The Trump administration is ending yet another of Michelle Obama’s hated, overly strict school lunch rules by bringing chocolate milk back to school lunch menus.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday announced a new rule set to take effect on July 1 after the period of public comment. The new rule relaxes sodium limits and Obama’s whole-grain requirements. The rule will also allow milk with one percent fat back on the menu, ABC News reported.

“Schools need flexibility in menu planning so they can serve nutritious and appealing meals,” Perdue said this week. “Schools want to offer food that students actually want to eat. It doesn’t do any good to serve nutritious meals if they wind up in the trash can.”

Perdue has been dismissing Michelle Obama’s signature school lunch rules all year.

“This is not reducing the nutritional standards whatsoever,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in May when announcing the Agriculture Department’s intention to bring chocolate milk back to schools. “I wouldn’t be as big as I am today without flavored milk.”

Perdue also slammed Obama’s rules as leading to too much waste. “If kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition — thus undermining the intent of the program,” he said.

Critics of Obama’s lunch rules pointed out that they led to higher costs for schools across the country. In the fiscal year 2015 alone, Obama’s school food requirements cost school budgets an additional $1.22 billion.

The School Nutrition Association and the School Superintendents Association have been supportive of Perdue’s efforts to scale back Obama’s rules. The groups recently noted that the “overly prescriptive regulatory requirements” of Obama’s school lunch program had forced school districts to “financially subsidize meals at the expense of educational programs.”

They also said Obama’s nutritional regulations added ten cents to the cost of every lunch and 27 cents to every breakfast, requiring local school districts to absorb $1.2 billion in additional costs in 2015 alone.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

NEW YORK (AP) — The lawyer for an actress who accused Harvey Weinstein of rape said Friday that she is frustrated prosecutors have not yet brought criminal charges.

“Boardwalk Empire” actress Paz de la Huerta publicly accused the movie producer of raping her twice in 2010. She began speaking with police about the accusation in late October.

Her lawyer, Carrie Goldberg, said that by now she expected the case would at least have gone before a grand jury, which would decide whether or not to indict Weinstein.

“We are deeply concerned about the foot-dragging in convening the grand jury,” Goldberg said in an email.

Weinstein’s attorneys have said he denies any claim of non-consensual sex, and that they would respond in any “appropriate legal forum, where necessary.” They had no comment on Friday.

New York City authorities initially seemed poised to move quickly on the accusations. In late October, Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said investigators found de la Huerta’s account believable.

Since then, police and prosecutors have traveled to Paris to interview de la Huerta and have spoken to other witnesses multiple times, two law enforcement officials said. The officials weren’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Prosecutors have also met with Weinstein’s lawyers, Goldberg’s office said.

A spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. she could not comment because of the ongoing investigation.

The prosecutor’s office has investigated Weinstein before, only to eventually back off of filing a criminal charge. In 2015, police conducted a sting after an Italian model accused Weinstein of groping her, secretly recording Weinstein apologizing for this conduct.

Vance ultimately decided there wasn’t enough proof and didn’t bring a case. Following criticism over the decision earlier this year, prosecutors said police arranged the sting without their knowledge and there were other proof issues, but police pushed back saying they’d presented enough evidence.

Goldberg said she wonders why prosecutors are putting her client through so much scrutiny.

“It exacts a huge emotional toll,” she said. “She has to rehash these memories and subject herself to exposure, and for what?”

She added: “We’ve already said we’re prepared for whatever the trial may bring.”

At least 75 women have come forward in the media to detail accounts of assault, harassment and inappropriate conduct by Weinstein. It’s not clear how many have gone to police.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they speak publicly, which de la Huerta has done.

A veterans hospital in Miami, Florida, was so filthy it required a deep clean and fumigation after the area failed an October safety and sanitation inspection.

The inspection report, obtained by the Miami Herald, found evidence of “grimy drawers and storage racks,” “unrefrigerated foods” and even “insects and rodent droppings.”

