The president compared the strategy to the one used against al-Qaeda.

View Video ›

President Obama said Friday that the U.S. goal in combatting ISIS militants in Iraq would be to "dismantle" them systematically, similar the strategy used to combat al-Qaeda.

"You can't contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people. Killing that many innocents. Enslaving that many women," the president said at the NATO Wales Summit. "The goal has to be to dismantle them"

Likening his strategy to combat ISIS to the one used against al-Qaeda, the president said the United States would "systemically degrade their capabilities" to destroy their ability to conduct terrorist attacks.

"And if you look at what happened with al-Qaeda, in the Fatah, where their primary base was, you initially push them back," he said. "You systemically degrade their capabilities. You narrow their scope of action. You slowly shrink the space, the territory, that they may control. You take out their leadership and, over time, they are not able to conduct the same kinds of terrorist attacks as they once could."

"What we can accomplish is to dismantle this network, this force, that has claimed to control this much territory, so that they can't do us harm. And that's going to be our objective," he continued.

Liberals: Not so #trendy.

Whose star is rising on the political talk shows?

The Sunday morning TV talk shows are one of the main venues political types go to hawk their views. The five main shows — "Meet the Press" (NBC), "State of the Union" (CNN), "Face the Nation" (CBS), "This Week" (ABC), and "Fox News Sunday" — have hosted more than 9,000 guests since January 2009. Some guests have appeared just once. Others, such as Sen. John McCain, are omnipresent, appearing dozens of times over the past half-decade.

But the shows — and political movements — are constantly looking for new faces. Thanks to data collected by American University researchers, and cleaned and published by The New York Times's Derek Willis, we can pinpoint some rising stars of TV punditry.

Using the American U./NYT data, BuzzFeed News looked for guests that met all three of the following criteria:

- Guest has appeared at least five times this year (through August 3, the most recent Sunday in the dataset).

- Guest has appeared more times this year than any other year since January 2009.

- Guest's appearances this year account for at least one-third of appearances since 2009.

Five guests qualified, almost all of a conservative persuasion. Without further ado, the trendiest Sunday morning show guests, ranked by percentage of appearances since 2009 that have come in 2014:

1. S.E. Cupp — Five appearances in 2014, out of eight since 2009

ABC News / Via abcnews.go.com

Cupp, a co-Host of CNN's "Crossfire," was one of the top contenders for the open "conservative" host slot on The View. It went to Nicolle Wallace. She fits a fairly unique profile in mainstream television: she is young, female, and libertarian.

2014 Appearances (Through August 3):

• This Week, Feb. 9
• This Week, April 20
• State of the Union, April 27
• State of the Union, June 22
• This Week, July 27

2. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) — Eight appearances in 2014, out of 13 since 2009

CNN / Via sotu.blogs.cnn.com

View Entire List ›

Kremlin radio approached the U.S.-funded broadcaster about collaborating, as the Russian media giant seeks to grow its reach.

Ria Novosti / Reuters

WASHINGTON — A representative from Russian state media conglomerate Rossiya Segodnya reached out to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Iraq affiliate earlier this summer to ask about broadcasting on the station's transmitters, seemingly either unaware or unconcerned that the station is funded by the U.S. government.

The email, with the subject line "A collaboration," sent to Radio Free Iraq and provided to BuzzFeed on Friday appears to be a generic form letter and asks about pricing for sharing FM spectrum space for 2015:

From: XXXX@ruvr.ru
To: iraq@rferl.org,
Date: 08/04/2014 03:01 PM
Subject: A collaboration

To Radio station

Dear Sirs,
I am greeting you on behalf of FEDERAL STATE UNITARY ENTERPRISE ROSSIYA SEGODNYA INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION AGENCY (Rossiya Segodnya). Our company is the largest Russian radio broadcaster.
Today our company explores the market with a view to extend broadcasting area. Our aim is to increase the «Rossiya Segodnya» audience in your country, in this connection, we are interested in transmission radio programs from the territory of the Irak in FM range.
In this case you are kindly asked to provide us with the prices for one hour of broadcasting on your transmitters in the period from 01.01.2015 to 31.12.2015.
Please e-mail us at: XXXX@ruvr.ru
Telephone: +7(XXX) XXX XX XX
Thank you in advance!
Hope for soon reply!

Sincerely yours,

Fokina Lubov
Head of Distribution

Rossiya Segodnya is the conglomerate formed last year when Russian President Vladimir Putin "liquidated" the RIA-Novosti news agency to form a new agency and merge it with Voice of Russia radio. The email sent to Radio Free Iraq comes from a Voice of Russia email address.

"It appeared to be a kind of general email, they were probably searching on the Internet and finding possible affiliate partners," said Mardo Soghom, the Regional Director for Iran and Iraq at RFE/RL.

Soghom said he doesn't believe that the Rossiya Segodnya representative knew that Radio Free Iraq is a U.S. government funded station, part of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty family of broadcasters which are overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which itself is overseen by the U.S. Congress. The history of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty dates back to the Soviet era, when the stations were explicitly designed to counter communism in Europe. Voice of America, another Broadcasting Board of Governors broadcaster, had been operating in Russia until Rossiya Segodnya's director Dmitry Kiselyov canceled their contract in March.

"I think they didn't know, and they didn't mention any names — it was a generic kind of email," he said.

Soghom said this wasn't the first incident he had recently heard of Russian state media attempting to increase its broadcasting reach outside of Russia.

"The Russians have contacted former Soviet country media companies looking into buying or leasing any kind of asset they can find," Soghom said, including "radio stations or owners of powerful transmitter." Soghom said he had heard from contacts in the radio business in the Caucasus region that "definitely [the Russians] have made inquiries" during the Crimea crisis.

"What they do is that these are not intended for these countries, in these countries already Russian television dominates," Soghom said. "They need these transmitters to transmit programs into Arab countries, into Iran, and even further down - let's say China, India — on shortwave. So the purpose is not only local but the purpose is to use those assets to broadcast further away."

Spokespeople for Rossiya Segodnya did not immediately return requests for comment. Nor did Lubov Fokina, who sent the email.

The president had said he would act at the end of the summer, but political concerns changed the calculation.

UPDATED – 12:15 p.m., ET

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Obama administration officials announced Saturday morning that the White House will delay executive actions on immigration that were expected at the end of the summer because of political concerns over the November midterm elections.

"The reality the president has had to weigh is that we're in the midst of the political season, and because of the Republicans' extreme politicization of this issue, the President believes it would be harmful to the policy itself and to the long-term prospects for comprehensive immigration reform to announce administrative action before the elections," a White House official said in a statement.

Obama announced an administration-wide review of immigration and deportation policy earlier this year, after congressional inaction on the topic and months of pressure from immigration activists on the record number of deportations.

Republicans have sharply opposed the prospect of executive action similar to ones Obama took in 2012, which granted legal status to certain young undocumented immigrants. But some Democrats have also quietly opposed announcing the actions before the midterm elections; Democratic control of the Senate depends on a handful of vulnerable senators in mostly conservative states hanging onto their seats.

The president reportedly made the decision to delay the executive actions, which were announced earlier this year, during his flight back to the United States over night.

The move will likely infuriate activists who have been calling for relief after a record number of deportations by the administration. A White House official told BuzzFeed News Saturday that administration officials gave activist groups a heads up ahead of the public announcement of the delay. The official did not characterize the response from activists.

Immediately following the announcement, the activist group United We Dream went live with an online splash blasting the president's decision.

Cristina Jimenez, the managing director for the group, said the president's latest broken promise is another slap to the face of the Latino and immigrant community.

"On June 30, President Obama stood in the Rose Garden and said, 'If Congress will not do their job, at least we can do ours. I expect [Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice's] recommendations before the end of summer and I intend to adopt those recommendations without further delay.' DREAMers have held him accountable at every corner, but the president is more content playing politics with the lives of our families," she said in a statement.

