Senator Ben Sasse explains what happened with the Iran compromise

The Senate saw a rare compromise this week when Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a bill to give Congress 52 days to weigh in and review the bill. Glenn couldn't tell if this meant the Senate simply surrendered their power, or if it is a step in the right direction. Senator Ben Sasse joined the radio program Thursday to discuss the compromise and what continued negotiations with Iran could mean for the United States.

Below is a rush transcript of this segment

GLENN: So we have Ben Sasse on with us. We wanted to get somebody on that we really trusted and we wanted to talk a little about this -- this rare comprise on Iran. And Iran is changing all of the -- changing all of the parameters of this deal that we supposedly had. And the -- the Senate made a rare comprise. And we wanted to see if this works in our favor or not. As I read last night, it seems like the Senate once again surrendered their power. And Stu said the exact opposite. So we thought we would get Ben Sasse's read. Hello, Ben, how are you?

BEN: Glenn, good to be with you. Can I pretend I'm a politician and split the difference?

GLENN: No.

PAT: First of all, Ben, we should ask because you've been there two months now. Have you turned yet? Like "The Walking Dead". Have you turned? Are you a Senate walker now?

BEN: No. I'm still not a politician.

GLENN: Good. Glad to hear it.

BEN: Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

PAT: So you would say this is in the middle then, or do you like it?

BEN: Let's talk about it like this. The macro on having a nuclear Iran is a horrible idea. And for 36 years, both Republicans and Democrats in this country all agreed to that. And the Obama administration has pivoted from the historic goal of preventing a nuclear Iran to trying to manage the arrival of nuclear proliferation across the Middle East. So it's dreadful what's happening at the big picture level.

This specific bill that was passed out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously, is a small, small deal. But it's a small step in the right direction. But it's not big enough to change the course of how big the problems are. But this Senate comprise is more good than bad, but it's small.

GLENN: Okay.

STU: Because it just gives us a chance to essentially veto this deal.

GLENN: Okay. But I thought the Senate has that right. You have the right.

BEN: No. Well, if it were being submitted by the Obama administration as if we had three separate, but equal branches of government that check and balance one another in a constitutional system -- they've got a pen, and they've got a phone, and executive unilateralism means to the Obama administration that they can just make up anything that they want. So they're trying to strike this deal with Iran, going completely around the Congress and going straight to the UN.

And so a treaty would have to be submitted to us. They've never framed this as a treaty, even though it's far more important than many things that go by treaty. For example, the last 23 civilian nuclear power agreements around the world -- I think the number is 23 -- have been submitted to the Senate for approval, under treaty-like structures.

In this case, they were just going to ignore the Congress. So Corker has been trying to do -- Bob Corker, the senator from Tennessee is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee -- he's been trying to get a piece of legislation passed called the Congressional Review Act, which at least gives us the ability to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what the Obama administration is trying to cook as a truly bad deal.

But here's why it is still a step in the right direction, though it's tiny. It will at least allow us to get access to knowledge for the American people of what's in the deal. The Obama administration has been trying to cut a deal with Tehran, where they and Tehran have rival talking points out in the world. And the people of the United States don't even know what's in it. The people of America have a right to know what's in this deal. It's going to be bad. But we need to know what's in there. The way you get some transparency into it is by the Congress knowing.

GLENN: So here's how I read this, Ben, why are we negotiating with the president in the first place? Why aren't you guys just going and saying, you can't do this? You can't do this without us?

BEN: Well, because the administration largely owns the media and they go out and tell a story that the United States has struck a deal. They want to use this as the occasion to wave all sanctions. How is that possible? That's possible because there was a flaw in some legislation that was passed many years ago in the way that the sanctions are being imposed on Iran.

Let's be clear about who Iran is. They're the world's largest state sponsor of terror. They're funding Shia militias among at least five of their neighbors, trying to destabilize regimes. They're horrible actors. But there is one thing worse than Iran right now. And that is the short-term threat of Sunni jihadist terrorists that are building non-state organizations like ISIS or ISIL. So it's essentially al-Qaeda rebranded.

So in the middle of the frenzy of ISIL capturing most of eastern Syria and lots of northwestern Iraq, many people in the Middle East are looking for some form of stability. When the Shia militias come in, they're sometimes a less bad option than the non-state actors. The Iranians are under huge sanctions. That's a good thing. They have about $130 billion of offshore revenues right now, and almost 90 percent of those funds are frozen. But the Russians, in particular, would like to end those sanction regimes because their economy is failing. And they would like to sell armaments to Iran. So in the midst of this, instead of leading, the Obama administration -- instead of leading and ratcheting up of sanctions, the Obama administration is trying to lead the capitulation to Tehranian HEP demands.