The report provided the cafeteria with a number of scores on their following of health and safety regulations, with the establishment scoring zero points on a number of key issues such as the sanitation of storage equipment, keeping walls, floors, and cooking equipment clean, as well as ensuring the employees were not at risk of falling over due to slippery floors.

“There are now no reported issues involving the canteen kitchen,” said hospital spokesperson Shane Suzuki on Thursday. “Out of an abundance of caution … we conducted a thorough extermination, deep clean and re-inspection of the entire canteen.”

Suzuki added that the food of hospital patients were not affected by the unsanitary conditions because their meals are prepared separately from the public cafeteria, known as the Patriot Café.

“We have a completely separate food preparation area for inpatient food service,” he said.

The report’s whistleblower, Scott Davis, who previously testified before Congress over the sub-standard treatment that veterans are receiving, told the Herald that “roaches and food is a consistent thing throughout the VA,” and cited another example of cockroaches being a “persistent presence” at a veterans hospital in Illinois.

According to a report from the Office of the Inspector General on the Illinois facility, authorities were aware that patients were receiving meals containing cockroaches but did not attempt to solve the problem.

In recent years, VA hospitals have been plagued by numerous cases of appalling treatment, which include patients being infected with diseases such as Hepatitis and HIV due to lack of infection control, dead bodies being left unattended for multiple hours, and hundreds of veterans dying on long waiting lists for the necessary care they had requested.

During his presidential campaign, President Donald Trump pledged to fix the wait times and overall problems surrounding the Veterans Affairs and drew up a ten-point plan to reform the department as a whole. In his first White House budget, Trump signed a ten percent increase in spending for the department.

“Veterans should come first in the country they fought to protect, and under a Trump administration, they will,” he said at the time.

Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com

Two high level former Obama campaign officials orchestrated more than $1.1 million of “in-kind” contributions over a 17 day period in November to an independent expenditure committee with no apparent assets that supports the election of Democrat Doug Jones in the Alabama U.S. Senate election, according to Federal Election Commission reports and publicly available documents.

Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Washington, D.C. based consulting firm founded by former Obama campaign official Andrew Bleeker, provided more than $800,000 in online advertising services to Highway 31, an independent expenditure committee based in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 17 days between November 6, when the Alabama group filed its statement of organization with the FEC, and November 22, the ending date for the first statement of activities it filed with the FEC.

Waterfront Strategies, a Washington, D.C. based consulting firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of GMMB Consulting, which was founded by former Obama campaign official Jim Margolis, has provided more than $309,000 in media buy services during that same 17 day period to Highway 31.

Reports filed with the FEC by Highway 31 indicate that it has no cash on hand, and has not paid a single penny to either Bully Pulpit Interactive or Waterfront Strategies. Highway 31’s report shows that it currently owes Bully Pulpit Interactive the full $800,000 it has advanced, and owes Waterfront Strategies the full $309,000 it has advanced.

The unusual and secret arrangement between vendors Bully Pulpit Interactive and Waterfront Strategies and Highway 31, which appears to be little more than a shell legal organization used as a “cut-out,” raises significant ethical questions.

Were Bully Pulpit Interactive and GMMB Consulting (through its subsidiary Waterfront Strategies) simply attempting to mask donations from Washington, D.C. based liberals to the Jones campaign, in effect?

Is the entire arrangement simply a sophisticated ruse to hide the true origins of the more than $1 million that has been poured into Alabama to support the Jones campaign through what appears to be nothing but a shell organization?

A legal expert on federal election law tells Breitbart News this arrangement is probably “a legal in-kind contribution to the IE” by Bully Pulpit Interactive, according to a recent FEC administrative ruling, even if Bully Pulpit Interactive is never paid a dime by Highway 31, the IE.

However, the arrangement may violate the spirit of federal election law if some other group is paying Bully Pulpit Interactive a like amount for an “unrelated project” that requires basically no work. Proving that such a behind-the-scenes arrangement was, in effect, made to compensate, however, would be very difficult, the expert says, even it does exist.