In a statement, the immigrant activist group American Voice put the blame squarely on Senate Democrats for the delay.

"We are bitterly disappointed in the president and we are bitterly disappointed in the Senate Democrats," executive director Frank Sharry said. "We advocates didn't make the reform promise; we just made the mistake of believing it. The president and Senate Democrats have chosen politics over people; the status quo over solving real problems."

Evan McMorris-Santoro contributed reporting. This post has been updated.

Battle between White House, Senate Democrats, and activists over delay raged for “weeks.”

Ints Kalnins / Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Obama's decision to delay executive action on immigration until after the November elections was the end result of weeks of back and forth within the Democratic Party, and fears the actions would damage the party's election prospects.

According to an activist familiar with details of the decision to delay the immigration announcement, Obama's political advisers became concerned with internal polling in the last few weeks for a handful of states on the midterm elections.

The polling for the vulnerable Democrats was so close — two points apart — that they were afraid the announcement could "put it over the cliff." Additionally, there was growing sentiment that the president would be blamed if they lost and even if the senators won, he might not be able to count on their support for his eventual actions after the election.

Senate Democratic campaign officials Saturday said they were not unhappy, or surprised, by the White House's decision to put the blame on fellow Democrats for his decision. One official said that for weeks, the potential impact of the deportation executive order on a handful of tight campaigns had been on the minds of top Democrats both in the Senate and at the White House.

"It absolutely helps," a staffer for a red state Democrat up for reelection told BuzzFeed News Saturday of the announcement. "In a state like ours, the immigration attacks poll strongly for the opposition, and this news takes away at least some of the immediacy. Now, the specter of executive action from an unpopular president will remain a weapon until November, but being an immigration alarmist just got harder for the Republican Party."

According to one source, as late as a month ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid didn't believe a delay would be necessary, but was relatively quiet on the issue this summer.

As Senate Democrats made their nervousness known in recent weeks, though, immigration activists in Washington rushed to put together a counter argument.

Over the last month or so, people familiar with the process said, immigration activists argued vociferously that the president should keep his promise to implement as many changes to immigration policy as he could without Congress, saying the delay would have real impacts on families facing deportation.

"Senate Democrats were communicating a clear message to the press starting a few weeks ago," said Angela Maria Kelley, the vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, the progressive think tank often closely aligned with the administration. "As that became apparent, there was more communication" with the White House from immigration activist groups.

A White House official told BuzzFeed News Saturday that activist groups had been notified ahead of the president's announcement.

Kelley said activists argued on the "human" and "economic" levels in recent weeks. They noted millions of undocumented families live in fear of deportations and said keeping current policies the White House intended to change in place was a kafkaesque scenario that would impose real pain. Kelley said activists told the White House "there was a strong economic case to be made," too, noting that the sooner undocumented workers are able to get legal status, the sooner they'd begin paying taxes.

At root, immigration activists felt like they had been waiting long enough.

"'You promised' was part of that," Kelley said, when asked to describe the fight with the White House.

Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, said the White House told immigration advocates to be practical. With polls extremely close ahead of the November elections, Democrats argued that rocking the boat made little sense.

"Their response was we should be looking at substance over timing," she said. "Our response to that was that substance and timing converge here."

When Obama sided with the Senate Democrats it felt like he was taking his Latino base for granted, Murguía said.

"You could hear it as, 'You don't have any other place to go,'" she said. "For us, that's disrespectful."

Murguía has often clashed with the White House, once calling Obama the nation's "deporter-in-chief."

But CAP is often a White House-allied organization. The think tank's founder, John Podesta, is now a top White House aide. Kelley said news of the delay Saturday morning was "like a sucker punch" for activists and warned the White House will have to rebuild its relationships with Latino groups now. She said activists will now expect sweeping executive actions come the fall.

"If you think a guy's going propose to you and he suddenly says, 'Oh, I'm going to do it in a couple of months,' you want a 2-carat ring instead of a 1-carat ring," she said.

If few were surprised by the administration's decision on Saturday, both activists and Democratic operatives both argued the process could have been handled better.

Chris Newman, the legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), said polling data about the close Senate races wasn't new information. He characterized the overall timeline from the administration as a political gambit to elicit Republican action.

"They had that polling data for months and were hoping it would shift," he said. "It appears that everything they did was designed to elicit an overreaction from Republicans and wasn't intended to get something done. It looks like they pushed the timeline back as a carrot to get Republicans to threaten impeachment and a government shutdown."

One Senate campaign source panned the administration's handling of the announcement, arguing that any number of "excuses" would have been better than simply saying Obama was worried about being blamed for losing the Senate.

"He could have come up with a better excuse, some of them real," this source said. "If it was me, I'd have said we need comprehensive immigration reform … and if somebody lost their seat [because of the executive order] comprehensive immigration reform would be dead for 20 years."

The official seemed more resigned than anything else — noting, "They had some big wins in the first term, but since then, nothing," of the Obama administration's legislative efforts as well as their chronic messaging missteps.

Kate Nocera and John Stanton contributed reporting.

Immigration advocates were working with community members on how the coming executive actions would affect them. Now, stunned activists are scrambling to figure out next steps in the coming weeks.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Stunned immigration activists lashed out Saturday at the Obama administration over the White House decision to delay executive actions on deportations until after the election. But beyond anger, the decision has left activists scrambling to figure out what to do next.

Activists BuzzFeed News spoke with said they will spend the weekend ironing out specifics on how they will escalate against an administration and vulnerable Democrats who they feel are taking the Latino and immigrant community for granted.

"We feel very intensely that that these decisions that are made affect people's lives," said Lorella Praeli, director of advocacy and policy at immigrant rights organization United We Dream (UWD), while at a UWD retreat to decide how the group will respond. "People were saying, 'now I have to talk to my mom, now I have to tell my dad.' That's what drives our work. This is clearly a political move and politics over families again."

"It makes me really upset — we had a forum with the moms and parents to prepare them for these actions," DREAMer Erika Andiola said. "Now it's not gonna happen and some of them have to go to court. It makes me so angry that he's fully throwing Latinos under the bus."

"The midterm elections were on the calendar back in June," said Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, noting that she thought the administration had made the political calculation that the benefits outweighed the costs.

Between now and November, "tens of thousands who could have been protected will be deported and more kids will end up in foster care because their parent was deported," she said. "These politicians are not paying attention to the humanity."

In the hours after the delay was announced, many immigration activists expressed similar feelings of anger and betrayal — but they wouldn't say Obama and the Democrats are on their own.

Part of the tension for immigrant groups, Hincapié acknowledged, is that they want to punish Democrats and the administration for yet another disappointment but they know that Republican control of the Senate would be far worse for the vulnerable population they advocate for.

"We're angry at the Democrats, but the Republicans are dead to us," Frank Sharry, the executive director of America's Voice, said. "The Republicans blocked the best chance at immigration reform in a generation."

Hincapié doubled down on her belief that Democrats made a mess of the entire process.

"I can see the GOP being so happy, 'Here go the Democrats screwing it up again.' There's a discipline on the GOP side in the way there isn't on the Democratic side, where there is no backbone or a real clarity of focus," she said.

"There's no one answer because none of these Latino groups are going to act the same," Angela Marie Kelley, Vice President for Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress, said when asked what immigration groups will do next. "I do think things will cool down enough so people can look at broader political issues again."

The reality for Latino activists facing the November ballot is that Republicans aren't an alternative, even after Obama's betrayal, Kelley said. That means if they want to show they have political influence, they have to help the Senate Democrats who just successfully convinced the White House to delay the executive actions to win on Election Day.

"If you look at which parties are the obstructionists [to immigration reform]…the bad guys here are not the Democrats," she said. "That said, I don't know that there won't be some constituencies that will be angry and won't get beyond that. But I think most groups will come back to the table. You know, it's not powerful to not vote."

