the unit would report aggregate taxable mileage rather than your exact location, travel times, or individual trips. Drivers of fuel-efficient gasoline vehicles could also claim a credit for the gasoline taxes they continue to pay.

RELATED: Automakers were ready to kill the gas car. Buyers had other ideas.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Unwanted passenger

Good to know — but we’re still talking about the state requiring a GPS-capable electronic device in your private vehicle so it can calculate a tax based on how much you drive.

And New York would make sure it’s there. The bill would add the device to the equipment checked during the state’s annual vehicle inspection. The inspector would record both your odometer mileage and the mileage reported by the onboard unit. Tampering with or disconnecting the device with the intent to evade the tax could bring penalties.

The rationale for a mileage tax isn’t difficult to understand. Gasoline taxes help pay for roads. As vehicles become more efficient and EVs buy no gasoline at all, states collect less fuel-tax revenue even though those vehicles still use — and wear — the roads.

Look at the two proposals together. One bill establishes a state policy of reducing the number of miles New Yorkers drive by 20%. Another creates the infrastructure to measure the miles driven by a growing share of cars and charge their owners for every one.

They’re separate bills with separate purposes. The Get Around NY Act is aimed at transportation planning and emissions. The mileage-tax bill is aimed at replacing declining gasoline-tax revenue. But if you’re a driver, they meet at exactly the same place: your odometer.

And that brings me back to life outside New York City. What happens when you can’t reduce your mileage?

Maybe your job is 30 miles away. Maybe the closest specialist your child needs is an hour away. Maybe you’re caring for an elderly parent in another town. Maybe your kids play sports. Maybe you live somewhere where “take public transit” means arranging your entire day around a bus that comes a few times rather than every few minutes.

Those miles aren’t indulgences. They’re life.

There’s an enormous difference between giving people alternatives to driving and designing policy around the assumption that they’ll drive less.

Give me better public transportation. Give me roads that are safe. Give me communities where people who want to walk or bicycle can do it safely. Give consumers choices.

But before Albany decides New Yorkers should collectively drive 20% fewer miles, I’d like lawmakers to spend some time asking why we’re driving those miles in the first place.

Because outside the five boroughs, the answer is often pretty simple. We have somewhere we need to be.

​Andrew gounardes, Evs, Gasoline tax, Lifestyle, Mileage tax, New york city, Public transit, Upstate new york, Automotive 

A female Arizona State University senior allegedly punched a police officer and interfered in an arrest over the summer — after which police used force against her and criminally charged her.

Eryn Bonner was criminally charged in connection with a violent July arrest on Mill Avenue in Tempe, KNXV-TV reported.

‘The female is actually striking the police officer with her fists and her legs. That fits that definition of aggravated assault.’

A Tempe spokesperson confirmed to KNXV that Bonner faces two misdemeanor charges in Tempe City Court: disorderly conduct under state law and interfering with police under city code.

The city previously told KNXV that Bonner punched a police officer several times, and the station added that video of the incident appears to show that moment in question, with the officer sitting over Bonner before striking her.

The Tempe Officers Association shared the following statement supporting the charging decision and standing by officers’ actions, the station said:

The filing of charges against Ms. Bonner aligns with what the complete video evidence has shown from the beginning: This incident was far different from the brief clip circulated on social media and her attorney’s repeated misstatements about the facts of the case.

The video shows Ms. Bonner repeatedly ignoring officers’ commands to step back while they were attempting to control an active arrest. TOA remains confident that the officers acted appropriately under difficult circumstances. The relevant video has been released. The case remains under internal review and, when that is complete, the full facts and analysis will be available for public review. We see no basis for a third-party investigation.

KNXV said the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to pursue felony charges and that an initial misdemeanor charge was filed and later dismissed before Tempe refiled the case with additional misdemeanor charges.

A city spokesperson previously said the original charge was dropped to allow prosecutors to refile it alongside additional charges after reviewing all available evidence, the station said.

Josh Logan — a former Chandler police officer and founder of Guardian Training and Consulting who has worked shifts on Mill Avenue — told KNXV in a previous story that his review of the video shows Bonner re-approaching officers after they told her to get back and that she did more than that.

“The female is actually striking the police officer with her fists and her legs,” Logan added to the station. “That fits that definition of aggravated assault.”

Logan also told KNXV that if the officer’s account of Bonner striking the officer multiple times is true, the force used against Bonner is justified in most police department’s policies: “If you reach that level of active aggression, you’re within policy to perform closed fist strikes to the face.”

The station said Bonner — a member of the ASU stunt team — was left with bruises for days following the incident.

Her attorney, Benjamin Taylor, told KNXV that the officer who took Bonner to the ground should be fired, calling his actions “very excessive” and accusing the city of targeting his client: “This is the way to try to cover up the officer’s wrongdoing. Two months later to pursue these charges seems very vindictive.”

Taylor added to the station that civil action typically cannot be filed when someone is convicted of a crime: “Usually, when cities bring charges months later, [they’re] trying to cover up for their civil liability.”

