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Saving Private Ryan offers not a single word about love of country. Generals may still talk like their Civil War counterparts, but soldiers in the field have ceased to cloak their duty in such sentiments.

The mission can't be justified on moral or patriotic grounds, and yet the toughest soldier in the squad, Sergeant Horvath, says saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing they "were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess."

Spielberg never suggests that we are any better than our enemy or, to put it more generously, that they are any worse than we are.

this is not a patriotic film; if anything, it argues that patriotism is beside the point in modern warfare. Even the mission itself has no heroic or patriotic aim; there is no hill to be taken, no redoubt to be stormed. Its goal, according to Captain Miller, is public relations.

there is no shortage of cruelty and brutality. Nazis move through battle-scarred streets indifferently finishing off wounded Americans, but, early in the film, we have witnessed callous GIs mowing down surrendering Germans with a laugh.

Schindler's List and Amistad are, in fact, about guilt and responsibility. They are not, as many imagine, noble memorials to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and slavery; rather, they are agonized meditations on all of those somehow implicated in those vast human tragedies.

How can the sentimental tableau of a weeping old man, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsentimental a film?

he described his father's own war stories: "I was supposed to wave the flag and be patriotic and say that without his efforts I wouldn't have the freedoms I had or even the freedom to have the bicycle I was riding." Only later did the director realize that it wasn't "a bunch of bunk he was telling me."

Private Ryan, a dazed kid surrounded by the bodies of men who were absurdly ordered to their deaths to save him, is given the equally absurd command by the dying hero, Captain Miller, to "earn this" and must now bear the terrible, impossible order until his own death.

at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as a grandfather and his son and grandchildren pay homage to those whose deaths we have just witnessed, the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of fallen heroes; the living are, in fact, the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan, we cannot help but ask what we've done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.

Saving Private Ryan is not about those who suffered; it is about those who have been spared suffering. Spielberg's subject, in the end, is not the courage of the soldiers who fought at Normandy; his subject is the debt owed them by their children and their children's children.

Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.

Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.

ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

But a re-election to the speakership would allow Mr. Ryan to pick up the pieces of a party that splintered during the 2016 election cycle.

Republicans’ willingness to anoint Mr. Ryan again for speaker will face its first test with the leadership votes that follow close on the heels of the Nov. 8 election. Mr. Ryan remains popular with many House Republicans, and perhaps his biggest advantage is that no one so far has emerged as a viable alternative to replace him.

While Mr. Ryan has weekly news conferences intended to talk about the House agenda, reporters tend to ask him almost exclusively about Mr. Trump.

The speaker is widely viewed as endorsing Mr. Trump to provide the party with the unity necessary to get House members re-elected and to help Mr. Ryan keep his day job.

The speaker has had a tough time getting enough votes to pass a budget in the House, let alone pass the rest of his agenda,

As Mr. Ryan was giving his modest endorsement to Mr. Trump, the Manhattan businessman was garnering his latest front page headlines by suggesting that a federal judge overseeing the class action suit against Trump University was biased because of his “Mexican heritage.”

His voice of skepticism, not his agenda, is what got Mr. Ryan the most attention, and putting it on the shelf may not serve him well

Conservatives are mainly taking aim at a pair of Obama directives to ensure protections for LGBT employees of federal contractors and to direct public schools to provide access to locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. 

Also on Wednesday, a measure by Alabama GOP Rep. Bradley Byrne passed to exempt religious groups from complying with the directives.

Republican leaders have tried to steer lawmakers away from wading into the hot-button debate on the House floor.

The speaker this week cautioned GOP members at a closed-door session that Democrats were likely to keep trying to force them into uncomfortable votes on LGBT discrimination, according to aides and members who were present.

He floated the idea of modifying House rules in a move that would likely restrict the number of amendments that could be offered on the floor, which would allow leaders to get out ahead of controversial votes and avoid any potentially embarrassing floor fights.

The GOP leadership is trying to “thread the needle,” according to aides, between conservatives itching for another chance to challenge Obama and those who don’t want to tackle on an issue they think is best left for the states to resolve. 

For their part, Democrats are exploiting the rift, looking to draw attention to the GOP infighting after a measure that would have banned federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT employees failed in the House last week.

Democrats see LGBT rights as a prime opportunity to prove that House Republicans are intolerant of minorities. 

The vote on Maloney’s original measure turned heated last week when it appeared that seven Republicans switched their votes after the bill seemed to have passed.

Ryan told reporters on Wednesday that the breakdown — which involved Democrats shouting “shame, shame” across the aisle at their GOP colleagues —  was just a misunderstanding.

Then, Democrats successfully rallied support from moderate Republicans to ban the flag on federal property. Southern Republicans were enraged and threatened to vote against the overall bill, forcing former House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to give up on the entire appropriations process to avoid an embarrassing failure.

The stakes are much higher this year for Ryan who has vowed to return the House to working order, starting with passing spending bills and allowing any member to offer amendments.

I wouldn’t have done it but I’m not House speaker. He is a practicing politician who has to calculate the consequences of what he does. That deserves at least some understanding.