Top officials at SEIU, the union that has made the push for immigration changes a central part of its activism agenda, released a joint statement Saturday saying they were "deeply disheartened" by the White House delay. But they turned that disappointment in Obama into a rallying cry for votes for Democrats in the same statement.

"By far, this isn't the end game. Immigration reform has and always will be our future. While the president will continue to hear from us, Congress will feel the pressure of a growing electorate," the statement read. "We haven't forgotten how we first got here. Republicans failed the American people by refusing to vote on meaningful immigration reform. Holding them accountable in November is a promise that we intend to keep."

Still, the advocates also believe there will be greater unity of purpose after Saturday's announcement.

In a last ditch effort Friday night, 183 organizations representing labor, faith, legal and advocacy organizations sent a letter to the president asking him not to delay his administrative actions.

Activists also point to the confirmation hearing for the next Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, which could happen before the election, as something that could see protests and signal the next battleground between Republicans and supporters of changed enforcement priorities.

The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), a coalition of 39 of the top Latino organizations in the country, said that because 97% of those deported are Latino, separations due to deportation policy are hitting Latino families particularly hard.

Because of this, NHLA announced that it would endorse a national boycott of meetings with the President on immigration matters if they do not include representatives of undocumented immigrants, it said in a press release.
NHLA includes top Latino organizations like NCLR and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and their decision means the administration would likely consider inviting more undocumented immigrants to it's meetings.

Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, was deeply critical of the White House delay, saying it felt to her like Obama was taking Latino voters for granted. She said rallying those voters in November would be tougher post-delay.

"We have to see how this decision will translate in the next three or four weeks," she said. "It will make our overall efforts challenging, but we are vested in politically empowering our community."

For Praeli, fears by Democrats of losing the Senate have been around for months and undocumented immigrants are just being made into a scapegoat.

She said the president, who is so concerned with his legacy and being seen as the "champion-in-chief" of immigration reform and not the "deporter-in-chief," will have to go further to get right with the community.

"I would say that the bar of success is higher for the administration now more than ever," Praeli said.

"If and when he comes through on this promise they should know that they can not just help a couple million people. He has a lot to come back from and a lot to make up for."

LINK: Inside President Obama’s Decision To Delay Immigration Actions

LINK: Obama To Delay Action On Slowing Deportations Until After Election

View Entire List ›

House Republicans’ goal, according to aides: Keep Ted Cruz from making trouble.

Emily Michot/Miami Herald / MCT

WASHINGTON — House Republicans could as soon as Thursday take up legislation to keep the federal government open past November's midterm elections in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of last year's government shutdown, Democratic and Republican aides said Saturday.

A GOP leadership aide Saturday said no final decisions have been made on the exact timing for a continuing resolution vote, but acknowledged "our objective is to get it done quickly."

With the election less than two months away, leadership is eager to wrap up its 10-day session without committing any unforced errors, focusing instead on message votes on jobs and energy. Speaker John Boehner's ability to control his caucus is tenuous, and the short time between now and election day means he doesn't have time for a messy, drawn out fight to pass major legislation.

Aides suggested the quick turnaround on the continuing resolution is to keep the Republican Party's "Trouble Makers Caucus," led by Sen. Ted Cruz, from organizing any sort of rebellion and prompting another government shutdown.

President Obama's decision to punt executive actions on deportations until after the November midterms has significantly reduced the likelihood of a conservative backlash. Whether the president actually has the authority to take executive action has become a point of contention on the right.

Still, Republicans are wary that Cruz and House conservatives could insist the spending bill include language barring the administration from implementing the changes in the future. And three weeks is more than enough time for conservatives to put enough pressure on Boehner to accept their demands for a fight.

Any law that prevented future executive actions, virtually everyone agrees, would be immediately rejected by the Senate and White House, setting the stage for a repeat of last year's shutdown debacle.

A shutdown wouldn't help Democrats win back the House — Obama's unpopularity, redistricting by state legislators, and strong candidates in swing districts took that possibility off the table long ago.

But a shutdown could have major implications for the Senate, where Republicans have the first chance in nearly a decade of retaking the upper chamber. Given the 2016 map, which favors Democrats, this year is Republicans' best opportunity for a while.

"You want to limit the number of sessions at Tortilla Coast," one GOP operative quipped, referring to Cruz' infamous meetings with House conservatives at the Capitol Hill restaurant where they plotted shutdown strategy in 2013.

North Carolina’s Republican Senate candidate is finally on the campaign for real and ready to talk about his record.

Tillis inspects a bale of tobacco.

Kate Nocera / BuzzFeed

WILSON, N.C. — Thom Tillis examined the 720-pound bale of golden tobacco and listened as the farm's owner explained just how many tax dollars this one bale would produce for the federal government.

"Just for that bale: $23,000 — the government is more dependent on tobacco than we are. If there's ever been a product that's over-taxed this is it," Jerome Vick explained to Tillis. "It's bought a lot of school clothes and it's done a lot of things for things for this country. We fought the Revolutionary War and used tobacco for collateral, so my contention is this country belongs to tobacco farmers."

Tillis nodded quietly as Vick went on: he hates the estate tax; government regulation is stifling his business; it's increasingly difficult to export certain crops.

"We worked hard for what we got and we don't want the tax man taking it away from us," he said.

"I don't either," Tillis replied. "What we need to do is not complex and it shouldn't be difficult we just need people that are willing to do it."

It may not be complex, but in just his second full week on the campaign trail, Tillis spent a lot of time explaining things.

He's been mostly absent from the campaign trail so far. (Tillis serves as speaker of North Carolina's House and that role, due to an unexpectedly long state legislative session, kept him busy.)

Filling the void: millions in television ads, which have been running for months. Democrats and Republicans (as well as outside groups) have committed major sums to North Carolina's air war. The race has been framed as a fight between an unpopular statehouse in Raleigh that Tillis ran, and an unpopular Democratic Senate where incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan serves.

Since neither candidate has a particularly forceful personality, both sides have framed the other as a creature of habit.

"We're the state of Jesse Helms and John Edwards — larger than life personalities," said John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, a conservative North Carolina think tank. "In 2014, what you've got is typical Democratic incumbent senator and you've got a typical Republican candidate in a state where the GOP has been rising. They do not yet have a strong brand identities in the public's mind."

Thom Tillis stands in front of a portrait of Jesse Helms at the Pitt County GOP field offices.

Kate Nocera / BuzzFeed

The many attacks from Democrats are easily woven into 30-second sound bites: Tillis cut education, doesn't support a federal minimum wage, wouldn't have supported the Farm Bill, didn't extend long term unemployment insurance, and didn't expand Medicaid. The GOP's message is more concise: Hagan has been a rubber stamp for Obama, who remains incredibly unpopular in the state.

On the trail Saturday, at several farms owned by supporters and at lunch and breakfast with local Republicans, Tillis seemed to understand a lot more explaining lays ahead. With few votes actually up for grabs, both campaigns have devoted their time to intense get-out-the-vote efforts. But for the truly undecided, Tillis said he knows he needs to make a concerted effort to explain his policies and positions.

"I think [there] are the kinds of things that you do, tough decisions that sometimes the citizens don't even understand, but you have the courage to make that decision because you believe in the principle of it and you know it's going to be a good thing for North Carolina," he told supporters at the Pitt County GOP headquarters. "That's exactly what I've done. We know if we inform the voter, we win."

And on the trail, Tillis says he's proud of his record.

"One of the things Kay Hagan has a problem with is recognizing the great progress we've made over the last three and a half years," he said.

But translating his view of success won't always be easy: One woman at Saturday's Republican field office event asked Tillis to explain why veteran teachers didn't get a raise in a recently passed teacher-pay bill. Callers to the office were asking, she said, and she needed to know what to tell them. Tillis launched into a detailed rationale: Veteran teachers had been getting raises for years, he said, while newer teachers' pay had been frozen. The raises were higher for newer teachers in order to be fair, he said.

