The Georgia Senate approved four measures Tuesday that make changes to the election process as a response to November’s presidential election.
Georgia gained national attention after a close presidential election prompted three recounts and lawsuits and threats from former President Donald Trump’s campaign and supporters. Several questions and allegations arose from Georgia’s absentee-ballot process.
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The General Assembly passed a polystyrene (Styrofoam) ban for serving food in restaurants and similar vendors in Virginia. The bill, passed on Wednesday, will first take effect in July 2023 to large vendors with more than 20 locations; in July 2025, it will apply to all vendors, although vendors can apply for temporary exemptions to their localities. Violation can result in a $50 per day fine.
Senator Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax) pushed HB 1902 in the Senate as a compromise to allow the House of Delegates to pass a bill adjusting regulation of new recycling technology. Republicans opposed the polystyrene ban, saying it would harm small businesses, but supported Senator Emmet Hanger’s (R-Augusta) advanced recycling regulation bill.
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Delegate Kelly Convirs-Fowler’s (D-Virginia Beach) HB 2254 passed with unanimous support in the House of Delegates. The bill would ban people from sending unsolicited obscene images to others. But after the House sent the bill to the Senate, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted eight to five to table the bill February 17, citing concerns that the bill could be applied too broadly.
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The Republican Party of Virginia (RPV) State Central Committee (SCC) voted 37 to 31 to issue a call for an in-person drive-in-style nominating convention to be held at Liberty University (LU) on May 8 at 9 a.m. Before passing that vote, the SCC voted against changing party rules to allow an unassembled convention, and voted against holding a canvass. The nearly four-hour-long Tuesday evening Zoom meeting hit the same notes of exasperation as previous SCC Zoom meetings and again highlighted a sharp divide between the pro-convention faction, led in the meeting by Mike Ginsburg, and the pro-primary faction, led in the meeting by Jeff Ryer.
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For the legacy media, the story of Democrats’ recent wins in Georgia is the story of Stacey Abrams. According to this narrative, after Abrams lost the 2018 gubernatorial race, she launched Fair Fight to stop Republicans from allegedly engaging in voter suppression and to register thousands of new voters.
When Georgia turned blue in 2020, Abrams received much of the credit. The story goes Democrats are now winning because they are making democracy better.
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Employees at Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, donated at least $15.1 million to President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to Open Secrets.
The donations eclipsed the amount given from employees in the banking and legal sectors, according to The Wall Street Journal. The five companies were also the largest fundraising sources for Biden’s campaign.
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Government facilities that host unaccompanied migrant children are rapidly reaching capacity due to COVID-19 operational restrictions, causing the Biden administration to rely on a privately operated Trump-era facility in Texas.
An emergency temporary facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, was reopened Monday and around 200 migrant children were transported to the facility that will hold up to 700 migrant teenagers due to permanent facilities reaching maximum capacity and increasing apprehensions of unaccompanied children, CBS News reported. U.S. Border Patrol encountered over 5,700 unaccompanied minors in January 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
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Amazon has removed from its cybershelves a book with “thoughtful answers to questions” about transgenderism—without informing the author and without explanation.
“When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” by Ryan T. Anderson, a former senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and now president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, contends that ideology is more of a factor than biology in American society’s acceptance of transgenderism.
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Senate confirmation for Neera Tanden, President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, is becoming increasingly unlikely after one Democrat and key Republicans announced that they would vote against her.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Rob Portman and Pat Toomey all said that they would vote against Tanden’s confirmation, joining West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin who announced his opposition Sunday. Without Manchin, Tanden would fall one vote short of confirmation, assuming that every Republican votes against her.
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A New York Times essay by columnist Kevin Roose frets that the U.S. is suffering from a “reality crisis” and proposes this solution: President Biden should set up a “truth commission” to combat the “scourge” of “hoaxes, lies and collective delusions” that lead to “violent unrest and civic dysfunction.”
Yet, the Times’ idea of “truth” often consists of falsehoods that cause violent unrest and civic dysfunction.
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In June 2019, Susan Gordon stood on a stage at the Washington Convention Center. Behind her loomed three giant letters, “AWS,” the abbreviation for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the giant Internet retailer. After three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, Gordon had risen to one of the top jobs in the cloak-and-dagger world: principal deputy director of national intelligence. From that perch she publicly extolled the virtues of Amazon Web Services and the cloud services the tech giant provides the CIA.
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The Biden administration aims to avoid a humanitarian crisis at the southern border as the number of migrant children seeking asylum increases.
Over 5,700 unaccompanied minors reached the border in January and government shelters are quickly reaching capacity, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shelters for migrant children are operating at 60% capacity to maintain COVID-19 guidelines and were 93% full as of Friday.
