TV News LIES

Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader, returned to the Capitol on Monday and cast his first vote after a months‑long absence that fueled rampant speculation about his health.

One of the highest-profile figures in Congress, the 84-year-old senator has been away from the Senate since mid-June, following what his office said was a fall that left him hospitalized. After weeks of silence, that spurred demands for greater transparency and stoked online conspiracies, McConnell disclosed that he had been “briefly unconscious” and “also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia”. He was discharged from a rehabilitation center last month.

McConnell arrived on Capitol Hill in a wheelchair, and briefly addressed reporters on Monday evening before voting to confirm a federal judge to a district in Ohio.

Appearing frailer, he said he was back to help advance the latest farm bill and to support legislation aiding “our good friends who are totally in the fight against the Russians”.

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At around five o’clock on a winter evening in 2013, then college student Sam Forstag was driving through a snowstorm toward his third job of the day, making sandwiches at the Subway inside a Walmart.

“I was always late,” Forstag recalled with a laugh more than a decade later.

Halfway there, the gray sedan in front of him lost traction. It spun across the icy road and slid nose-first into a ditch. Forstag’s first instinct was to pull over. Growing up in a tight-knit community in North Portland, Oregon, and later in Montana, he had learned that when someone’s car ended up in a ditch, you stopped. You grabbed a shovel or you called a neighbor. You helped push the car back on to the road. That was simply what people did.

But he kept driving.

“I remember thinking, ‘I should stop – but I don’t have time,’” he said. He couldn’t afford to lose the job that helped pay his rent, car payment and groceries. He thought about it for the rest of that sandwich-making shift.

That memory has become part of Forstag’s political identity as a firefighter turned Democratic candidate hoping to flip Montana’s first congressional district in November’s midterm election. Once a scholarship kid at a Catholic high school, 32-year-old Forstag has built his campaign around a deeply personal argument: that the economic pressures consuming many Americans do more than empty their wallets. They leave people with less time and capacity to care for one another. That message has helped Forstag galvanize young and working-class voters in a district that has long favored Republicans.

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Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said Sunday that Democrats should not prioritize impeaching President Donald Trump if they win control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead should focus on making life more affordable for Americans.

Clyburn told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that if Democrats take back the House, he feels confident that their first order of business would be making the country accessible and affordable for all citizens.

Pressed on whether he believes Democrats should rule out the prospect of impeaching Trump if they regain control of the House, the South Carolina lawmaker said, “I don’t rule it out, but I don’t rule it in.”

“I don’t think that should be our priority if we get into office,” he added. “Our priority ought to be making housing, education, energy, healthcare affordable and accessible for all of our citizens. Impeaching the president will not do that.”

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In a recent fundraising email, the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat, former congressman Mike Rogers, appeared to mislead supporters about his past by suggesting that he had played an active role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida who was shot and killed in an American military raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011.

“When I served as a US army officer and an FBI special agent, I swore a sacred oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Rogers wrote, according to a screenshot of the email shared online by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now with Straight Arrow News. “I dedicated my life to keeping our families safe – working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security.”

He then added, in a section of the email highlighted in bold type: “I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America.”

Rogers, however, was not in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on 1 May 2011, when Bin Laden was shot and killed – nor was he in the White House Situation Room, where then president Barack Obama and senior administration officials at the time, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, followed the raid in real time.

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South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham has won the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, according to a race call by the Associated Press.

Her win came after an endorsement from President Trump, backing her for a full term in the seat formerly held by her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

She beat Rep. Ralph Norman for the nomination in Tuesday's special election primary runoff after no candidate won the GOP special election primary outright earlier this month. She now faces Democratic nominee Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in November in the heavily Republican state.

Trump had backed Graham, a political newcomer, as the interim replacement for her brother, who died from a heart condition on July 11 and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Darline Graham to serve out the remainder of her brother's term.

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Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday said the Department of Justice believes Congress has already granted President Trump the authority to construct the White House ballroom under existing presidential authority.

“We don’t believe we have to go to Congress. We believe Congress has already given us the authority to do what we’re doing,” Blanche said during a Sunday appearance on Fox News’s “Fox News Sunday.”

“Many presidents have done a tremendous amount of work to the White House, as they should, and Congress has authorized them to do so,” he added in discussion with anchor Shannon Bream, a lawyer criticized by Trump after the interview aired.

An appeals court has ordered the administration to stop all work on the project by Aug. 21 unless the Supreme Court steps in to approve the overhaul. 

“We’re hopeful that the Supreme Court recognizes that so we can get the ballroom finished as soon as possible. Remember, yes, it is a ballroom, but it’s also a meaningful upgrade ae..nd necessary part of the security of this city and the security of the president and his family,” Blanche said Sunday.

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