"It's good sound business to treat all the teachers fairly and I think it's a good story to tell," he said. "But they are going use the tired old arguments of war on education and war on women and these other issues."

"More than anything else this points to the fact that when you are the incumbent and you are attacking your challenger, versus showcasing all the great things you've done for the last six years, there's only one reason for that: You haven't done anything."

The Hagan campaign rejected the idea she hasn't been able to get anything done for North Carolina; they pointed to a list of 13 amendments signed into law they say directly benefited the state. Hagan, they noted, was responsible for "killing an amendment that would have harmed North Carolina tobacco farmers."

"His rhetoric about working families is empty when you look at the policies he has pushed that have only made it harder for working families to get ahead - refusing to raise the minimum wage, cutting education and overcrowding classrooms, rejecting health care for 500,000 people and killing an equal pay bill that would help women in the workplace and their families," said Hagan spokeswoman Sadie Weiner. "That's not the record of someone who is looking out for North Carolina's middle class and it's clear he is rigging the system against working families."

Her campaign has also hammered Tillis for overseeing the defunding of Planned Parenthood in the state, the passage of stricter abortion laws in the state, support for a personhood amendment that would ban some forms of birth control, and his support for the Supreme Court's ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. The "war on women" messaging will likely only increase as polling continues to show Hagan with a significant lead among women voters.

Tillis has recently come out with one counter for that attack: He became the latest Republican Senate candidate to endorse the purchase of over-the-counter oral contraceptives — another thing he was ready to try and explain. It's a "policy endorsed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists," he argued, that could "probably reduce the cost of some of these things by literally half." He told BuzzFeed News he's always held the position that the pill should be available over the counter. "I'm talking about it now because I'm running for an office where it is relevant."

And he had a lot more opinions to share. On the minimum wage, Tillis explained — several times on Saturday — that he feels the issue should be left to the states, and took swipes at Hagan's wealth and upbringing.

"One of the biggest disagreements between Sen. Hagan and I — I don't believe we should be building an economy that's founded on making ends meet on minimum wage. It's impossible, it's a stepping stone. I worked on minimum wage, I didn't go to college out of school, I worked multiple jobs and it's probably not something Sen. Hagan's not had to worry about because we grew up in very different life circumstances," he said.

He would not say whether North Carolina's minimum wage should be increased, but said the decision should be left up to the leaders of the next legislature and the governor.

On the farm bill? Tillis says it didn't do enough for the farmers and was overly focused on food assistance and welfare programs.

On his decision not extend unemployment insurance? Tillis says the unemployment rate dropped significantly afterwards and the state's debt has steadily decreased.

There's an old adage in politics that says if you are explaining you are losing but the Republican has an answer for that, too.

"Change while sometimes good is difficult to absorb, I think that a part of it is just having to see the results," he told BuzzFeed News. "We were the only state to make the decision to not extend long-term unemployment benefits. There were a lot of concerns expressed at the time but shortly after that we started seeing the unemployment rate go down. We also started seeing the revenue we needed to start paying down our debt... When people understand that, then they get why some of the dramatic changes were needed."

This is just the beginning: Tillis and Hagan are statistically tied, and he's only just started campaigning. His supporters have faith in his ability to woo undecided voters. They argue the closeness of the race is a good sign and the Tillis campaign will only gain momentum in the weeks ahead of the election.

"On our side of things, things are changing rapidly," said state senator Buck Newton. "People are very excited about Thom. Races around here don't typically start this early. Everybody's busy here putting in tobacco. Everybody's busy getting back to school. The race is really just starting in a lot of people's minds."

View Entire List ›

Nicolas Mora / BuzzFeed

When he finally decided to surrender to the Border Patrol, Luis Miguel was sunburnt and had thorns in his feet. He and his half-sister Anabel, both 16 and from Guatemala, had not had any food or water for more than a day. It was a cloudless April day in the Texas desert, and they were beginning to worry they would die of thirst.

Hours earlier, Luis Miguel had managed to get enough signal on his cell phone to call his older half-brother, who lives in New Haven, Connecticut and whom he had never met. Luis Miguel explained that he and his sister had lost touch with the human trafficker to whom they had paid $2,500 to help them cross into the United States. The brother told him to wait a few hours and see if the trafficker came to find them, as he had promised to do. If he didn't, the half-brother said, Luis Miguel and his half-sister should walk until they found a highway, stop a police car, and confess to having crossed the border without papers.

As the sun rose higher into the sky, Luis Miguel said to his sister he thought it was time to try to find the highway. But Anabel disagreed, saying it would be foolish to give up after coming so far. At that point, Luis Miguel told BuzzFeed News, something snapped inside of him.

"Fine," he said to his sister. "You can stay here if you want. I'm going."

Luis Miguel began to walk away in no particular direction. Over the previous few nights, he had tried to stay awake to make sure none of the 22 grown men in their group hurt Anabel, the only woman in their company. But the heat and the hunger had made both of them irritable, and they had been arguing. He walked for some 20 minutes, angry and disoriented, until he heard her running behind him. When she finally caught up, Luis Miguel said, she was crying.

Later that day, Luis Miguel and Anabel stumbled upon a highway. The first car they saw was from the Border Patrol. An officer who spoke Spanish gave them water and took them to a detention facility.

The brother and sister would spend a few weeks in a freezing a cell in Hidalgo and a little over a month in a shelter in Houston. After that, they would be allowed to meet their half-brother in New Haven.

There, after their long, dangerous journey, the brother and sister aren't receiving assistance from the federal, state, or municipal governments — but instead from a thrown-together band of advocates and activists.

Nicolas Mora / BuzzFeed

Luis Miguel and Anabel, whose last name BuzzFeed News is withholding at the request of their lawyers and guardians, are two of the more than 60,000 undocumented children that have arrived in the United States in recent months. The arrival of these minors, most of them from violent and impoverished countries in Central America, has reinvigorated the national debate on immigration.

The path that brings children like them to the United States is a long and winding one, determined as much by weather as by the intricacies of U.S. immigration law. Had Luis Miguel and Anabel been Mexican, they would have been deported immediately, left to their own devices at one or another of the towns along the border.

But the teens come from a country that does not have a contiguous border with the United States. This arbitrary fact means their cases are governed by a different set of federal regulations, which dictate that young Guatemalans, unlike their Mexican peers, can be released from detention centers and allowed to stay with friends or relatives while an immigration judge decides their fate. This year, according to the Office of Refugees and Resettlement, the United States has granted this kind of "humanitarian parole" to nearly 40,000 Central American minors.

Much of the conversation surrounding the recently arrived undocumented children has focused on whether the minors should be immediately sent back to their home countries. The Obama administration has quietly pushed for legislation that would expedite the legal procedures to deport the minors — a process that under current laws can take months or even years.

But beyond those questions of principle are many practical, immediate questions that have received less attention. If the undocumented children stay in the United States for an extended period of time — a likely scenario given the current gridlock in Congress — they will need legal representation, health care, education, and housing. The latest border crisis is at its heart a logistical problem of giant proportions: 40,000 minors, perhaps more, who need medical, legal, and psychological assistance, and who are required by law to attend school.

And as the government stands waiting for direction, the task of providing these services has largely fallen to loosely organized civic groups in places like New Haven.

Luis Miguel is short and slight, and wears his thick black hair in the vaguely punk style popular among Latin American soccer players. When he smiles, he reveals several missing teeth. He speaks an articulate and elegant Spanish full of biblical inflections — and not a single word of English.

He was born in Panicomac, a small village in the highlands of Guatemala. People there speak Kaqchikel, a language of the Maya family, and subsist by cultivating small plots of maize. His father, Luis Miguel told BuzzFeed News, had a drinking problem and another family in a neighboring village, and left Luis Miguel's mother when the boy was very young.