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Thucydides recalls a scene from the Peloponnesian War when the Athenians, fleeing before their enemies, come to the Assinarus River. They stop to drink from its flowing waters even as their foes bear down on them.
The Syracusans, Thucydides writes, “showered missiles down upon the Athenians, most of them drinking greedily and heaped together in disorder in the hollow of the river.” Then the Peloponnesians “came down and butchered them, especially those in the water which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it.”
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The House Education Committee voted Monday to approve changes to Senator Siobhan Dunnavant’s (R-Henrico) bill to require schools to provide in-person learning. After passing the Senate with bipartisan support, the House of Delegates Education Committee proposed a substitute that Republicans said would have effectively left the status quo intact. However, Dunnavant worked with the committee to create a new substitute including specific definitions for the in-person requirement, creating a compromise bill that received bipartisan support in the committee. The bill would be effective for the 2021-2022 school year — efforts to give the bill emergency status were shot down.
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Tiger Woods was injured Tuesday morning in a rollover car crash, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Multiple news reports say Woods was removed from the vehicle with a “jaws of life” device, he was the only person in the vehicle and the extent of his injuries are unknown. But later multiple reports corrected the part about the “jaws of life,” and say that it was not used to extricate him.
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Legislation that would allow third-party contractors to handle the distribution of absentee ballots is headed to Gov. Ralph Northam’s desk as other voting reforms await further action.
Senate Bill 1239, sponsored by Sen. John Bell, D-Broadlands, would allow general registrars to contract to these third parties for printing, assembling and mailing the ballots. This would not allow third parties to handle ballots that have already been cast. The Democratic-led bill passed with some bipartisan support, clearing the Senate 27-12 and the House of Delegates 70-30.
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The Framers left us a Constitution that gives powers and authority both to the national government and to the states. But the Constitution does not systematically expound on the nature and extent of those powers, nor does it offer a clear-cut rationale for what the states are supposed to do beyond checking national power – a theoretical deficiency rooted in political reality.
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, is vowing to confront the “hard truths of Chicago’s racial history,” which will include public input about the future of 41 statues in the city.
Four of the statues honor former U.S presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley and George Washington.
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The leading advocacy organization for small businesses in the U.S. is focusing its legislative efforts on defeating a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
The minimum wage is the biggest issue the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) has lobbied on recently, the group told the Daily Caller News Foundation. After a series of pandemic-related victories on Capitol Hill, capped off by the December stimulus package that included $284.5 billion for small businesses, NFIB decided to lobby Congress to “do no harm.”
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Joe Biden is set to announce today that the United States will be spending $4 billion on an effort to increase distribution of the coronavirus vaccine in poor and third-world countries, as reported by ABC.
Congress had approved spending the funds on an international vaccine distribution effort back in December; half of the money will go to an organization called Gavi, an international group that focuses specifically on vaccine distribution and is backed by the United Nations. The funding will cover Gavi’s operations throughout 2021 and 2022.
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by Debra Heine The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Republican challenge over absentee ballots received up to three days after Election Day in Pennsylvania. Republicans in the Keystone State had sought to block a state court ruling that allowed the Nov. 6 deadline extension in the 2020…
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Around $14.3 million worth of narcotics and several weapons have been seized since the start of February at an Arizona port where officials also arrested a man wanted for murder, Customs and Border Protection announced Tuesday.
Officials seized 440 pounds of methamphetamine, 385,000 tablets of fentanyl, 84 pounds of heroin and almost 13 pounds of cocaine in around 25 instances since Feb. 1, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A 28-year-old man wanted for murder in Las Vegas was arrested while in possession of an AR-15 assault rifle, a handgun and over 300 rounds of ammunition.
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Florida Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried issued a press release on Monday stating that she will direct offices within her purview not to lower flags to half-staff in honor of the recently deceased conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh.
The announcement from the Democrat comes after Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had previously indicated that flags would be lowered to half-staff to honor the late conservative icon.
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Two House Democrats sent letters Monday to a dozen television broadcasters suggesting that they stop airing Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network, a move which a Republican commissioner on the FCC called a “chilling transgression” aimed at deplatforming the conservative networks.
“Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date?” California Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney wrote in a letter to the companies.
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U.S. Senate Republicans may use next week’s Interior confirmation hearing for Rep. Debra Haaland to air their grievances about the Biden administration’s energy policies, running the risk of alienating Native Americans in Western states.
GOP Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Steve Daines of Montana sit on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which will hold the Tuesday hearing, and both have already raised objections that Haaland holds “radical” views. Daines vowed to block her progress in the Senate unless she addresses several issues that concern him.
