The House of Delegates voted 55 to 45 on Thursday to initiate a study of how to fund a potential universal healthcare program in Virginia. HB2271 says the study should examine both a publicly-funded model administered by the Commonwealth and a publicly-funded model administered by a private entity. The report would be due in October 2022.
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Small businesses have been decimated by the pandemic shutdowns. Many have struggled to survive. Many have had to lay off employees. If they haven’t closed their doors yet, the next six to nine months will be a real challenge.
There is some help on the way. The Small Business Administration has released a second round of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) — a forgivable loan program designed to assist small businesses with money to stay afloat. Part two of the PPP opened on Jan. 15.
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Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.
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Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney is far more popular with Democrats and unaffiliated voters than he is in his own party, The Daily Caller reports.
The 2012 Republican presidential nominee has an impressive 84 percent approval rating among Utah Democrats, while only a third of GOP voters approve of what he is doing.
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Republican lawmakers have unleashed a wave of pro-life bills into the Democrat-controlled Congress this week.
The flood of pro-life legislation occurred the same week that President Joe Biden enacted policy allowing taxpayer dollars to fund abortions abroad. Days earlier, Biden marked the 48th anniversary of Roe v. Wade by promising to both appoint judges who respect the ruling as precedent Friday and to codify Roe v. Wade.
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Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) traveled to Wyoming for a rally on Thursday at the state capitol, where he denounced the state’s At-Large Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) for her vote in favor of President Donald Trump’s second impeachment, as reported by Fox News.
Speaking to a crowd of Wyoming Trump supporters, Gaetz declared Cheney to be a member of the “establishment in both political parties [that] have teamed up to screw our fellow Americans for generations.” Gaetz also slammed Cheney’s hawkish approach to foreign policy, saying that “there’s basically two things that Liz Cheney has done in the United States Congress: Frustrate the agenda of President Trump, and sell out to the forever war machine.”
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Senator Elizabeth Warren called for an SEC investigation into Reddit posts and other entities, according to a letter she sent to the Acting Chair of the SEC.
After Redditors discovered large hedge funds had shorted massive quantities of GameStop ($GME), retail investors bought $GME in a frenzy, sending it surging 600%, and causing hedge funds to lose approximately $5 billion dollars. Popular investment platforms such as Robinhood responded by halting the ability of investors to freely purchase more shares, making their only option to sell.
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Hours after New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a scathing report over how the state reported deaths at nursing homes due to COVID-19, state Heath Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker went on the offensive.
Zucker claimed the attorney general’s report affirmed the total number of deaths overall and that the state has repeatedly said its policy is to count deaths by where they occurred.
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After three generations the anti-war tendency within America’s oldest political party has been thoroughly alienated from its leadership and rendered impotent. The absence of this political failsafe means that America’s destructive overseas interventionism is less accountable than ever.
As the 1968 presidential election cycle kicked off there was little reason to suspect that Lyndon Johnson would not continue to serve as president. He had succeeded to the office following the much loved and mourned John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963 and won in such a landslide in 1964 that he was immediately able to undertake a raft of ambitious new programs known as the Great Society.
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President Joe Biden issued executive actions Thursday to direct U.S. tax dollars to promoting abortion here and abroad, and to expand Obamacare.
The actions not only will mean federal funding for abortions in other countries, but could restore more federal funding to Planned Parenthood.
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President Joe Biden’s administration and Democrats in Congress have vowed to press forward with the president’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package amid Republican objections to the bill’s size, even if they do so without any GOP votes.
Biden has argued that the relief package is not only popular among a majority of Americans but is also necessary to combat the economic toll imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. Though Biden campaigned on a message of unity and bipartisanship, his administration rejected a Republican pitch to split the plan into smaller pieces and has said that it must move quickly to pass the package even if it means doing so without Republicans’ help.
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The House of Delegates voted 55 to 45 on Thursday to initiate a study of how to fund a potential universal healthcare program in Virginia. HB2271 says the study should examine both a publicly-funded model administered by the Commonwealth and a publicly-funded model administered by a private entity. The report would be due in October 2022.
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The Virginia House of Delegates sent four gun bills to the Senate over the past week, and is scheduled to vote on two more on Monday.
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A bill in the state Senate that would prohibit prisons and juvenile facilities run by the Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) from placing offenders in solitary confinement was reported out of the Rehabilitation and Social Services Committee on Friday.