Luis Miguel began working at age 8 to help support his three brothers and sisters. At first, he stayed in school and made money by shining shoes at a restaurant. But when he was 12, his mother fell ill and had to travel to a nearby city for treatment. Luis Miguel then dropped out of school to work at a clothing factory. He was paid by the number of sweaters he made, so he worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. On a good day, he said, he made the equivalent of $6.

Around the same time, Luis Miguel and his friends began receiving beatings and threats from older teenagers who belonged to local gangs. With 40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, Guatemala has twice as many murders per capita as Mexico and eight times as many as the United States. Anibal, a 17-year-old who comes from a village not far from Luis Miguel's and who has been living in Connecticut for a year, told BuzzFeed News that he decided to leave Guatemala after the MS-18 gang doused his uncle with gasoline and burned him alive.

As the beatings and threats grew worse, Luis Miguel began thinking of joining his half-brother in the United States. There, he thought, he would be safe, make more money to help his family, and be able continue his studies. He had also heard rumors, spread by human traffickers who stand to make a small fortune from every migrant they help cross, that once he arrived in America he would be able to get papers.

After much consideration and a four-month trial stint in Chiapas, Mexico, Luis Miguel decided to go for the border. Early one Sunday morning in March, Luis Miguel, Anabel, and their mother took a bus to the Mexico-Guatemala border. They met a trafficker at a park, hugged their mother goodbye, and set out on the month-long journey to Texas.

New Haven is home to Yale University and its $21 billion endowment, but also to a large and struggling Guatemalan community. The presence of that community has meant that the city has received a disproportionate number of Central American asylum seekers — though nobody knows exactly how many. Unidad Latina en Acción, a local advocacy organization, told BuzzFeed News that it was aware of 35 recent Guatemalan arrivals in New Haven, all of them children or young mothers.

That figure may not seem high, but when adjusted for the city's population it is comparable to the number of unaccompanied migrant children released this year to family members in California.

In 2007, New Haven became the first municipality in the country to issue official identification cards irrespective of immigration status, allowing undocumented residents to open bank accounts and access health services. The city has also repeatedly refused federal requests to implement Secure Communities, a policing program that requires local law enforcement officials to verify the immigration status of all detainees, no matter the cause of their arrest.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the administration of New Haven Mayor Toni Harp has loudly expressed its intention to provide services for the unaccompanied children. Late in July, after Gov. Dannel Malloy declined a federal request to house 2,000 children in an empty psychiatric facility in nearby Southbury, Harp convened a meeting of local mayors to discuss ways municipal governments could help find housing for the children, whether in facilities or with foster families.

"The idea was to fund the project with the federal money that would have been used for the Southbury facility," Tomas Reyes, Harp's chief of staff, told BuzzFeed News.

But before the mayors could come up with a concrete proposal, the federal government withdrew its request for housing space in Connecticut. The sudden lack of federal funds severely restricted New Haven's ability to offer help.

The administration, Reyes said, remains committed to assisting the dozens of minors that have already arrived in the city, even if the 2,000 others are never sent to New Haven. He told BuzzFeed News that Harp and other mayors have created a task force to come up with solutions and reach out to local advocacy organizations, but was unable to name any specific programs or actions that the city is planning to undertake to assist the child migrants.

Martha Okafor, New Haven's head community services administrator and the person in charge of the mayoral task force, canceled several scheduled interviews with BuzzFeed News and was unable to comment on the city's efforts to support the undocumented minors.

After saying goodbye to their mother, Luis Miguel and Anabel stayed several days in a crowded safe house in Arriaga, a town in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. They were waiting for La Bestia, an infamous cargo train that runs north-south across a large swath of the Mexican territory. The train is not designed to carry passengers, and the journey is dangerous.

La Bestia arrived in Arriaga around four in the morning. The human traffickers woke Luis Miguel and Anabel and told them to climb on top of the cargo containers and hold on. When the sun came out, the metal containers became almost too hot to touch.

"It was like having burning coals held very close to the face," Luis Miguel told BuzzFeed News. "There were little children all around us, and they all began to cry."

After the train, according to Luis Miguel, the journey became a whirlwind of bus rides and safe houses. The brother and sister inched north one town at a time. On several occasions, Mexican law enforcement officials detained them, demanding bribes and threatening violence.

Finally, nearly a month after they left their village, Luis Miguel and Anabel made it to the border. The traffickers broke up the migrants into several groups of about 25 and introduced them to their guides: teenagers just a few years older than Luis Miguel. The boy who was assigned to Luis Miguel and Anabel's group, Luis Miguel said, was clearly on drugs.

Late one night in mid April, the teenage guide took Luis Miguel, Anabel, and 20 other migrants — all but one of them adult men — into the desert. They crossed the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft. The moment they got to the other side of the river, Luis Miguel said, the guide told the migrants to run as fast as they could away from the river. They ran for almost five hours, with Luis Miguel and Anabel struggling to keep up.

Then, when they reached a small wooded area, the guide told the group they were stopping for the night.

Unidentified men pull a raft to shore on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande along the U.S.-Mexico border near Mission, Texas July 24, 2014.

Eric Gay / Reuters

On a recent afternoon, Unidad Latina en Accion, the New Haven advocacy organization, held an open meeting for volunteers who wish to help the children access the services they need. Among the 20 or so people who showed up were college professors, Planned Parenthood organizers, public school teachers, a retired social worker, and an elderly former priest.

"People keep sending us clothes," said Megan Fountain, an organizer for ULA. "But what we actually need is people. Lawyers, psychologists, doctors, and people who can speak Spanish and drive a car."

Under current law, undocumented minors who are released from detention cease to be the charge of the federal government and are placed in the custody of their relatives, which means the government is no longer responsible for their wellbeing. But these relatives, many of them also undocumented, are often not in a position to provide the support that children require.

Immigration and school authorities provide legal and enrollment materials in Spanish, but many adults in New Haven's Guatemalan community are illiterate, or speak an indigenous language better than Spanish. The minors also have to attend biweekly check-ins at the offices of B.I. Incorporated, a private prison company the Department of Homeland Security has contracted to handle its intensive supervision program for undocumented migrants. The closest B.I. outpost is an hour away in Hartford, the state capital, and very few of New Haven's undocumented Guatemalans have access to a car.

The burden of translating documents, filling out forms, driving cars, finding doctors, and locating lawyers has fallen to volunteer advocacy groups. In New Haven, ULA has taken the lead.

The volunteers who showed up at the meeting, Fountain said, will be paired up with a child or young mother. They will drive their assigned children to court and act as advocates in case the staff doesn't speak Spanish. They will help the children enroll in public school. They will fill out applications for Medicare even though they know they will be denied, because Yale-New Haven Hospital will only provide care on a sliding scale to those who can prove that they do not qualify for government benefits.

"We are not a charity, we are a solidarity organization," John Jairo Lugo, another organizer with ULA, told BuzzFeed News. "But nobody else is helping these kids, so we have to step up to the task."

Nicolas Mora / BuzzFeed

The day after Luis Miguel and Anabel's group crossed the border — or perhaps two days later: Luis Miguel has trouble remembering how many days he spent in the desert — the migrants heard an ominous sound coming from the sky. Luis Miguel looked up and saw what he thought was an airplane, but was possibly an unmanned drone operated by the Border Patrol. Whatever it was, it sent the migrants running in all directions. In the ensuing confusion, the group broke up. Luis Miguel, Anabel, and seven other migrants were separated from the guide.

The migrants spoke with the trafficker on the phone a few times. Each time, the guide said he was coming to meet them, and each time he failed to show. Since the migrants had no water, they headed in what they thought was the direction of the highway to try to find a gas station or a good samaritan. After walking for a day, they saw what they thought was a lake. But when they got closer, they realized it was the Rio Grande.

