NATO members are not legally required to join any member’s military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership.

But they often do just that.

Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security.

They followed the precedent set by America’s 1999 intervention in the distant Balkans, leading a three-month NATO campaign to dismantle Slobodan Milosevic’s often bloody ambitions of a Greater Serbia.

The U.S. also joined the 2011 U.N.-approved, and French- and British-inspired, NATO “coalition of the willing” bombing campaign in Libya.

That effort proved a seven-month misadventure — especially since the targeted Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi had given up his nuclear weapons program and was desperately trying to cut a deal with the West.

When NATO members in the past have operated unilaterally to defend their own national interests, they have often called on the U.S., as NATO’s strongest member, for overt help….

Currently, America has not asked NATO members to help bomb Iran….All the U.S. had initially asked for was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy….

But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some damned the U.S. effort as either illegal or unnecessary.

When the liberal media isn’t buying the Democrats’ talking points, you know they’re in trouble.

On Sunday’s edition of This Week, host Jonathan Karl walked Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) through the reality of the Democrats blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and things got a little testy when Van Hollen was confronted with some uncomfortable truths

“I guess what's confusing here is you have fought and blocked the funding for the Department of Homeland Security because you object, as you just outlined, to what ICE has been doing, and you wanted to force changes,” Karl said. “And yet, the only thing that has been assured throughout all of this is that ICE already has the money. Because, as you said, $75 billion passed in the budget bill last year.”

This isn’t new information; we’ve known for months now that ICE is funded through 2029, which made this standoff completely pointless, not to mention dangerous and reckless.

Karl pressed the point further, spelling it out in plain English. “So you're holding up the entirety of the Department of Homeland Security because you object to ICE, and you want changes to ICE,” he said. “Through it all, ICE continues to have the money it needs.”

…Then Van Hollen had the audacity to claim, “We're not holding it up.”

There are moments in the life of a republic when the veil slips, when the carefully curated façade of institutional integrity gives way to something far more unsettling.

The raid on Mar-a-Lago was not merely a law enforcement action. It was a rupture.

Now, Judicial Watch has newly-uncovered internal documents that reveal that even within the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself, there were grave doubts about the legal foundation for that extraordinary intrusion, doubts that were brushed aside by a Department of Justice determined to proceed.

At the heart of the matter lies “Plasmic Echo,” the code name for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) secret investigation into Trump’s handling of presidential records.

According to internal communications, the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) explicitly stated that it did not believe probable cause existed to justify a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago.

Let that sink in.

The agents on the ground, the professionals entrusted with the solemn responsibility of safeguarding constitutional rights, concluded that the legal threshold had not been met.

Yet the Department of Justice pressed forward regardless, culminating in an unprecedented raid on the home of a former president.

One is compelled to ask: Since when does the absence of probable cause become a mere inconvenience?

Back in 2008, while running for the White House, Barack Obama declared that our planet is “in peril” due to climate change.

He continued, saying one of the major challenges facing the U.S. is “what we will do about our addiction to foreign oil.”

In that address, known as the “New Energy For America” speech, Obama said, “We simply cannot pretend, as Senator McCain does, that we can drill our way out of this problem.”

He went on, saying, “Breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face. It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.”

In June 2013, Obama again mocked the idea of increased oil and gas drilling.

During a speech at Georgetown University, Obama introduced what he called a “new national climate action plan” that he claimed would make the U.S. “a leader — a global leader — in the fight against climate change.”

In that speech, Obama used the word “climate” two dozen times.

He claimed Congress should “end the tax breaks for big oil companies, and invest in the clean-energy companies that will fuel our future.”

The line from that speech that resonates today is this one: “We can’t just drill our way out of the energy and climate challenge that we face. That’s not possible.”

Those speeches haven’t aged well.

The 177,000 signature threshold has now been passed, officially clearing the requirement for an Alberta independence referendum on October 19th.

This is a historic moment for Alberta and signature collection is still continuing.

Mitch Sylvestre has been the driving force behind the movement and gathering the signatures during the petition drive.

A signature drive that will continue until the official cut-off date on 2 May. Organizers want to gather as many as they possibly can in order to offset any challenges. They know there are going to be plenty of those from indigenous First Nations groups and Canadians who are just pissed at what the group is doing.

Some suits challenging the movement's legitimacy have already been filed.