A Tempe Police Department spokesperson told KNXV that an internal review of the incident is still ongoing.

RELATED: July 4 mob attack on female cops: 3 adults, 4 kids charged with possession of machine gun, theft of Taser, assault on police

Taylor also repeatedly has called for an external review of the arrest, saying the sergeant overseeing Tempe’s investigation was previously suspended in a use-of-force case, the station said.

However, the city’s police union has pushed back, calling the move an attack on the investigation’s integrity, KNXV added.

Taylor said Bonner has pleaded not guilty, the station said, adding that a pretrial conference is scheduled for Nov. 4 in Tempe City Court.

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​College student, Criminal charges, Physical attack, Punching cop, Arizona state university, Arrest, Interfering with police, Tempe, Crime 

Sylvester Stallone is one of America’s most recognizable actors. He also stands as a rare representation of sanity in Hollywood, refusing to dance to the industry’s carefully choreographed ideological drumbeat.

His new memoir, “The Steps,” documents his rather fascinating rise to fame.

Casting agents repeatedly shoved him out of their offices, telling him his voice sounded like a broken garbage disposal and his face looked like a stroke survivor’s.

The story starts on July 6, 1946, in a maternity ward in Hell’s Kitchen. The delivery went sideways when a careless doctor dragged him into the world with a pair of forceps, severing a facial nerve and paralyzing the lower left side of his lip, chin, and tongue.

Hangdog sneer

The easily avoidable accident left him with a permanent hangdog sneer and slurred speech, a combination that made childhood an endless gauntlet of brutal teasing. His home life proved equally chaotic, torn between a short-tempered barber father and an oddball mother who dabbled in astrology and DIY medicine.

His parents eventually “shipped” him off to a boarding home, and he bounced between over a dozen different institutions before finishing high school. Teachers saw him as a lost cause, while his peers treated his cartoon-character name as an open invitation to brawls. He routinely answered the mockery with his fists, accumulating bad grades, behavioral warnings, and a growing reputation as a feral misfit.

By the early 1970s, Stallone was stranded in Manhattan with a few dollars in his pocket, sleeping on wooden benches at the Port Authority Bus Terminal when he couldn’t afford rent. To keep from starving, he took on whatever absurd odd jobs came his way. He cleaned out lion cages at the Central Park Zoo, a gig where he lived in constant fear of urine sprays and sharp claws. He worked at a fish market slicing heads off cod, cut hair in a basement using box cutters with hands that “resembled ten bananas connected by foam rubber,” and worked as an usher at the Baronet and Coronet Theatre. He even sold his beloved bull mastiff, Butkus, outside a 7-11, a moment he describes in “The Steps” as his absolute bottom.

RELATED: Mel Gibson has been fighting this fight longer than you think

Ellen DeGeneres/Twitter/Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images

Rejection as rocket fuel

His early acting credits were equally unglamorous. Desperate for heat during a brutal winter in a tiny room on 46th Street, he agreed to star in an adult movie called “The Party at Kitty and Stud’s” for $200. “The whole thing was an embarrassing debacle,” he writes in the book, maintaining a dry, self-deprecating tone about his total lack of hope and dignity. Casting agents repeatedly shoved him out of their offices, telling him his voice sounded like a broken garbage disposal and his face looked like a stroke survivor’s.

Stallone used the rejection as rocket fuel, sitting down with a notebook to study screenplays and figure out how stories actually worked.

The turning point came in March 1975, when he watched Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner. Wepner was an obscure boxer who lost the fight, yet managed to knock Ali down and survive 15 punishing rounds. Stallone locked himself in a room for three days and hammered out the screenplay for “Rocky.” When producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff offered him $350,000 for the script, Stallone refused to sell unless he played the lead role. He had $106 in his bank account, and his wife was pregnant. Still, to his credit, he held firm against every attempt to replace him with an established star like Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal.

Stubborn to a fault, he got his way and managed to get the film made for under a million dollars. “Rocky” went on to win Best Picture at the 1977 Academy Awards, instantly turning him into a massive movie star.

Stallone eventually bought his dog back for $1,500.

Eye of the tiger

The middle section of “The Steps” tracks his explosive run through the 1980s, but here the narrative loses some of its original momentum. Stallone is most entertaining when he is broke, angry, humiliated, and scheming his way toward the next opportunity. Once the rags become extreme riches, some of that desperate comic energy disappears. There are stretches where a story about an almost pathologically determined outsider turns into the considerably less relatable story of a very famous movie star.

But Stallone taps into his inner Rocky in the final act, reviving the book by confronting his age (80) and mortality with absolute honesty. A churchgoing Catholic, he suggests that although life can be difficult, “you just get stronger the more you fight back and finally realize that God’s greatest gift is your heart and the will to keep going.” It’s a little cliché, but the New Yorker is nothing if not genuine.

He looks back on his career choices with surprising sincerity, admitting when his ego got the best of him during his late 1990s box-office flops. He presents himself not as a genius auteur, but as a relentless, working-class craftsman who understood his own limitations better than his critics did. “The Steps” succeeds because it avoids fawning self-congratulation, standing as an inspiring account of a man who escaped a nightmare to achieve the American dream.