They had been walking in circles.

The older migrants then decided to leave Luis Miguel, Anabel, and a third teenager behind. The three teens wandered for another day. They eventually found a large vegetable field, Luis Miguel said, and rushed to drink from the small puddles along the furrows. But the water tasted of chemicals, and they couldn't drink it.

It was the next morning that Luis Miguel and Anabel called their half-brother and decided to surrender to the Border Patrol.

“I think there’s a moral responsibility to engage voters.”

Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu on Sept. 3, 2014.

Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters

Long before Ed Koch became mayor, he was a small-time lawyer in Lower Manhattan with a quaint lunch break tradition. On the sidewalk, perched on a chair, Koch spoke about current events.

"I really learned to speak in the streets, carry around a chair," Koch said much later, this time getting the last word for his own obituary. "My law office was on Wall Street and at noon I would go downstairs and speak in the subtreasury steps."

The image comes to mind decades later, farther uptown: Zephyr Teachout under the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt on the Upper West Side. The law school professor and anti-corruption activist stumped before a modest, and sometimes skeptical crowd, about her bid to unseat New York Governor Andrew Cuomo — a throwback to a time when political events weren't so carefully managed. When there were no more questions, Teachout looked disappointed and asked for more.

Cuomo, meanwhile, was holding his own press conference — in a town near the Canadian border with fewer people than some New York City apartment complexes. It was so remote, and his office alerted the event with such short notice, that it appeared no reporter from Albany or New York could get there in time. As has been the case more often than not recently, the governor didn't appear in public the next day, nor the day after that — and he never debated Teachout before their Tuesday primary.

If elected, Zephyr Rain Teachout, 42, may be the first to move to the Governor's Mansion from a walk-up apartment. (The Vermont native — who, name notwithstanding, swears her parents aren't hippies — lives on the third floor in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.) Her quirky, shoestring, unashamedly lefty, and very long shot campaign has revved up state politics, if only because Teachout is one of the few unafraid to call Cuomo how so many privately see him: an economic moderate, at best, who failed to make good on his pledge to clean up Albany.

She calls Cuomo the Wizard of Oz, running for the state's highest office behind thick curtains of $30 million war chest. Cuomo may find it a compliment. He is not after a civics lesson, only a heftier re-election margin than his father Mario. Polls show Cuomo trouncing both Teachout and his general election rival. Why risk boosting Teachout's name recognition when 9 out of 10 New Yorkers don't know who in creation Teachout is?

"I don't think it has anything to do with democracy," Cuomo told reporters Sept. 2. "I think it has to do with individual campaigns. Sometimes you have debates, sometimes you don't have debates."

Voters may say they want cleaner government, but experts say it's rarely their top issue when they vote. Still, it's been one of two major planks in Teachout's strategy. Cuomo is giving her something to work with: Besides not debating, he challenged her bid to be on the ballot, losing twice in court. He dispatched people to heckle her; and then there's the matter of often being MIA on the stump. (He doesn't do broadcast interviews, apart from via phone with a favorite radio host).

"I think there's a moral responsibility to engage voters," Teachout told me towards the tail end of her "Whistleblower" campaign bus tour at the end of August. "I do think that there's a failure of leadership, and having some integrity in your vision — it makes him very hard to be accountable."

There's also an ethical scandal in Albany, though unfortunately for Teachout, it lacks the pithiness of, say, a governor nabbed having sex with prostitutes. In Cuomo's case, it's alleged interference with a commission charged with rooting out corruption — corrupting the corruption commission, if you will.

The governor formed it, vowing a year ago it would be "totally independent": "Anything they want to look at, they can look at — me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman."

It emerged — first through the Daily News, then to greater effect in the New York Times — that when the commissioner started looking into the governor's political connections, Cuomo aides leaned on the commission to back off.

Not long after, Cuomo folded it altogether, its work incomplete. The commission's open files, checkered operation and abrupt ending now are in the purview of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan.

Part two of Teachout's strategy is attacking Cuomo's centrism on the economy and a couple of other sensitive issues, like fracking. Cuomo is deliberately vague on the fracking issue; Teachout is opposed, and is backed by the environmental group the Sierra Club. Cuomo is far clearer on taxes. His website says it best: "His economic strategy began with a simple premise: New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation."

Teachout thinks he's coddling the rich: "We are just giving away really billions, tens of billions of dollars a year to the financial services industry," she told my NY1 colleague Errol Louis, dismissing talk companies would move elsewhere.

"She's sort of what I regard as a classic third party candidate — a person running to make a point, or a set or views," says Gerald Benjamin of State University of New York - New Paltz, a longtime expert on New York state politics.

That's precisely what Teachout tried to be, anyway, until Cuomo beat her to it.

Both vied for the nomination of the Working Families Party (WFP), a union-backed group, where voters can often find a second line for those also in the Democratic column. It's supposed to be a good housekeeping seal that the candidate isn't some centrist shrill, but a real Democrat.

So how did Cuomo end up with it? The answer: Bill de Blasio, to a large degree.

After several months getting slapped around in Albany, the rookie New York City mayor played a key role in the governor's race, channeling lefty's aggression into extracting major concessions from Cuomo. (The mayor probably also delighted in watching Cuomo squirm on the video addresses he delivered to a skeptical convention).

Chief among Cuomo's givebacks, the governor now says he'll work toward complete Democratic control of the State Senate, after supporting joint control among Republicans and a breakaway group of Democrats.

"Now that he's put the state's fiscal house largely on order, he can abandon the coalition," says Benjamin.

Why did de Blasio do it, especially after Cuomo was so seemingly demeaning during recent budget negotiations? Because WFP line or not, Cuomo was likely to win. He's overmatching his Republican opponent Rob Astorino. A recent poll has New York State voters approving 57-38 percent of the job Cuomo is doing, and say 56-36 percent that he deserves reelection, little changed from the May 21 findings.

And now Cuomo owes de Blasio. And that's not a bad place to be, assuming Cuomo is good to his word.

So has the Working Families Party abandoned Zephyr Teachout?

"They gave me an extraordinary opportunity," Teachout told me. "Politics is politics."

The Working Families Party declined to comment.

Lefty voters may have another way to register their distaste with Cuomo. A quirk of state law allows primary voters to select their pick for governor separate from his running mate. In Cuomo's case, that running mate is Kathy Hochul, a former congresswoman from Western New York best known for fervently opposing drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants.

Cuomo is enlisting all the Democratic regulars to vouch for Hochul, but that hasn't stopped interest surging towards Tim Wu, Teachout's running mate, a Columbia law professor and scholar of emerging Internet law.

Cuomo is concerned. His aides whisper about Teachout; but they're throwing what they can at Wu — his lackluster fundraising, his dearth of political experience, even a funny gif of him I was forwarded.

An adviser to the state Democratic party, which backs Cuomo, said: "When you think of Tim Wu, you don't think of anyone prepared to handle the office of governor — and that is the first qualification, and that is the thing that disqualifies him most of all. He's a stone thrower not a leader."

Teachout responds: "Part the gravitas that it takes to be governor, is a willingness to take responsibility, be clear about where you stand, and neither Andrew Cuomo nor Kathy Hochul has shown that."

No matter who his lieutenant governor, should he win, Cuomo now has a reinvention to do. He's been largely socially liberal; a Democratic-controlled State Senate may wrench him out of his comfort zone economically.

Where does that leave Teachout? With plenty of new lessons for her law students, plus free publicity for a book she's about to release titled "Corruption in America." And the experience, which she seems to be relishing. Despite the bleak subject and her bleaker chances in her first go at elected office, a smile never seems to fade from her face. She looks like she's having fun.

Which reminds me of a certain mayor.

Today, Koch is gone and Albany still stinks, after Cuomo discarded several key good government promises.

