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A Democrat congressional candidate in Georgia convicted of driving under the influence (DUI) this week trashed his district in video footage of his arrest.

Recently released video footage of Steven Lamar Foster, 61, who is running as a Democrat against incumbent Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA) in the November election, showed him trashing his district while police officers arrested him:

“Eleven years I served this county. I hate this county. I prayed to God that he would curse it. And guess what? He did,” Foster allegedly said, according to the arrest footage from September 2017.

“Man, I saw it hit and cursed, and I saw people laid off right and left—white people. I hate this county,” he added.

A jury found Foster guilty of DUI on Monday, and a judge ordered him to jail without bond until his sentencing next Tuesday.

Even though Foster has been convicted of the offense and his comments about his district have been made public, he is still listed on the ballot, and his campaign manager said Foster has not signaled any intent to drop out of the race.

“He would not have taken this to trial if he had thought he would be found guilty,” Dan Lovingood, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party’s 14th Congressional District and Foster’s campaign manager told the Daily Citizen-News. “I have no comment to make other than that. He’s still in the race. He seems more determined than ever to continue.”

Lovingood added that depending on what the judge decides at Foster’s sentencing Tuesday, there might have to be some changes made to the campaign, but it is up to Foster to decide how he wants to proceed with his campaign.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman who was spotted as a star by President Trump at a rally last week, is finally getting some vindication.

Turns out that an earlier smear-attack on him, put on by the left about how he supposedly ignored sexual abuse as a coach earlier in his career, reported copiously by the press, was fake and phony all along. Just as Thomas Lifson suspected from the get-go, calling it the work of “the left’s personal destruction machine.” Turns out the person who leveled the original charge has since recanted. According to the Daily Caller:

A former Ohio State University wrestler is recanting his claims that Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan knew of sexual abuse allegations against a university physician when he coached wrestling at the school over 20 years ago.

“At no time did I ever say or have any direct knowledge that Jim Jordan knew of Dr. Richard Strauss’s inappropriate behavior,” Mark Coleman, a former MMA fighter who wrestled at Ohio State when Jordan coached there, said in a statement.

“I have nothing but respect for Jim Jordan as I have known him for more than 30 years and know him to be of impeccable character.”

Coleman is the first former OSU wrestler to recant his claims that Jordan knew about sexual abuse at the hands of Dr. Richard Strauss, an OSU physician accused of molesting dozens of student-athletes.

So there was nothing to it all along. Yet the press, which so loudly reported the original lie, has just minimally covered this recantation. Will they now report the recantation with as much vim and vigor as they did the original charges? If they don’t, it’s proof positive that the whole thing was a setup all along and they were its gullibly willing accomplices, led along by their loathing of President Trump. That’s some record.

As for Jordan, who was the victim of a tremendous injustice, as former Reagan Labor secretary Ray Donovan once put it: Where do I go to get my reputation back?

Jordan joins a long line of effective GOP legislators and jurists who had their careers damaged and often cut short by phony charges – Rep. Tom DeLay, Sen. Ted Stevens, Gov. Sarah Palin, Judge Clarence Thomas and others. Fortunately, it was caught soon enough. But because the pattern is getting so well defined in the press, one can only hope the public starts noticing just how untrustworthy these press blitzes have become and what the end-game really is.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman who was spotted as a star by President Trump at a rally last week, is finally getting some vindication.

Turns out that an earlier smear-attack on him, put on by the left about how he supposedly ignored sexual abuse as a coach earlier in his career, reported copiously by the press, was fake and phony all along. Just as Thomas Lifson suspected from the get-go, calling it the work of “the left’s personal destruction machine.” Turns out the person who leveled the original charge has since recanted. According to the Daily Caller:

A former Ohio State University wrestler is recanting his claims that Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan knew of sexual abuse allegations against a university physician when he coached wrestling at the school over 20 years ago.

“At no time did I ever say or have any direct knowledge that Jim Jordan knew of Dr. Richard Strauss’s inappropriate behavior,” Mark Coleman, a former MMA fighter who wrestled at Ohio State when Jordan coached there, said in a statement.

“I have nothing but respect for Jim Jordan as I have known him for more than 30 years and know him to be of impeccable character.”

Coleman is the first former OSU wrestler to recant his claims that Jordan knew about sexual abuse at the hands of Dr. Richard Strauss, an OSU physician accused of molesting dozens of student-athletes.

