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.

Trump: Clinton has ruined the world  —  Donald Trump pointed to Hillary Clinton as the cause of “so many” of the world's current problems in an interview to air Sunday, attacking, among other decisions, the then-New York senator's vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2002.

Marco Rubio Doesn't Add Up  —  MATH was never my strongest subject, so maybe I'm just not crunching the numbers right.  —  But the more I stare at them, the less sense Marco Rubio makes.  —  Rubio as the front-runner, I mean.  As the probable Republican nominee.

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.

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 …

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.

Pryor Teen Shot While ‘Ding Dong Ditching’ In Neighborhood  —  PRYOR, Oklahoma -  —  A 14-year-old Pryor boy is out of surgery after being shot several times by his neighbor who has not been arrested.  —  Police said the teen and two of his friends were ringing doorbells and running off early …

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.”

In Chicago, distrust toward mayor has turned ‘personal’ … CHICAGO — Mayor Rahm Emanuel cut short a family vacation this past week and returned to a city in crisis: On the North Side, more than a dozen people stood outside his house, hurling insults.  On the West Side, a close aide was punched …