And now, Cuomo is declining to debate.

I have no idea what Koch would say, but he had a word for things that disgusted him: "an outrage."

“I don’t want people like that using that as an excuse so they can drum up more troops to be sent over.”

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Democratic Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan says ISIS is a regional threat and that he's concerned that senators such Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain will use it "as an excuse" for sending ground troops to the Middle East.

"Right now I think mostly it's regional in nature. What I don't want is people making it a bigger threat than it is to the United States so that the John McCains of the world and the people who want to send more troops." Ryan said on NBC local news in Youngstown, Ohio, over the weekend. "If John McCain were in charge we'd be in seven different wars right now across the world. I don't want people like that using that as an excuse so they can drum up more troops to be sent over."

“My home is Dodge City and I’m damn proud.”

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Incumbent Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts says he's "damn proud" to live in Dodge City — noting he's only been home "about seven times" this year — at a state fair debate with lurking independent challenger Greg Orman.

"My home is Dodge City and I'm damn proud," Roberts said in the debate.

"About seven," is the number of times Roberts said he'd been home.

Roberts' residency continues to be an issue in the race.

Roberts is registered to vote at an address in Dodge City owned by supporters who he pays rent to and stays with when back in the state.

In one instance, his campaign manager Leroy Towns was caught calling northern Virginia the senator's home.

"He went back home for two days or three to rest. I think he's going to come back here the first of next week," Towns said. "He's going to spend most of August out here."

Catching himself, Towns attempted to backtrack.

"Home is probably not the right word in terms of the way the campaign's been. But anyway he went back there. It's where his family is at the moment. But he does intend to spend every moment between now and the election in Kansas, I think, that he can," Towns said.

In one interview Roberts said he returns to Kansas whenever he has a campaign opponent.

"We have declared Dodge our residency. Our kids went to school there," Roberts said in an interview on KCMO. "Every time I get an opponent — I mean, every time I get a chance, I'm home. I don't measure my record with regards as a senator as how many times I sleep wherever it is."

“By the way am I allowed to repeat Karl Marx on the air. It’s okay? On your show it’s okay. I want to make sure I’m not offending anyone.”

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Democratic Florida Rep. Alan Grayson cited Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital author Karl Marx in his criticism of U.S. foreign policy in a local radio interview Monday.

"Well history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. We had the same origin for Osama bin Laden didn't we," Grayson said when asked about a report from Steve Clemons of The Atlantic that the Saudis could have helped fund ISIS.

"By the way am I allowed to repeat Karl Marx on the air," Grayson then said. "It's okay? On your show it's okay. I want to make sure I'm not offending anyone."

Grayson said Marx's quote best reflected the problems of United States foreign policy in the Middle East.

"That was actually Karl Marx who says history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. And in this case it is a farce because we haven't learned our own lessons. A lot of the grief that we've come to in the Middle East for the past twenty years has been a product of our own making."

The Florida Democrat cited the Iraq War as an "ultimate example" of history possibly repeating itself.

"I think that the War in Iraq is the ultimate example of that. Four trillion dollars down that rathole and now we have people who are anxious for us to do it all over again."

marzolino/marzolino

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Thom Tillis says he wants to be an “independent” senator and won’t commit to supporting Mitch McConnell for Republican leader.

AP Photo/Gerry Broome, Pool

WILSON, N.C. — Thom Tillis, the Republican candidate for Senate in North Carolina, wouldn't commit to supporting Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, if both of them win this fall.

"I'm not going to look past the most important election and that's the election in November," he told BuzzFeed News on Saturday. "I think there are a number of people in Republican caucus who would be great leaders and it would be great for them to be in that position."

He may not be looking past election day, but Tillis did try and lay out part of his vision for the Senate should Republicans take the majority. He is locked in a tight race against the Democratic incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan and considers his race the real majority-making state for Republicans.

"I've met with probably 30 members of the sitting Republican senators over the last year and I never neglect to let them know that I'm going to expect our leadership to do things differently," he told supporters. "I'm going to expect our leadership to respect the minority."

Hagan has also been vague about supporting Senate Majority leader Harry Reid next year should she win reelection.

"Harry Reid is our leader, and I certainly do support Harry," she told Politico in April. "And I have a huge race going on right now, and I will be victorious. And I will be back next year. And we can talk all about that then."

Republicans and the Tillis campaign's major attack on Hagan is that she is a "rubber stamp" for President Obama and the Senate Democrats. Tillis, who served as the speaker of the state House, said he would work to be "independent" for the state.

"We need somebody to cross party lines and finally get something done for this country. A senator who votes 92% with the president doesn't work for us here in North Carolina," he said.

"People here want someone who is going to be independent, someone who is going to stand up for North Carolina," he added.

Tillis' remarks were notable because he's positioned himself as deeply conservative, and pushed through significant Republican priorities during his time as speaker. At the same event, a supporter asked him to clarify what he meant by "independent," and Tillis went on to say that it actually meant getting Democrats to vote with Republicans.

"I'm talking about the kind of compromise where we convinced Democrats to help us override the governor's veto for bills that cut…taxes and spending. By getting Democrats joining with Republicans that overrode a veto for medical malpractice reform…that's the stuff I'm talking about," he said. "That's bipartisanship. What it was was not necessarily embracing a liberal principles, it was having conservative policies so compelling that Democrats would have the courage to vote with Republicans against a Democrat governor."

As Tillis has campaigned, he's tried to explain the various positions and policies he put into place in North Carolina, as he tries to woo undecided voters.

"Speaker Tillis is desperately trying to run from his record of cutting education, defunding Planned Parenthood and vowing not to increase the minimum wage because he knows that's not what North Carolina's middle class families need," said Hagan spokeswoman Sadie Weiner.

The union has been outspoken in its recent defense of other players facing suspension.

Sean Gardner / Reuters

The NFL indefinitely suspended Ray Rice Monday after video publicly surfaced of the Ravens running back violently assaulting his then-fiancée in a casino elevator.

The suspension follows weeks of backlash over the league's initial two-game suspension.

It's unclear whether the NFLPA, the players' union, will try to appeal Rice's suspension. So far the NFL Players Association has stayed mum on the situation. Several NFLPA staff members have not responded to BuzzFeed News requests for comment; two calls to NFLPA offices on Monday were not answered.

In the wake of the reaction to the initial suspension, Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote a lengthy letter explaining why the league's domestic violence policies were flawed and amended its guidelines. Then Monday, after new footage of the incident was released, the Baltimore Ravens released Rice from the team and the NFL suspended him indefinitely. The NFL allowed another player accused of domestic violence, San Francisco 49ers defensive lineman Ray McDonald, to play in their opener against the Cowboys on Sunday.

While the union has yet to publicly comment on Rice, it has been outspoken in its defense of other players who have been hit with suspensions for other offenses.

Most notably, the union has defended two high-profile wide receivers, Wes Welker and Josh Gordon, who were hit with suspensions for alleged drug use. Welker's four-game suspension was for an unknown drug, reportedly Adderall or Molly. Gordon was suspended for the entire season for smoking marijuana.

The NFLPA is already working to try to reverse their suspensions as it seeks new drug policies for all players.

"We want to get a new agreement in place but we understand the responsibility we have to the players and to the game," NFLPA President Eric Winston said in a statement last week. "It is critical that we get this right."

On Friday, NFLPA spokesman George Atallah tweeted at Sports Illustrated's Peter King to quell rumors about players hoping for an expedited change to NFL drug rules.

Atallah has yet to tweet about Rice.

LINK: NFL Suspends Ray Rice Indefinitely After Video Surfaces Of Him Knocking Out Then-Fiancée

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“They are to be milked, bred, and much, much worse!”

Here's Alan Benyak, who plays a Pennsylvania attorney in an ad for Tom Wolf, who's running for governor of Pennsylvania.