“Yes, this appears to be legal. FEC regulations concerning debt are fairly straightforward: political committees are allowed to have debt as long as they report the amount of debt to the FEC. The regulations do not address the situation of taking on debt when a committee has no assets or donors, ” Tyler Cole, Legislative Director & Policy Counsel at Issue One, a non-profit whose “goal is to pass and protect federal legislation that strengthens accountability and returns America to a system of self-governance for the common good,” told Breitbart News when asked about the propriety of the Highway 31 arrangement with Bully Pulpit Interactive and GMMB Consulting’s Waterfront Strategies.

“Issue One believes that it is important for voters to know who is funding advertisements that seek to influence their vote,” Cole added.

“This is disclosure in name only given that due to the reporting deadlines, voters will not be able to see what individuals or organization are funding Highway 31 until after the election. Unfortunate situations like these are why we believe that disclosure laws should be strengthened so voters get more information and get that information more quickly and easily,” Cole concluded.

Breitbart News asked Bully Pulpit Interactive to confirm FEC records that show Highway 31 owes the company $800,000 for the provision of online advertising services between November 6 and November 22, but has received no response.

Breitbart News also asked Bully Pulpit Interactive to explain how the company’s provision of this $800,000 in advertising services to an independent expenditure committee supporting the Doug Jones campaign without any payment, or any reasonable expectation of ever receiving any payment from the independent expenditure committee, is not an illegal in-kind campaign contribution to the Doug Jones campaign.

Bully Pulpit Interactive did not respond to either question.

In addition, Breitbart News asked GMMB Consulting  to confirm FEC records that show Highway 31 owes the company ‘s subsidiary, Waterfront Strategies, $309,000 for the provision of media buy services between November 6 and November 22, but has received no response.

Breitbart News also asked GMMB Consulting to explain how its subsdiary’s provision of this $309,000 in media buy services to an independent expenditure committee supporting the Doug Jones campaign without any payment, or any reasonable expectation of ever receiving any payment from the independent expenditure committee, is not an illegal in-kind campaign contribution to the Doug Jones campaign.

“We are fully compliant, and we don’t discuss client information,” Waterfront Strategies told Breitbart News in an emailed statement provided by GMMB Consulting late Friday.

This is not the first time that the behind-the-scenes activities of Waterfront Strategies have come into question.

In a 2012 article titled Political Consultants From Mysterious Firm Tread Fine Legal Line ‘Putting The Lie To Reality’, the Huffington Post reported:

Waterfront, it turns out, is an internal branch of GMMB. It was incorporated in Delaware, and its president is listed as Raelynn Olson. She is GMMB’s managing partner.

Olson declined to discuss the firm within a firm, but other consultants who sometimes do business with Margolis and GMMB were willing to talk about it without being named.

Waterfront Strategies, they explained, exists so that GMMB has a separate corporate entity where it can employ people to handle outside expenditures — in this case mostly from the House Majority PAC that aims to retake control of the House from Republicans, and the Majority PAC that is trying to preserve Democratic control of the Senate. The arrangement keeps the money legally separate from people who may be working more directly with Senate or House candidates. Thus campaign laws barring coordination are not violated.

That’s an awfully thin fig leaf, critics charge.

“It’s the Kabuki that’s done to conform with the form while putting the lie to reality,” Meredith McGehee, now a strategic advisor with the Campaign Legal Center, told the Post in 2012.

Edward Still is listed as the Treasurer of Highway 31 in documents filed with the FEC. Still, a far left activist attorney based in Birmingham was Director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a non-profit public interest law firm in Washington, D.C. from 1997 until 2001, according to his law firm’s website.

In 2014, Still and a co-counsel “filed a new suit against the provision of Alabama’s campaign finance law forbidding PAC-to-PAC transfers. The law basically prohibits any transfer between political actors except personal contributions to any group, PAC contributions to principal campaign committees, and limited payments from principal campaign committees to political parties,” according to his law firm’s website.

The case was THE ALABAMA DEMOCRATIC CONFERENCE, an Alabama political action committee, et al., Plaintiffs, v. LUTHER STRANGE in his official capacity as the Attorney General of Alabama; et al., Defendants.

“Our organizational client uses its funds to run GOTV drives,” Still notes.