Specifically, Senate Bill 1301 does not outright ban the use of solitary confinement – defined as 17 or more hours in a cell for juveniles and 20 or more hours for adult prisoners – but more so restricts the practice and implements safeguards against misuse
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Gov. Ralph Northam (D) showed his support Friday as a bill that would end the death penalty in the state passed through a subcommittee in the Virginia House of Delegates.
“The use of capital punishment has been inequitable. The administration strongly supports HB 2263 and abolishing the death penalty. The Office of [Gov. Northam],” Del. Mike Mullin (D-Newport News) said on Twitter, attributing the statement to Northam’s office.
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President Joe Biden’s new $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal includes a surprising provision: raising the federal minimum wage to $15.
The fight for a higher minimum wage is not new, although it has been intensified by current events. The idea, more specifically, is to provide a “living wage.” Proponents argue that, currently, minimum wage workers cannot afford basic living expenses. But even if one assumes for the sake of argument that this is true and sets aside the fact that small businesses are already on the brink of collapse, it’s impossible to determine one suitable “living wage” for all parts of a vast and diverse country like the United States.
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General Motors announced that it plans to eliminate emissions from new light-duty vehicles by 2035 and go completely carbon neutral by 2040.
General Motors (GM), the largest automaker in the U.S., announced plans Thursday to go completely carbon neutral globally and produce an all-electric lineup of vehicles by 2040, according to a press release. GM also joined fellow U.S. automaker Ford Motor Company and more than 380 other companies, signing onto the United Nations (UN) “Business Ambition for 1.5 C” climate petition.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for additional security Thursday to defend against members of Congress seeking “to bring guns onto the floor.”
Pelosi said during a press conference that she was in talks to increase security measures because the threat to safety was coming from within the House of Representatives.
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It is almost impossible to describe adequately how absurd the partisan abrasions of American politics appear after listening to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s virtual address earlier this week to the inevitable World Economic Forum at Davos. A more unlikely setting could not be imagined: Davos is a dingy, cold, little town inhabited by grumpy German Swiss with inferior hotels and restaurants and one of the few benefits of the coronavirus pandemic is that Davos is now virtual and the rigors of its Spartan, humorless, relentless globalism may be moderated somewhat by the comforts of home.
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The New York Young Republicans are planning a “Re-Occupy Wall Street” event in New York City after allegations that popular investment platforms are throttling trading of certain stocks to protect big hedge funds.
“We do not want this massive story to get brushed under the rug. We want to keep the spotlight and attention on what Wall Street is doing and what the Biden administration is allowing. This is corrupt and illegal, plain and simple. We need to keep up the pressure,” New York Young Republicans President Gavin Mario Wax told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Six attorneys general sent a letter to President Joe Biden warning him that many of the executive orders he issued in his first week in office will be challenged on constitutional grounds.
Any actions he takes that might exceed statutory authority, are inconsistent with constitutional law or risk civil liberties could result in legal action brought by states, attorneys general from West Virginia, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana and Texas warned in the letter.
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Johnson & Johnson announced on Friday that its coronavirus vaccine was 72% effective in combating COVID-19, but only 57% effective against a novel South African strain.
While slightly less effective than Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines, which were both approved by the FDA in December, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines provides significant distribution advantages that could be crucial in the nation’s fight against the virus. Unlike Pfizer and Moderna, Pfizer’s vaccine is just one shot, and can be stored in refrigerators instead of freezers.
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The Biden regime is fully embracing a radical globalist plan that seeks to destroy capitalism and replace it with a socialist system.
“The Great Reset” was unveiled at the World Economic Forum (WEC) in Davos, Switzerland last June, using the coronavirus pandemic and “global warming” as pretexts to impose on the world far-left social programs like government-provided basic income, the Green New Deal, universal healthcare, and of course, massive tax increases.
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Legislation that would require local school divisions in Virginia to make in-person learning available to all students advanced out of the Senate Education and Health Committee on Thursday with some bipartisan support.
Senate Bill 1303, introduced by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant (R-Henrico), just barely passed out of the committee by an 8-7 vote. All six Republicans voted in favor of the bill and two Democrats joined, while the rest of the committee members opposed.