Ryan had no good options. He chose the one he felt was least damaging to the conservative cause to which he has devoted his entire adult life.

what was surprising was not Ryan’s ever-so-tepid semi-endorsement, which was always inevitable and unavoidable — can the highest elected GOP official be at war during a general election with the party’s democratically chosen presidential candidate? — but his initial refusal to endorse Trump

Ryan was legitimizing resistance to the new regime, giving resisters safe harbor in the House, even as they were being relentlessly accused of treason for “electing Hillary.”

For his part, Mr. Ryan has been diligently tweeting pledges to the American people that the law is on its way out. Republicans haven’t landed on a replacement plan yet. But Mr. Ryan is sure they will come up with something because they know, as he said in a recent tweet, “Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need.”

n so doing, Mr. Ryan inadvertently revived an idea that desperately needs to be resuscitated — the idea that freedom requires not just a lack of barriers, but also the conditions that allow people to live their lives fully. Deprivation, then, is a constraint on Americans’ freedom.

Ryan laid out those policies—which he described as a “bold, pro-growth agenda”—in this week’s Republican address.

In fact, Ryan even avoided addressing the subject of immigration when discussing his national security priorities. While Ryan notes that Republicans will boost national security by focusing on “building a 21st-century military,” he makes no mention of stopping the large-scale visa issuances to Muslim migrants

Moreover, Ryan’s office put out a press release detailing that the Republican Party’s agenda of “jobs and economic growth” will focus on “ideas to fix our tax code, rein in the regulatory state, and maximize our energy potential.”

Ryan’s office makes no mention of easing or reversing the unprecedented flow of low-wage labor into American communities, nor did Ryan’s office explain how he plans to “fix our tax code [and] rein in the regulatory state” while importing large numbers of migrants who favor big government policies.

After the numerically-smaller 1880-1920 immigration wave, immigration was reduced for half a century. There was no net increase in the immigrant population over a fifty-year period—in fact, the foreign born population declined substantially between 1920 and 1970.

In the fifty years since visa caps were lifted in 1965, the level of immigration in the country has quadrupled—from fewer than 10 million foreign-born residents in 1970 to more than 42 million today.

I know great Americans– great Americans– who love this country, and they are not happy with what’s going on in Washington.

The enormity of what is happening is somehow being lost on our political leaders. But it is not lost on the American people. Today, after five decades of record immigration, a record number of Americans are not working. The share of men in their prime working years who do not have jobs has tripled since the late 1960s. Workplace participation for women has declined more than three full percentage points since 2000. Median household incomes today are $4,000 less than they were fifteen years ago… Absent visa reductions, the annual rate of immigration, the total level of immigration, and the percentage of the country that is foreign-born will continue surging every single year.

Indeed, Trump has soared in the polls as he continues to campaign on a platform of putting an end to the open borders trade and immigration policies that have been championed by Ryan-Rubio Republicans and their donors

Indeed, it is hard to imagine the Democratic National Committee complaining about only representing the interests of its “core constituencies”– such as immigrant groups or Black Lives Matter– and urging Party lawmakers to drop their commitment to some progressive values so that they are not stuck with only their “core constituencies.”

A recent study by Princeton economists revealed that white, middle, and working class Americans without a college degree are experiencing a rapid rise in morbidity. The report found that the rise in their death rates was tied to what the New York Times describes as, the “pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures”.

Unemployed, desperate and despairing, these once-middle-class workers are killing themselves at unconscionable rates with guns, heroin and alcohol-induced cirrhosis… The cause of the self-slaughter, the researchers suggested, is financial strain.

Third, we, as a conference, should unify now, and not after a divisive speaker election.

“I want to be clear about this. I still think we are an exceptional country with exceptional people and a republic clearly worth fighting for. It’s not too late to save the American idea, but we are running out of time. “Make no mistake: I believe that the ideas and principles of results-driven, common-sense conservatism are the keys to a better tomorrow—a tomorrow in which all of God’s children will be better off than they are today.

“The idea that the role of the federal government is not to facilitate dependency, but to create an environment of opportunity. . . . for everyone. “The idea that the government should do less. . . . And do it better.

“I have shown my colleagues what I think success looks like, what it takes to unify and lead, and how my family commitments come first. I have left this decision in their hands, and should they agree with these requests, then I am happy and willing to get to work. Thank you.”

Other travelers set off because they simply hit a wall. There’s nothing like being stuck at home to make you realize you would rather be anywhere else. In Facebook groups like Travel off Path Community and Worldschoolers, members trade advice on how to cross borders, how to handle local quarantine rules, where to find Covid-19 tests abroad and how to home-school on the road. Lonely travelers use the groups, with thousands of members, to meet up with other people overseas.

A bipartisan group of centrist lawmakers, including a number of Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mitt Romney of Utah — also urged their fellow party members to stand down.

“All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted. At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans’ confidence in the already determined election results.”

A similar dance is playing out in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has taken to conservative media in recent days to reassure conservatives that even if Trump bucked their policy goals, the Republican legislature would rein him in.

It’s a low bar to clear, but McConnell told CBS last week that in a worst-case scenario, “the Constitution” would restrict Trump.