Breitbart News left a message for Still on his law firm’s voice mail system on Friday, asking him to explain why the arrangement between Highway 31 and vendors Bully Pulpit Interactive and Waterfront Strategies is legal under federal election law, but has not received a response.

“Bully Pulpit Interactive was founded by the digital marketers of the Obama Presidential campaign to help clients in the public and private sectors create modern versions of what President Roosevelt once called a ‘bully pulpit,’ or a platform, to tell their story, increase their bottom line and shape public opinion,” according to its website.

Its founder, Andrew Bleeker “was the lead digital marketing strategist on both of President Obama’s campaigns as well as a senior adviser to Secretary Clinton. Since founding Bully Pulpit Interactive in 2009, the firm now spans four offices and has managed nearly a billion dollars in marketing spend.”

According to another report filed with the FEC on November 30, these two firms combined to extend an additional $700,000 in credit to Highway 31 to support the Doug Jones campaign in the seven days between November 23 and November 29, bringing the total amount of credit extended by the firms to Highway 31 more than $1.8 million in just 24 days.

The special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama between conservative Republican Roy Moore and liberal Democrat Doug Jones is scheduled to be held in 11 days on December 12.

National reciprocity for concealed carry is expected to be introduced on the House Floor for a vote next week.

Breitbart News reported that the legislation received a markup from the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. That markup indicated committee members were confident national reciprocity had the momentum to reach the House Floor.

The legislation, Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, was introduced by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) on January 3, 2017. It treats concealed carry permits like driver’s licenses, making a permit from one state valid in the other 49. This saves the common man the hassle of navigating the cumbersome patchwork of concealed carry laws that exist in the U.S., making it easier for him to be armed to defend himself and his family should the need arise.

As national reciprocity moved toward markup, Rep. Hudson said:

My bill is a simple, common sense solution to the confusing hodgepodge of concealed carry reciprocity agreements between states. It will affirm that law-abiding citizens who are qualified to carry concealed in one state can also carry in other states that allow residents to do so. I am pleased to see such strong support in committee, and I look forward to continuing this momentum and bringing the bill to the House floor as soon as possible.

Politico reports that Hudson’s bill “is strongly favored by the National Rifle Association but has drawn fierce opposition from gun control advocates who say it effectively nullifies restrictions passed in states that want to limit the practice.” Gun control advocate Gabby Giffords pointed to the Texas church attack as a reason to oppose the concealed carry legislation. She did not mention that the congregation was unarmed and the attacker was stopped by a citizen who retrieved his own gun, ran to church, and shot the attacker.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com

Tully Borland, an associate professor of philosophy at Ouachita Baptist University, published an op-ed sympathetic to Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore Thursday, immediately setting off a firestorm of criticism from Never Trump commentators and on social media.

“I have a 14-year-old daughter. If I caught Roy Moore doing what was alleged, for starters I would kick him where it counts. That said, I don’t think it’s wrong to vote for Moore,” Borland’s article on The Federalist begins.

Hardly a ringing endorsement of the embattled Alabama Republican, Bordland’s piece makes a defense of some of the legal conduct in which Moore is alleged to have engaged, casts doubt on some of the allegations of clearly illegal conduct, and argues, in essence, that voting for Moore is the lesser of two evils. He cites, for example, Democratic Doug Jones’s stance on abortion as a reason to support Moore even if voters “suppose the accusations are mostly true.”

Most controversially, Borland offered a general defense of older men looking to start families with teenage women. Citing a friend whose grandmother was married at 15 and data suggesting a male-female age gap of around 15 years is most advantageous for starting large families, he writes:

In fact, this practice has a long history and is not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family.

To have a large family, the wife must start having kids when she is young. The husband needs to be well-established and able to support the family, in which case he will typically need to marry when older.

Despite Borland’s description of Moore as a “terrible candidate,” a swift backlash came from the Moore detractors he sought to combat. Never Trump National Review columnist David French, whom Borland named in his piece, called Borland’s argument an “embarrassing effort.”