So there was nothing to it all along. Yet the press, which so loudly reported the original lie, has just minimally covered this recantation. Will they now report the recantation with as much vim and vigor as they did the original charges? If they don’t, it’s proof positive that the whole thing was a setup all along and they were its gullibly willing accomplices, led along by their loathing of President Trump. That’s some record.

As for Jordan, who was the victim of a tremendous injustice, as former Reagan Labor secretary Ray Donovan once put it: Where do I go to get my reputation back?

Jordan joins a long line of effective GOP legislators and jurists who had their careers damaged and often cut short by phony charges – Rep. Tom DeLay, Sen. Ted Stevens, Gov. Sarah Palin, Judge Clarence Thomas and others. Fortunately, it was caught soon enough. But because the pattern is getting so well defined in the press, one can only hope the public starts noticing just how untrustworthy these press blitzes have become and what the end-game really is.

China has removed crude oil from its list of items being slapped with a 25 percent tariff, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

It seems unusual for those used to America being an energy importer to hear about energy exports, particularly to a country as big as China. However, America’s role in petroleum production has steadily increased for quite some time now, meaning industry in China was about to feel a serious pinch.

“Over the past two years China has become the biggest buyer of U.S. crude-oil exports, last year taking a fifth of the total,” Chuin-Wei Yap wrote in the Journal.

Beijing had originally announced that oil was going to be on the list of items slapped with a 25 percent tariff issued in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs.

However, when the final list of $16 billion in tariffed goods was issued on Wednesday, oil was conspicuously absent.

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“China’s Ministry of Commerce didn’t explain the omission and didn’t immediately respond to questions,” Yap reported.

China still called the measures “unreasonable” and said they had taken the measures “to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests and the multilateral trading system.” However, the measure seemed to be more about safeguarding the interests of Sinopec Group, the state-owned Beijing-based energy giant.

“Sinopec did a lot of lobbying work with the government,” an individual with knowledge of the situation told Reuters. They said the petroleum manufacturer used its clout to move the decision of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Commerce.

“The U.S. will be the single largest source of new oil supplies outside OPEC. It’s in China’s interest to diversify supplies,” another source told Reuters.

“Removing crude imports, worth roughly $8 billion annually based on Sinopec’s earlier forecast of 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) for 2018, also gives Beijing room to maneuver in future negotiations with Washington, especially as it may soon lose some Iranian oil shipments due to reimposed U.S. sanctions,” Reuters noted.

And that could mean big things in the trade war.

“The issue for the Chinese is that any tariff on U.S. exports, (including) oil, will likely hurt their economy disproportionately because they have to import,” Kenneth Medlock, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told Reuters.

“U.S. exports will find a home regardless of how the global supply deck is reshuffled.”

Even though oil won’t be on the list when the new tariffs go into effect on August 23, diesel, kerosene, lubricants and propane will be included.

RELATED: Liberals’ Obsession with Foreign Labor Used as Bargaining Chip by China

However, this is a pretty major blink from China — and a huge win from the Trump administration.

If Beijing’s need for oil brings them to the table, that’s yet another bargaining chip the United States can use to get a more sane trade policy

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The Obama Presidential Center has already started destroying dozens of age-old trees in Chicago’s Jackson Park, despite a pledge not to start removing trees until all legal paths are cleared.

The City of Chicago, the park district, and the Obama Center agreed to wait until a handful of lawsuits have developed before beginning preparations for construction, but the Chicago Sun-Times reports that the Obama Center’s promise has essentially been broken because the Chicago Park District has already begun destroying baseball diamonds and tearing out trees as part of the work associated with the Obama complex construction.

In January, the Obama Center promised that until the foundation had all permits secured and all lawsuits were satisfied, “there will be no trees removed or cut down.” But now, the Center claims that only the 19.3 acres upon which the center will sit is included in that promise, and the trees destroyed by the Park District are not on that acreage.

The Center’s claim is technically accurate. But the paper explains that the decades-old trees are being destroyed to make room for a track field that is being displaced by the impending construction of the Obama Center. One did not need to transpire without the other, so the moving of the track field is inextricably tied to the Obama Center, critics note.

The paper also points out that the Obama Center is impacting far and away more acreage and city facilities than just the area upon which the complex will eventually sit.

The Times wrote:

Since former President Barack Obama picked Jackson Park for his center in August 2016, a series of intertwined projects in and around Jackson Park has made the impact much larger than just the 19.3 acres to be occupied by the center, including retooling roadways and relocating athletic fields.