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The Virginia House of Delegates voted 63 to 34 on Wednesday to remove to storage the statue of former Democratic Governor Harry Byrd Sr. from Capitol Square. Byrd served as governor for four years from 1926-1930, and as Senator from 1933 until 1965. He wielded extensive political power which he used to oppose the New Deal and civil rights legislation. His legacy has come under fire in part because he advocated “Massive Resistance,” an effort to block school desegregation mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
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Thanks to reporting delays with 2020 U.S. Census data, the timeline for Virginia’s newly implemented redistricting process and the 2021 elections for all 100 House of Delegates seats could be impacted.
On Wednesday, a Census Bureau official said the redistricting data for states may not arrive until July 30th or afterward.
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The national March for Life in Washington D.C. looked very different on Friday compared to past years. Normally, thousands of pro-life demonstrators would march through the Capitol in the yearly march, but this year the thousands turned to social media to watch as a few hundred hand-picked representatives of the pro-life movement marched in D.C. By Friday evening, a Facebook livestream of the event had over 200,000 views.
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State Attorney General Mark Herring filed papers with the Virginia Supreme Court on Wednesday formally asking the body to reject an appeal that seeks to keep the controversial Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond from being removed.
The appeal was filed with the high court Monday on behalf of the plaintiffs, a group of Richmond residents living near the monument who have been challenging Governor Ralph Northam’s authority to remove the statute in court since summer.
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A new buzzword on social media, cable news, and among leftist activists is “deprogramming.”
Along with terms like “reprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” and “deplatforming,” deprogramming refers to cleansing the incorrect mentalities of former Trump Administration officials—and even those who voted for Trump.
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At least two House Democrats are on board to hold a hearing on “Robinhood’s market manipulation,” Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Thursday.
Companies such as GameStop, AMC, and Blackberry recently saw their ticker’s unable to trade on the popular investment platform Robinhood. The stock surge for companies such as Gamestop and AMC, boosted by a group on Reddit, has caused hedge fund managers who held short positions on those companies to lose billions, according to Yahoo Finance.
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Hunter Biden continues to hold a 10% stake in the Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners, Chinese business records show, despite multiple reports from December suggesting he was divesting his position in the company.
Both the Daily Mail and Fox News reported in late December that Hunter Biden was in the process of offloading his stake in BHR. Both outlets cited an unnamed source with Hunter Biden and his business dealings.
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California Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez said that he would introduce a resolution to expel Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress after recent reports alleging that she previously supported executing notable Democrats and FBI agents.
“Such advocacy for extremism and sedition not only demands her immediate expulsion from Congress, but it also merits strong and clear condemnation from all of her Republican colleagues, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell,” Gomez said in a statement on Wednesday evening.
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Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, is accusing the Cuomo administration of severely undercounting the coronavirus-related deaths that have occurred at nursing homes – by up to 50% – according to a report released Thursday.
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The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims decreased to 847,000 last week as the economy continued to suffer the effects of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to the Department of Labor.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) figure released Thursday represented a decrease in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending Jan. 16, in which there were 900,000 new jobless claims reported. Roughly 18.3 million Americans continue to collect unemployment benefits, according to the BLS report Thursday.
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The last person I interviewed face-to-face before the COVID shutdown was Tiffany Ashton on February 29, 2020. Her plans that day were to finish college at UNC-Charlotte in May then permanently move to Nashville.
Two weeks later, we were in lockdown as a nation and nobody went anywhere. Not only that, Ashton was one of the first people I knew who got the coronavirus and it put her out of commission for a month.
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A survey of Wyoming voters by a national consulting group shows Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) hemorrhaging support after voting to impeach former president Donald J. Trump.
“Liz Cheney’s decision to vote to impeach President Trump makes her extremely vulnerable according to a Wyoming poll conducted among 500 likely general election voters,” a memo from McLaughlin & Associates said. “It is evident her ratings are in bad shape among general election voters and have collapsed among Republicans and Trump voters. The strong voter sentiment in this survey suggests there could be similar results for other Republicans who voted for impeachment.”
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President Joe Biden is signaling a pivot back to China with his most recent choice to sit on the National Security Council, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell.
Campbell wrote the book, “The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia,” where he argued, “While the Asian Century detoured to the Middle East in the years following the September 11 attacks… the United States has led a ‘Pivot’ (or ‘rebalancing,’ as many prefer) of American diplomacy toward the nuanced yet demanding tasks of engaging a rising Asia. The Pivot is premised on the idea that the Asia-Pacific region not only increasingly defines global power and commerce, but also welcomes U.S. leadership and rewards U.S. engagement with positive returns on political, economic, and military investments.”