In response to the assertion he and other Never Trumpers are merely “virtue-signalling” when they express outrage over Moore and his alleged behavior, French writes:

Finally, as so many Moore defenders do, Borland accuses me of “virtue-signaling.” It’s another way of claiming I’m making my arguments in bad faith — hoping that people will see me as moral rather than speaking out of sincere conviction. I’m past caring about that accusation. If condemning Roy Moore is “virtue-signaling,” then I’ll virtue-signal all day.

Other Never Trump stalwarts piled on with their own signals:

If someone submitted a piece to the Federalist about how conservatives are obliged to vote for Doug Jones, would it be published?

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 30, 2017

The way I read it you weren’t supporting it, you were just excusing it. https://t.co/phQXszpaHn

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 30, 2017

General social media response was no less negative. After hundreds of negative comments calling Borland a pedophile apologist, a likely pedophile himself, or worse, the professor took the opportunity to clarify that he was not making a general endorsement of behavior like that of which Moore is accused:

Let’s be clear, no, I do not support 30-yr-olds dating teens. People need to learn how to read and follow an argument.

— Tully Borland (@BorlandTully) November 30, 2017

Few of Borland’s detractors were convinced.

Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal alien who was deported 5 times and convicted of 7 felonies. Yesterday an asshole jury in San Francisco acquitted this killer of her murder because they really value illegal aliens more than Americans in the liberal Bay Area. As if that weren’t bad enough, Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts has used this horrendous not guilty verdict to promote her unconstitutional gun control agenda. If you are drawing a connection between liberalism and shittyism, you are not alone.

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate stole a handgun from a federal agent and then used it to open fire on a crowded pier in San Francisco in 2015. He killed Kate Steinle that day, but told the jury that the gun “just went off” and they bought it, clearing him of any murder or manslaughter charges.

Because liberal gun grabbers can never let an innocent person’s death go by without exploiting it for their own gain. MDA lunatic Shannon Watts tweeted out this ridiculous thing:

The best way to honor #KateSteinle and protect the hundreds of Americans who are shot and killed or injured every day in America is to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Why are we more upset that she was shot by an immigrant than that she was shot and killed???

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) December 1, 2017

“The best way to honor [Kate Steinle] and protect the hundreds of Americans who are shot and killed or injured every day in America is to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Why are we more upset that she was shot by an immigrant than that she was shot and killed???” Watts wrote.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, is more upset that Kate was shot by an immigrant than she was killed. First of all, she was shot by a 5-times deported illegal alien, not an immigrant, who was shielded from a 6th deportation by the sanctuary city policies of San Francisco. That’s very upsetting and secondly people are upset because this piece of shit murdered a woman and was acquitted of it, meaning Kate Steinle will get no justice.

Shannon Watts can throw all of the question marks she wants at this, but it doesn’t make her faux outrage true. The issue here is not that Kate’s killer was an immigrant, it’s that he will never pay for the callous murder he committed and that he was even in this country to commit this act.

Oddly enough, that’s not even the dumbest thing about Watts’ tweet. She’s trying to use this case as an example why we need more gun control. She says Kate’s death is why we need more laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. If San Francisco had turned this motherf*cker over to ICE like they should have, this wouldn’t even be an issue.

Beyond that, Zarate is an illegal alien, meaning he isn’t allowed to own, purchase, or possess a firearm in the US. He is a 7-times convicted felon, which is 7 more reasons why he isn’t allowed to have a gun. He stole the gun he used to kill Steinle from a federal agent, which is something everyone would agree is outside the law. Even if Watts had her wish and every American citizen were disarmed, Zarate still would have gotten his hands on this gun.

What law does Watts think would have prevented Kate Steinle’s Death? Illegal aliens can’t have guns. Felons can’t have guns. It’s illegal to murder people. Well, it’s apparently not illegal for illegal aliens to murder people in San Francisco, but everywhere it is against the law.

Once again liberals prove that they are the shittiest people on the planet. For Watts to try to exploit Kate Steinle’s death to promote gun control shows what a despicable useless sack of shit she really is.

Follow Brian Anderson on Twitter