Militia takes over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters  —  Update at 9:15 p.m.: Statement from Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward: “After the peaceful rally was completed today, a group of outside militants drove to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, where they seized and occupied the refuge headquarters.

SCALIA DISMISSES CONCEPT OF RELIGIOUS NEUTRALITY IN SPEECH  —  METAIRIE, La. (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the idea of religious neutrality is not grounded in the country's constitutional traditions and that God has been good to the U.S. exactly because Americans honor him.

How Liberals Are The New Autocrats  —  Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.  —  The End of Localism  —  This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends.

The myth of the cop killing ‘epidemic’  —  To hear the media tell it, America is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave, an orgy of wanton murder in which heavily armed thugs randomly gun down innocent unarmed people, some of them teens, just for sport.  —  Except that these homicidal goons …

CNN to host Obama town hall on guns in America  —  Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama will join CNN's Anderson Cooper Thursday for an exclusive one-hour live town hall on gun control.  —  Obama will sit down with Cooper at 8 p.m. ET for the event, titled “Guns in America.”

Last Year (Winds of Winter)  —  The last post from the Lost Post, and the one you've all been waiting for.  —  Back when this was one long long long post, before Live Journal sent it to the cornfield, I mentioned opening with Dickens' line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

‘This Week’ Transcript: Ben Carson and Sen. Bernie Sanders  —  THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT FOR ‘THIS WEEK’ ON JANUARY 3, 2016 and it will be updated.  ANNOUNCER: Starting right now on ABC This Week.  It's 2016.  With less than a month to Iowa, one-time front runner Ben Carson making big moves to shake up his campaign.

The Middle East Couldn't Possibly Get Worse.  Could It?  —  The Sunni-Shia schism goes back more than a millenium and has been a more or less constant feature of geopolitics in the Middle East for a long time.  The closest the balance has come to being upset within recent memory was the Iran-Iraq war …