Despite claims by Obama representatives, the famed Jackson Park, designed by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1893, will see major alterations even though the park was placed on the federal National Register of Historic Places in 1972. And preservationists say the Obama Center is destroying the carefully planned parklands across the city’s Lake Shore region.

The claim that the Center will not force the city, state, or federal governments to spend tax dollars on the complex is also coming up false.

According to the Wall Street Journal, taxpayers are now being asked for nearly two hundred million dollars for costs resulting from the Obama Center.

“Now comes news that Illinois taxpayers will put up at least $174 million for roadway and transit reconfigurations needed to accommodate the Obama Center. If you don’t live in Illinois, you may be smirking — but you’ll be footing the bill, too,” the Journal reported on August 10. “Eighty percent of such spending is generally reimbursed by the federal government, and Illinois officials confirmed to me that they expect to receive $139 million from Washington if they request it.”

Former Obama chief of staff and current embattled Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel thinks the $174 million in tax dollars to be spent on the center is “money well spent.”

Oddly, the city will not even enjoy rent money from the sprawling Obama Center because another sweetheart deal the city agreed to when it entered into the pact with the Obama Foundation maintains that the Center will pay only one dollar for the land. And that is one dollar only, in perpetuity–not per month or even per year, just one single dollar.

The one-dollar rent and the $174 million in taxpayer funds certainly do seem like great deals, indeed–but for Obama, not for the American people or the citizens of Chicago.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn attended a pedophilia-themed party, according to photographs surfacing online.

The Daily Caller’s Ian Miles Cheong appears to have been the first to find and publish the photos, seen below.

I wish I never defended James Gunn. pic.twitter.com/GdoG4daK8D

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 11, 2018

The now-disgraced Gunn was fired by the Walt Disney Co. last month after countless “jokes” about child rape were dug up on his Twitter account. The jokes were more than five-years-old and also mocked sensitive subjects such as AIDS, the Holocaust, Mexicans, and “ass raping” women.

As Breitbart News previously reported, these “jokes” included…

…a post about a monkey that “jerked off” on a child, high-school kids masturbating “in front of the others to show how fun it is,” his alleged experience of doing a “reading with a convicted pedophile,” and how he wants to make a “Hollywood film adaptation of The Giving Tree with a happy ending – the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob.”

Also found on Gunn’s website (which he apparently took down in a panic as the old tweets began to circulate) was a video he titled, “Video: 100 Pubescent Girls Touch Themselves,” which featured a chorus of what looks like high school-aged girls singing the pop tune “I Touch Myself,” a song about female masturbation.

Gunn added this comment to the video:

Huston Huddleston posted this video on my Facebook page with the note ‘I thought you’d appreciate this,’ My response: ‘Appreciate it?!! I just came all over my own face!!’

A few years later, this same Huston Huddleston, after being charged with soliciting a minor to appear in child pornography, pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography. He is now a registered sex offender.

Despite his objectively disturbing past behavior, ever since his firing, his fans, including the entire Guardians of the Galaxy cast, have been lobbying hard to convince Disney to re-hire Gunn to direct the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

None of Gunn’s defenders, though, has ever addressed Gunn’s connection to Huddleston, and the left-wing entertainment media have all coordinated in an effort to pretend the connection does not exist.

As a result, late last week, trial balloons were being floated to test the public reaction if Disney reversed itself. “Rumors” about the possibility of Gunn’s re-hiring were strategically leaked to the left-wing entertainment media.

According to the screenshots of the pedophilia-themed party, which appear to come from Gunn’s personal blog, the theme of the party was “To Catch a Predator,” which is the title of a popular NBC investigative series that ran from 2004-2008. Using hidden cameras, the show would catch alleged sexual predators who had arranged to have sex with children as young as 12.

One of the photos (Gateway Pundit has more) shows Gunn dressed as a Catholic priest posing with two young women dressed to look like children. One is in pigtails and pouting, another looks like she is about to cry as she holds a juice box and a doll. Father Gunn, who appears to be wearing eye makeup, looms over them.

Jamesgunn.com/Screenshot

The second photo features Gunn, again dressed as a priest, next to a pigtailed young women sucking her thumb. Kneeling on the floor in front of Gunn is a man made up to look like a clown. He has his hands around the throat of the second young woman wearing what looks like a babydoll dress. The photo also features a large rabbit and a man (in pigtails?) yanking at his pants.

Jamesgunn.com/Screenshot

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.