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Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, has begun attaching formal disclaimers to many of its products at the start of each movie or TV show declaring that the content may be “offensive,” as reported by the New York Post.
Among these products is “The Muppets Show,” which begins with a disclaimer that the show features “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.” The disclaimer continues to say that “rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
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McDonald’s will tie executives’ pay to diversity goals and aims to hit gender parity in management by the end of 2030 as the company tries to overhaul its workplace culture. Fifteen percent of the company’s annual bonuses will be used to reach these targets, McDonald’s said in the statement.
The world’s biggest restaurant chain on Thursday said the company aims to increase the number of women in leadership roles to 45 percent from 37 percent by 2025. It also wants to boost “historically underrepresented groups” in leadership positions to 35 percent from 29 percent over the same time frame, CNN reported.
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The extreme cold weather across much of the country has delayed 6 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, slowing a vaccination rate that has been steadily rising since the Biden administration took office last month.
The backlogged doses account for roughly three days’ of delayed shipments affecting all 50 states, due to road closures, snowed-in workers and power outages, said Andy Slavitt, senior adviser on the White House’s COVID-19 response, during a news conference Friday.
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With President Biden and Kamala Harris steering the American ship of state, there isn’t much left at the federal level to stop “woke” politics from encroaching even further into all aspects of American society. In every federal agency including the military, in corporate America including sports and entertainment, throughout the colleges and universities, and even down into the K-12 public schools, “woke” ideology now permeates the culture. It is a seductive, divisive philosophy that emphasizes group conflict over individual competition and achievement. If it isn’t stopped, it will destroy everything that has made America great.
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The Virginia General Assembly passed a death penalty repeal on Monday. Governor Ralph Northam is expected to sign the bills, which would make Virginia the first state in the South to ban capital punishment. Advocates have argued that the death penalty is vulnerable to wrongful conviction, is expensive, cruel, and applied unfairly, but opponents say some of the most heinous crimes require a death penalty to make sure the criminal doesn’t get free. During the 2021 session, House Republicans have emphasized the names of victims of particularly serious crimes, who they say are being ignored by Democrats.
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The General Assembly passed HB 2213, Delegate Elizabeth Guzman’s (D-Prince William) bill to create a work group of scientists, local representatives, activists and state officials to study the impacts of gold mining. Although the bill originally included a two-year moratorium on permits for new gold mines bigger than 10 acres, the Senate removed that clause before passing the bill Tuesday 23 to 16. The House passed the amended version Thursday 56 to 43, sending it to the Governor for final approval.
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If you want to find a Libertarian Party organization that has achieved relevance, look no further than Georgia. That’s where Shane Hazel, running for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian, garnered 2.3 percent of the vote in November. Hazel’s showing may have been insignificant, but the Republican candidate, David Perdue, only needed 0.3 percent more votes to have avoided a runoff, where he lost.
America’s political system today, with rare exceptions, is a two party system. All that Perdue needed was for one in seven of Hazel’s voters to choose him instead, and the GOP would still control the U.S. Senate. In a two party system, it doesn’t take much to be relevant. Hazel now intends to run as a Libertarian for governor in Georgia in 2022.
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Stephen K. Bannon talks to Gab CEO Andrew Torba on War Room: Pandemic radio show about the enslavement agenda of Silicon Valley, transhumanism, and de-coupling with companies that don’t share Judeo Christian values.
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During a press conference Friday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that flags in Florida will be lowered to half-staff for conservative talk radio legend Rush Limbaugh once his funeral arrangements are made.
“I know they’re still figuring out the arrangements but what we do when there’s things of this magnitude, once the date of internment for Rush is announced, we’re going to be lowering the flags to half-staff,” the governor said. Limbaugh, who resided at his “Southern Command” oasis in Palm Beach Florida for the past ten years, died on Ash Wednesday after a year-long bout with stage IV lung cancer. He was 70.
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration released the first photos taken by its Perseverance rover on Mars after it became just the fifth rover to ever successfully complete the landing.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) photos released Saturday showed Mars’s vast landscape and rocky terrain. On Thursday, Perseverance successfully completed its landing on the Red Planet after a nearly seven-month flight from Earth.
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Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, said Sunday that the evidence that the coronavirus resulted from human error in a Chinese lab “far outweighs” other theories about the origins of the pandemic.
“If you weigh the circumstantial evidence, the ledger on the side of an explanation that says that this resulted from some kind of human error, it far outweighs the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak,” Pottinger said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
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President Joe Biden is promoting an immigration bill that could grant amnesty to up to 20 million illegal immigrants.
