Angel Gilberto Garcia-Avalos had been deported five times in just the past four years, yet each time he has managed to sneak from Mexico back into the U.S., where he ended up in more mischief: driving without a license, attempted burglary and felony weapons charges.

In August, he graduated to full-fledged mayhem, sparking a fire in the Sequoia National Forest that has already cost the government $61 million and left some of the country’s most beautiful landscape scarred for years to come.

Garcia, who pleaded guilty last month and faces 13 months in prison, had only recently been released from the Kern County Jail. He likely would have been deported again, but local authorities were unable to report him to immigration authorities because of California’s new sanctuary city law, which prohibited the sheriff from communicating with federal agents.

Federal agents now say they will kick Garcia out of the country once he serves his latest sentence, but the damage has already been done.

At a point along State Highway 155 through the Sequoia National Forest, the smell of cedar gives way to the stench of soot. Ash-blackened trees above and below the roadway show the path of the blaze.

...

Correct The Record is open about it’s efforts to combat “lies and misleading narratives about Secretary Hillary Clinton” on Reddit, to which it devoted one million dollars.

A coordinated effort to “downvote” a post could keep it from reaching a large audience on the site.

Due to the anonymity the site providers its users, however, it’s impossible to know the extent of Correct The Record’s Reddit campaign.But some Redditors are nevertheless sure that the PAC is actively trying to suppress negative stories about Hillary Clinton from the Podesta emails.

...

One community where Correct The Record appears to be unpopular is the subreddit /r/WikiLeaks, which has more than 60,000 subscribers and is devoted to WikiLeaks-related news and topics.

“It looks like CTR is out in force and getting smarter. Don’t waste your time arguing, just dig!” one user posted on /r/WikiLeaks Wednesday, adding: “Don’t let them eat up your time. Get to work digging or spreading. They’re wasting cash on man hours, don’t let them eat up yours.”

The PAC is similarly unpopular on the subreddit /r/DNCLeaks, which was originally devoted to crowdsourcing findings from WikiLeaks’ release of emails from the Democratic National Committee but has since been repurposed to crowdsourcing revelations from the Podesta emails.

That subreddit has more than 17,000 subscribers and averages 200 new subscribers every day, one of the moderators told The Daily Caller.

One of the top posts on /r/DNCLeaks right now states, “CTR is in here heavy today. Make sure you are generous with your upvotes and downvotes to counteract these jerks.” That post currently has 1,143 points (the number of upvotes a post receives, minus the number of downvotes).

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. Congress on Thursday asked the Justice Department to clarify how a looming rule change to the government's hacking powers could impact privacy rights of innocent Americans.

The change, due to take place on December 1, would let judges issue search warrants for remote access to computers located in any jurisdiction, potentially including foreign countries. Magistrate judges can normally only order searches within the jurisdiction of their court, which is typically limited to a few counties.

“We are concerned about the full scope of the new authority that would be provided to the Department of Justice,” 23 senators and representatives wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The Supreme Court in April approved amendments to Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure that would allow judges to issue warrants in cases when a suspect uses anonymizing technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnet.

Those amendments will take effect on December 1 of this year unless Congress passes legislation that would reject, amend or postpone the changes. Some lawmakers, led by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, have introduced legislation that would halt the changes, but it has yet to gain much traction.

...

"Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered?" Tanden wrote in July. “Like whole thing is f---ing insane.”

“I know we have Erica Garner issues but we don't want to mention Eric at all? I can see her coming after us for leaving him out of the piece,” Clinton press secretary Nick Merrill wrote in an email.

“Can we tweet?” Podesta wrote in a 2015 email, according to a recent Wikileaks dump. Clinton staffers shared the email, and snarky remarks.

“Omg,” Brian Fallon, Cinton’s press secretary, wrote. “I think we should give to NY Post.”

We’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking – and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.

The people who support Donald Trump – they’re not racists or rednecks, they’re actually pretty decent people. After talking to a number of them, I sort of wanted to sort of write this.

Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said: if you close these factories, as you are planning to do in Detroit, and rebuild them in Mexico, I am going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody’s going to buy them.

It was an amazing thing to see.

He’s saying the things that people who are hurting [want to hear]. It’s why every beaten down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle-class loves Trump.