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The U.S. economy contracted 3.5% in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, marking the nation’s worst economic performance since the end of World War II.
The U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), which measures net services and goods produced by a country, fell 3.5% in 2020 compared to the 2.2% increase in 2019, according to a Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) report released Thursday. The overall decline came despite 4% growth in the fourth quarter, the period from October to December, and 38.3% growth in the third quarter, the period from July to September.
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The Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors (BOS) sent a scathing letter on Tuesday to Governor Ralph Northam criticizing the slow COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Virginia.
“Simply put, Virginia’s campaign to vaccinate the masses is totally defective. On this issue, we have run out of patience and tolerance. Our citizens deserve better,” the five supervisors wrote. “Virginia has far too many doses still not administered, and that’s not the fault of the federal government.”
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Governor Ralph Northam approved the Permanent COVID-19 Workplace Safety and Health Standards, which replace the expiring COVID-19 Emergency Temporary Standard. The standard requires Virginia businesses to develop COVID-19 safety strategies much like other workplace safety requirements.
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The 2021 Atlantic 10 Conference men’s basketball tournament is coming to the city of Richmond this year.
Normally viewed as crosstown rivals, the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) will serve as co-hosts for the annual championship tournament in order to accommodate for safety precautions in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference announced in a news release on Thursday.
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Virginia’s public gathering limits, daily curfews, face mask requirements and other COVID-19 restrictions will stay in place until the end of February, drawing concern from some members of the business community.
Gov. Ralph Northam announced Wednesday he issued Executive Order 72, which extends and slightly modifies the state restrictions. Under the new restrictions, face masks will be required in not only indoor settings but also in any outdoor setting when a person cannot remain 6 feet away from other people.
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Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates have introduced a bill that would allow presidential electors to be chosen based on the national popular vote, as part of a broader push among left-leaning activists to end states’ rights to choose their own electors.
“Every American citizen is created equal,” Del. Mark Levine (D-Arlington), who introduced HB 1933 told The Virginia Star. “We should all have an equal right to elect the President of the United States.”
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Former business executive and political outsider, Glenn Youngkin has officially joined the 2021 Virginia governor’s race seeking the Republican nomination.
Youngkin, 54, made the formal announcement through an online statement and campaign video released on Wednesday.
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There seems to be a continued, deep split between the message of unity the President Joe Biden administration would like us to hear – and what its actions are communicating.
Again, President Biden’s inaugural address was great. It hit the right themes of bringing people together as Americans. But but he promptly walked up to the White House and created dissonance with his first volley of clearly partisan left-wing executive orders.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci just announced the Biden administration’s commitment to “advance gender equality at home and around the world.” This is underscored by President Joe Biden’s executive order allowing biological males to compete in girls and women’s sports and removing justification for female spaces in schools.
We are watching the deliberate deconstruction of biological distinctions before our eyes. But there is much more at stake here than women’s privacy or women’s sports, though those concerns remain vital.
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President Joe Biden’s Asia policy czar pick was a top executive at a non-profit foundation that had direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party, The Washington Free Beacon fist reported Wednesday.
President Joe Biden’s choice to head Asia policy Kurt Campbell served on the board of the U.S.-China Strong Foundation as vice chairman until August 2020, The Washington Free Beacon reported. The group is funded by Chinese-American philanthropist Florence Fang, a leader of the National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification (NACPU), which is controlled by China’s international propaganda agency the United Front Work Department (UFWD).
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Stephen K. Bannon talks to Bill Gertz of The Washington Times on the War Room: Pandemic radio show discussing why it was clear that the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan China and how mainstream news outlets attempted to shut him down.
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Newly declassified FBI memos provide startling new details that undercut the frenzied 2017 effort to investigate Donald Trump for obstruction, revealing the FBI knew Director James Comey’s firing had been conceived by Justice Department leadership long before the president pulled the trigger during a key moment in the Russia probe.
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Denouncing what he called “systemic racism that has plagued our nation for far, far too long,” President Joe Biden signed executive actions Tuesday aimed at “racial equity,” including a measure to end the use of private prisons to hold federal inmates.
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