​American dream, Books, Muhammad ali, Sylvester stallone, Rocky screenplay, Hollywood, Chuck wepner, Rocky, The steps, Memoir, Lifestyle, Culture, Review 

The last thing the NFL needs is another national anthem controversy.

One online video, however, has the Chicago Bears in the spotlight for a player’s actions during “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and one online video may be all it takes.

‘Don’t pray to Allah during OUR national anthem!’

Before the Bears’ game against the New York Jets on Sunday, wide receiver Kalif Raymond was spotted alone on the edge of the end zone grass at Soldier Field in Chicago during the national anthem, seemingly praying on his hands and knees.

Raymond rose to his feet for what appeared to be the final 20 seconds of the anthem performance, standing still.

Raymond was spotted performing similar actions before Week 3’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles, also at Soldier Field in Chicago

Some fans immediately took Raymond’s actions as a sign he is a Muslim.

“Don’t pray to Allah during OUR national anthem!” wrote radio host Grant Stinchfield on an X post.

However, other fans quickly pointed to Raymond attending both a private Christian high school in Georgia and the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a private Jesuit college.

In fact, last Thursday the Bears posted a YouTube video with Raymond wearing a microphone on the field, where he is seen saying, “I’m going to thank Lord Jesus first.”

Further evidence of his Christian faith comes from 2022, when Raymond said he was “just thankful that the Lord blessed me” after winning a game ball for his performance.

Still, some fans found the display disrespectful to the anthem.

RELATED: Former NFL player and Christian minister says Muslim players are being unfairly punished

“Is this respectful during the National Anthem?” a post asked.

A reply stated, “Anyone disrespecting the national anthem like this (or kneeling) should be fined and suspended.”

The NFL’s most infamous controversy came when quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem in 2016. The former San Francisco 49ers player’s performance was a vague protest about injustice and police brutality:

“I am not going to stand to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said at the time.

Many other players protested similarly in subsequent weeks, including retired player Ray Lewis, who joined the Baltimore Ravens’ protest but decided to get down on both knees instead.

Other famous prayers in the NFL include former quarterback Tim Tebow, who made his name into a verb by “Tebowing,” which meant to take a knee in the end zone to pray after scoring a touchdown.

RELATED: NBA team hires and fires announcer on same day over teenage tweets: ‘Asian people p*** me off!’

Amy Lemus/NurPhoto/Getty Images

The NFL rulebook does not specifically mention conduct during the national anthem.

At the height of the kneeling controversy though, outlets referred to a league Game Operations Manual that encouraged players to stand for the anthem but didn’t required them to. The NFL vice president of corporate communications confirmed this to FactCheck.org in 2017.

The previously listed operations manual no longer appears online, and the current operations manual mentions the national anthem only with regard to its maximum length.

The Bears organization did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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​Nfl, Football, National anthem, Chicago bears, Sports 

Laws are often passed under the guise of protecting the vulnerable, but sometimes they hurt the very people they’re intended to protect.

And immigration policy expert Lora Ries is no stranger to this, telling BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that this has been going on for decades when it comes to child trafficking and immigration policy.

“In 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act became law and it created a T visa for victims of trafficking even though we already had something called an S visa, which was nicknamed, you know, the snitch visa,” she explains.

The “snitch visa” allowed immigrants to “temporarily come into the U.S., help this prosecution testify in a criminal case, … and then depart.”

“Instead of using that, which they should have done, they created a T visa, which became both a temporary visa but also a permanent visa,” Ries says.

“It just has become yet another pathway for permanent immigration,” she continues, “And so this victim can then bring in their family members, their parents, who often put them into the trafficking situation to begin with. And on and on.”

Freitas points out that this creates an incentive for “people to send unaccompanied minors into the United States.”

“That may sound very, very generous, but in reality, you’re creating a situation where human traffickers are going to exploit this,” he adds.

Despite the policy being “about prosecution,” Ries explains that when the bill was first introduced in 2000 and passed, “The estimated number of trafficking victims was 600,000 to 800,000.”

The State Department reports that this number has now skyrocketed to 27 million.

“So this is not working,” Ries says, “and it gets reauthorized every few years. And just more money going out the door.”

Ries also explains that “when the Department of Homeland Security was created, the House Judiciary Democrats in particular insisted that the functions for giving shelter to unaccompanied minors and sponsors was not going to go in DHS.”

“They said, ‘Nope, it’s going over to the Department of Health and Human Services.’ And so that department receives a lot of money to go to these, you know, anti-trafficking NGOs. And during Biden’s four years, 550,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border,” she continues.

“Four hundred thousand of them, Biden’s HHS lost track of. And so those functions need to be taken away from HHS. It is not HHS’ mission and they’re clearly bad at it, and it needs to go back to DHS,” she adds.

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Child trafficking, Immigration, Lora ries, Human traffickers, Joe biden, Nick freitas, Blazetv show