STU: And this is more to than just being able to review this deal, Ben. This is also -- if I'm understanding it correctly. You give them a month to look at the deal and review it. They also have a chance to block Obama from removing the sanctions, which is fundamental to the deal, and Iran won't agree to it without that. So in effect, you have with this bill veto on the Iranian deal, don't you?

BEN: So a couple of things. Glenn's point. You and I have been on the same side of this. Now I hate to go against you because you're my partner in this. So we don't want Glenn to ever be right.

STU: Of course.

BEN: Here's what's being turned on its head. Under the constitutional arrangement, the president is supposed to negotiate the best deal you can for treaties. Then you submit it to the Senate. It it needs a two-thirds vote. Under this new world, you would essentially have a resolution of approval or disapproval. And given the Senate rules, it would take about 60 votes to say, no, we think this is terrible.

But well before we get to that point, because we can get lost here in process in a hurry, we would at least be able to, as representatives of the people, be able to get access to knowledge of what's in this deal.

The Obama administration has been claiming this is verifiable. As if the IAEA has typically been right in the past, when they've tried to dig in and find out things like the drift to a nuclear North Korea. We had a 36-year consensus in this country that we should never have a nuclear Iran. And the president continually posits this false choice between, we have to accept whatever the worst deal is that the Iranians will let us have, or we have to go to a immediate war. That's nonsense. When you talk to Nebraskans, they know it's nonsense. And your listeners know it's nonsense. There's a third choice, which you negotiate from a position of strength, where the Iranians know we mean business and we don't intend to allow a nuclear Iran. And our allies in the region don't want a nuclear Iran. And lo and behold, we'd be having a totally different discussion than the way we negotiate from this posture of weakness.

PAT: Isn't it possible, though, Ben that this whole process is moot anyway because the Iranians are changing the deal radically. Kerry was asked, what happened if they change the deal after you announced that the framework has been agreed upon, and he just said, well, that's not going to happen. And it already has. It's already happened. And so, in fact, they've cut the time in half from ten years to five.

STU: They want 4,000 extra centrifuges.

BEN: Right.

PAT: So the deal should be off anyway. Shouldn't it?

BEN: It should. So let's just name two or three of those variables you named. There are about six or seven things that are going wrong in the Kerry/Obama negotiation with the Iranians. But let's take your centrifuges point. The right number of centrifuges for Iran to have is zero. There should be no uranium enrichment in the world's largest state sponsor of terror. Your listeners should be asking themselves, these people have been funding Shia militias across the Middle East and North Africa that have intentionally tried to target US troops. Why would we believe that when they have access to nuclear material that they wouldn't ultimately also share it with terror organizations? So the right number of centrifuges is zero. We know they have around 19,000. The Obama administration said at the beginning that they were going to negotiate to get them down to about 1,000. They've now pivoted to something more like 6,000. The right number should be zero.

You can make the same argument about the way any time anyplace inspections should work. The Iranians want to set up a regime of cat and mouse, like what was the case with Saddam Hussein in 2003, and the Kerry response to this is, well, we would have a snapback, that if they ever didn't keep their commitments under this agreement, all of the sanctions will snap back into place.

Well, a couple of problems with that. First is, they have $130 billion offshore right now. And if they get sanctions relief, they'll get access to most of that $130 billion. They've been spending a lot of their money to fund terrorist operations, beyond their borders. What do you think they'll spend the new $130 billion on? And number two, if these sanction regimes were ever going to snap back into place, you'd need groups like the Russians and the French and the Chinese to all cooperate with that. And it would be a bureaucratic, litigated process. You would know we're in a bad place in a negotiation right now when the French are trying to hold out for harder requirements in the US.

PAT: That's for sure.

GLENN: Senator, we appreciate your time. We know you're on a busy schedule. I would like to ask you to look into this Judicial Watch report about ISIS being on our border. There's conflicting reports on it. I happen to believe the Judicial Watch people that we have some serious issues going on our border with ISIS on both sides of our border. If you could, when you find out details, report back to us. We'd like to know if it's real or not.

BEN: Thanks, I spend a lot time in a classified setting. We're trying to learn about some of these issues. I would love to report back to you. So thanks for having me on.

GLENN: Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Ben Sasse from Nebraska. Back in just a second.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

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The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

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The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

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Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

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The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

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Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

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America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

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Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

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Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.