Militia takes over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters  —  The Bundy family of Nevada joined with hard-core militiamen Saturday to take over the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, vowing to occupy the remote federal outpost 50 miles southeast of Burns for years.

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.

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.”

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 …

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 …

For Donald Trump, Lessons From a Brother's Suffering  —  One evening in the 1960s, Donald J. Trump, still in college but eager to make it big, met his older brother, Freddy, for dinner in a Queens apartment complex built by their father.  —  Things went bad fast.

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.

Clinton campaign hopes Bill will deliver a New Hampshire ‘comeback kid’ boost  —  Bill Clinton has taken a backseat thus far as Hillary Clinton's national campaign hits its stride, but with a New Hampshire rally set, his impact is anyone's guess  —  “New Hampshire tonight has made Bill Clinton the comeback kid.”

Elevator hero wished woman ‘Happy New Year’ before being crushed to death  —  A 25-year-old man wished “Happy New Year” to a woman just before he saved her life by shoving her from a faulty elevator that suddenly took a plunge — but the brave act cost him his own life, witnesses said.