Via youtube.com

And here's Benyak, an actor, as "Mr. Cannibal."

Breeding Farm

Alan Benyak, an actor who stars in Pennsylvania Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf's ad "Jeeps" also had a lead role as "Mr. Cannibal" in a twisted porn film called Breeding Farm.

In the ad, Benyak — who is in fact a former Army lawyer and former judicial candidate whose Central Pennsylvania practice reportedly includes real estate and estate planning— delivers the message that Wolf served in the Peace Corps.

His theatrical career took a different turn. Breeding Farm's plot, according to an online summary: "Four friends are kidnapped by a mysterious man. The friends wake up in a basement, and realize they are part of something horrifying. A human breeding farm. They are to be milked, bred, and much, much worse!"

"Mr. Cannibal with his wife are attorneys that fry and eat people," reads a description of Benyak's role. "They purchase their 'stock's from Farmer."

The film features Benyak torturing a half-naked woman, buying a woman, force-feeding a woman, engaging in cannibalism, and inspecting a woman as if she is livestock.

Other parts of the film include rape, miking a woman and making them act like farm animals, kidnapping, treating women as livestock, riding a woman, physical abuse, and torture.

"He served in the Peace Corps," says Benyak of Wolf.

Via youtube.com

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“These are some special stones.”

Here's Monday's Daily Snapshot, the email newsletter that's "got everything you need to know about a given day at the White House":

The other items in the email are: "West Wing Week 09/05/14 or, 'Every Gray Hair Is Worth It'" and "Weekly Wrap Up: 10 Million Jobs, 50 Years of Conservation, and a Trip to Estonia and the U.K."

Obama visited Stonehenge after the NATO summit last week that largely concerned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The president is expected to speak about ISIS, the Islamic militant group that now controls parts of Iraq, on Wednesday.

The network’s legal team says the reporter named in the lawsuit doesn’t technically work for CNN.

Arwa Damon

CNNi / Via thewrap.com

CNN has responded to the two Baghdad-based EMTs who claim a "seriously intoxicated" Arwa Damon bit them in a violent rage, asking the New York Supreme Court to dismiss the case, which seeks $1 million in damages.

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Sen. Bob Casey said it was “good news” for the school that the NCAA reinstated Penn State’s eligibility for bowl games and scholarships Monday.

Getty Images/Patrick Smith

WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Bob Casey said he thought it was "good news" for Pennsylvania State University that the NCAA is rolling back the sanctions it levied on the school for knowingly ignoring sexual abuse of some of its football players by then-coach Jerry Sandusky.

But Casey, who said he hadn't yet had a chance to take a closer look at the 58-page report that guided the NCAA's decision, told BuzzFeed News he wasn't yet satisfied.

"It's good news for the university," Casey said. "But there's still a measure of justice that the children have to be accorded that will play out. There's still some work to be done there."

Penn State was initially supposed to be ineligible for the playoffs, bowl games, and the Big Ten conference championship through the 2015 season. The team will be eligible for all three of those this year.

The team will also have all 85 scholarship spots available for next season.

As reports about Sandusky's conduct began to surface in 2011, Casey called for Senate hearings to see how federal law could be applied to the case.

When the NCAA first handed down its sanctions on the university, Casey said they were "tough but necessary."

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey could not be reached for comment.

"Penn State has made remarkable progress over the past year," NCAA board member Harris Pastides said in a statement. "The board members and I believe the Executive Committee's decision is the right one. It allows both the university and the association to continue to move toward a common goal of ensuring that educating, nurturing and protecting young people is a top priority."

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is the fifth federal appeals court to hear arguments on same-sex couples’ marriage rights this year.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals appeared poised to strike down bans on same-sex couples' marriages in Idaho and Nevada in nearly two hours of arguments on Monday.

All three judges hearing the cases — Judges Stephen Reinhardt, Marsha Berzon, and Ronald Gould — appeared ready to rule the bans unconstitutional as violating equal protection guarantees.

As with other appellate courts to hear marriage cases this year, the court did note that the judges expect the matter to be headed to the Supreme Court. When Monte Stewart, the lawyer arguing in support of both Idaho and Nevada's bans, questioned the court's view of Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in last year's case striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, Reinhardt retorted, "I think you're going to have an opportunity to find out what Justice Kennedy thinks."

Although not as fireworks-filled as the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals arguments over Indiana and Wisconsin's ban, the arguments Monday at the 9th Circuit were, in a way, even more lopsided. This was so because of the judges on the panel, all of whom have written or joined significant gay rights opinions previously, and because of a decision from the 9th Circuit earlier this year in which the court held that sexual orientation discrimination claims would face additional scrutiny by the court.

In that case — SmithKline Beecham v. Abbott Laboratories, a case about whether potential jurors could be dismissed solely for being gay — the 9th Circuit held that sexual orientation-related discrimination is subjected to heightened scrutiny. In equal protection claims, courts use heightened scrutiny to help decide whether people claiming governmental discrimination should succeed in their claim. If intermediate scrutiny applies, for example, then the state law or practice in question must advance an important governmental interest. If no heightened scrutiny applies, then courts only ask whether the law has a "rational basis."

Notably, two of the judges from the SmithKline Beecham decision, Reinhardt and Berzon, were hearing Monday's marriage cases. In the livestreamed arguments on Monday, though, all three judges and the lawyers for the same-sex couples appeared to agree that heightened scrutiny applies here under the SmithKline Beecham precedent and that such bans are unconstitutional under heightened scrutiny.

Berzon additionally took some time to ask about the argument that such bans also are sex discrimination, saying that she could not understand why other courts had been so skeptical of the sex discrimination argument and stating outright that such bans clearly are sex discrimination.

The judges asked lawyers Deborah Ferguson, representing Idaho couples, and Lambda Legal's Tara Borelli, representing Nevada couples, about the specifics of the equal protection claims, but appeared to be settled on the issue, at least as to sexual orientation discrimination. They focused their questions to the plaintiffs' lawyers, though, on whether the judges needed also to decide the question of whether the bans violate same-sex couples' fundamental rights.

Stewart, the lawyer for Idaho and for the coalition that backed Nevada's marriage ban, argued in defense of the bans and faced an uphill, if not hopeless, task. He focused on arguments he has advanced in his writings and in defense of Utah's marriage ban about the distinctions between "genderless marriage" and "man-woman marriage" — and Nevada's and Idaho's claimed right to prefer to highlight their support for "man-woman marriage" through a marriage definition that excludes same-sex couples.

Stewart argued that Idaho's ban is key to the state sending a message about the importance of a man and a woman to parenting, claiming that the contrary message of allowing same-sex couples to marry would be that "fathers are not a necessary part of marriage." Berzon, however, shot back that Idaho's ban and Stewart's arguments in its defense were "using another group as a scapegoat ... including the children" of those couples in order to send a message.

The two cases were paired with a case about whether a lower court ruling against same-sex couples in Hawaii was moot and should be vacated after the state passed marriage equality. Same-sex couples and Gov. Neil Abercrombie argued the lower court ruling should be vacated, while opponents of marriage equality argued the case should be held until a state-court challenge to Hawaii's marriage law is decided.

Monday's arguments made the 9th Circuit made it the fifth federal appellate court to hear arguments over marriage bans this year. The 4th, 7th, and 10th circuit courts of appeals all have ruled states' bans are unconstitutional in Virginia, Indiana and Wisconsin, and Oklahoma and Utah, respectively. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in early August over Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee's bans and has not released a decision. The 5th and 11th circuit courts of appeals have cases pending before them in Texas and Florida, respectively, but no arguments even scheduled.

State or local officials in Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia already have asked the Supreme Court to hear their appeal of the appellate decisions — with the same-sex couple plaintiffs in those cases agreeing the justices should take their respective cases. The justices could act on the petitions as soon as later this month when they return from their summer recess.