“The Biden administration, in coordination with Democrats on the Hill, introduced legislation that would give citizenship to 10-20 million illegal immigrants,” Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, said in a public statement.
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A Democratic state assemblyman in New York says that lawmakers are “inching toward” opening an impeachment probe of Gov. Andrew Cuomo over his handling of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes.
In an interview on the “Skullduggery” podcast, Ronald Kim, a Queens assemblyman, also said he is willing to cooperate with federal investigators in an ongoing probe of the Cuomo administration.
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Cartoon Network has released a new Public Service Announcement telling children they must “see color” and view individuals through a skin-color based lens in order to be “anti-racist.”
The new two-minute-long public service announcement, from “Steven Universe” creator Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey, was posted to YouTube earlier this week.
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Environmental experts said Thursday momentum behind the new presidential administration brings the promise of a comprehensive methane rule in sight – a move that would have a significant impact on Pennsylvania, one of the top natural gas-producing states.
Dan Grossman, senior director of advocacy for the Environmental Defense Fund, said controlling methane emissions from the oil and gas sector remains an important component of lowering greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which contribute to one quarter of the climate effects witnessed across the globe over the last decade, he said.
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A pair of bills that recently cleared the Virginia state legislature will mandate that all teachers in the state undergo “cultural competency” training, with history and social science teachers required to undertake additional training regarding African-American history.
The bills, one in the state House of Delegates and one in the Senate, would add “cultural competency” evaluations to the standard slate of regular evaluations to which teachers in the commonwealth are subject and require “each teacher and any other school board employee holding a license issued by the [state Board of Education] to complete cultural competency training, in accordance with guidance issued by the Board, at least every two years.”
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In C.S. Lewis’s novel about totalitarianism, That Hideous Strength, we find this line, “Qui verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis,” which translates, “They that have despised the word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.”
This line occurs in a passage during which an elite who dreamed of making themselves masters of mankind find themselves under the “curse of Babel,” unable to speak anything other than gibberish.
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More gubernatorial polls this week show most voters are undecided, allowing contest leaders to continue to claim front-runner status while allowing everybody else to claim theoretical wins. But there’s more gubernatorial news than that — this week’s campaign news features new policy announcements, major endorsements, messaging controversy, and a late-night television mention.
First, the poll: 49 percent of Democratic voters and 55 percent of Republican voters are undecided, according to a Christoper Newport University/Wason Center Poll. Former Governor Terry McAuliffe leads Democrats with 26 percent, while Senator Amanda Chase leads Republicans with 17 percent.
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Governor Ralph Northam released an amended Executive Order 72 that allows outdoor sports to have up to 250 spectators or 30 percent of venue capacity, whichever is less, effective Monday. The February 17 amendment modifies language that previously allowed just two guests per player, up to 30 percent of venue capacity. Indoor sports are still limited to 25 persons per field.
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The recent revelation that a senior Navy task force is proposing an oath to be taken by every member of the Navy was a warning of how deep woke-think has penetrated American institutions – even the Defense Department.
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Last week, the Biden administration promised gun control groups that it will soon roll out a massive push for limits on firearm purchases and other measures. President Biden reiterated that promise on Sunday. And the television networks aren’t waiting to lay the groundwork for this effort.
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YouTube this week censored a recent interview with former President Donald Trump, claiming the video violated its new standards regarding allegations of election fraud.
The interview, conducted by Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly, included claims by Trump that he himself was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. Trump has repeatedly insisted that widespread voter fraud and vote-rigging tipped the scales in favor of Joe Biden during the race.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appears to be trying to rig an “independent security review” of the January 6th Capitol riots by appointing an extreme left-wing partisan to lead the investigation, and Republicans are starting to cry foul.
Retired Lt. General Russel Honoré, hand-picked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month to oversee the “9/11-style” commission, is under increased scrutiny after numerous crude, extreme, and profoundly partisan tweets and comments have come to light.
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Over 75,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended for crossing the border into the U.S. last month, breaking record numbers for the highest number of January apprehensions in over a decade, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The majority of illegal immigrants who were apprehended in January 2021 were single adults, though Border Patrol agents detained 7,260 migrants traveling as family units, nearly 3,000 more than in December 2020, the WSJ reported. Some of the migrants said they are illegally crossing the border with the hope that the Biden administration will be more forgiving than the Trump administration.
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Imaad Zuberi, a Pakistani-American venture capitalist who cultivated connections with Joe Biden when he served as vice president, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday on foreign lobbying and campaign finance charges.
Zuberi peddled influence at the highest levels of the U.S. government, meeting with both President Barack Obama and Biden during their administration. He also developed connections to prominent senators and House members of both political parties, which he leveraged to drum up overseas business deals.
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