Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reportedly overruled a memo from the commanding general of the National Guard who objected to keeping troops in D.C., according to Fox News.
The memo, written by Gen. Daniel Hokanson, was disseminated among the White House National Security Council last week and cited concerns over the National Guard already being overburdened with coronavirus issues, civil disturbances and wildfires, according to a report from Fox News.
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The Oklahoma House passed a bill Wednesday that extends punishments for rioters and grants immunity to drivers who injure or kill someone while fleeing a riot, USA Today reported.
House Bill 1674, introduced by Republican state Rep. Kevin West, would allow prosecutors to charge rioters with a misdemeanor for interfering with traffic and endangering drivers. If passed, motor vehicle operators would not face criminal or civil charges for hitting a rioter if they were fleeing for safety or exercised “due care” at the time of the injury or death.
The bill defines a rioter as anyone committing violence or robbery during the protest, according to the Courthouse News Service. Rioters can face a criminal charge and imprisonment.
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee- No one in Emily Brooke’s family was musical. Young Brooke was a cheerleader, not a singer. But like many preteen girls twelve years ago, Brooke was super into Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana. She wanted to learn to play guitar as they did.
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President Joe Biden said Thursday night that he is directing U.S. states to open COVID-19 vaccinations to all American adults by May 1 in an effort to more quickly reopen the country and prop up the staggering U.S. economy.
“To do this we’re going to go from a million shots a day … to 2 million shots a day,” he said.
In most U.S. states currently, only older Americans, front-line workers and those with pre-existing conditions are eligible, though getting scheduled for a first dose has been problematic in many states even for the most at-risk.
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A top foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. rejected warnings from a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist against forming a partnership with Burisma Holdings, the energy firm linked to Hunter Biden that has faced allegations of corruption.
Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of a Ukrainian group called the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC), contacted John Herbst, a director at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, on Jan. 20, 2017, and asked him to reconsider plans to work with Burisma, newly released State Department emails show.
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After months of heated Zoom meetings, on Friday night the Republican Party of Virginia (RPV) State Central Committee (SCC) finally voted to hold an unassembled nomination convention. Delegates to the May 8 convention will visit one of 37 drive-in locations and drop off a completed ranked-choice ballot, and then return home.
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President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has not yet completed his first 100 Days and the wheels are already falling off the cart–but, not for the obvious reasons.
Biden may not realize it for months, but already in Washington, there is a recognition that the president will get nothing done in 2021 and 2022 is not looking good either.
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A group of about 5,000 community members including parents, students, and staff are suing the Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) Board and Superintendent Scott Braband over changes to admission procedures at magnet school Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ). The lawsuit complaint filed Wednesday argues that the changes were meant to reduce the number of Asian-American students at the school.
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Maryland’s vile handling of the COVID-19 vaccine affords searing lessons in the failure of bureaucratic government or the administrative state. More specifically Montgomery County (MoCo), Maryland’s bedroom community for the federal bureaucracy, exemplifies how America will suffer under one-party Democratic rule.
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Domestic climate debates are clouding our reasoning on energy exports. The latest example of this problem is the climate movement’s vocal opposition to a proposal from Sempra, a San Diego–based energy infrastructure company, to send natural gas to Mexico for re-export in its liquefied form (LNG).
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The Wisconsin House of Representatives on Wednesday held a hearing to review election irregularities after newly revealed documents obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight revealed that Democrat activists, funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were able to infiltrate the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin’s five largest cities.
In Green Bay, a Democrat activist was actually given keys to the room where absentee ballots were stored before the 2020 presidential election.
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio became the latest Democratic lawmaker to call on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign after a sixth woman accused him of sexual misconduct.
After the Albany Times Union reported that a woman accused Cuomo of reaching under her blouse and touching her at his Executive Mansion last year, de Blasio said that the governor “could no longer serve.”
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The House passed a gun control bill Thursday that requires a universal background check for every purchase of a firearm.
HR 8, titled the “Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021” and led by California Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson and Georgia Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, passed 227 to 203 with eight Republicans voting in favor. If signed into law, it would mandate background checks whenever somebody purchases a gun, regardless of where they purchase it.
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The entire staff of the Nevada Democratic Party, along with all consultants, has quit after a slate of candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America took over leadership positions, according to a news report.
Alana Mounce, the party’s executive director sent an email Saturday to Judith Whitmer, who won the race for party chairperson alerting her that the staff was quitting, according to a report in The Intercept.
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The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims decreased slightly to 712,000 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 figure released Thursday represented a decrease in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending Feb. 27, in which there were 754,000 new jobless claims reported. That number was revised up from the 745,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
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Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill Thursday overturned his own decision to drop third-degree murder charges against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin after an appeal from state prosecutors.
“The dispute over the third-degree murder charge revolved around wording in the law that references an act ’eminently dangerous to others,'” Spectrum News reported. “Cahill’s initial decision to dismiss the charge had noted that Chauvin’s conduct might be construed as not dangerous to anyone but Floyd.”
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Ponder this, I’m not much of a cook, but I have noticed on occasion, a bay leaf floating in my stew. In all my years of life, I’ve never really given much thought to bay leaves until now. I have to wonder if bay leaves are really necessary. Do they really make a difference in any given recipe and would they be missed if they were no longer available? My hunch is that most of us would never miss bay leaves if they were left out of a stew. Unlike bay leaves, salt is one seasoning that certainly would be missed if not part of a super stew.
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The Republican Party of Virginia (RPV) State Central Committee (SCC) will once again vote on amending the party plan to allow an unassembled convention. Chairman Rich Anderson called for the meeting on Monday, after last week determining that an in-person parking lot convention would not be possible at Liberty University. The agenda for the Friday evening meeting includes three potential amendments to party rules that would allow an unassembled convention.
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President Joe Biden on Thursday signed into law a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that includes extended unemployment benefits, direct funding to states and municipalities, and $1,400 checks for most Americans.
“This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving the people of this nation – working people, middle-class folks, people who built the country – a fighting chance, that’s what the essence of it is,” Biden said in the Oval Office before signing the bill.
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Appalachian Power, the second largest electric utility in Virginia, is seeking an 11% increase in rates paid by consumers residing in the commonwealth to pay for electric transmission costs.
If approved, Appalachian Power would increase the Transmission Rate Adjustment Clause from $225.1 million to $337.7 million, which is a $112.6 million increase. It would increase the monthly bill for a customer by $11.52 for every 1,000 kilowatt hours. It would go into effect in July 2021.
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“I may even decide to beat them for a third time. Okay? For a third time.”
That was former President Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 28, hinting at another potential run for President in 2024. If he pulled it off, Trump would be the first incumbent president to lose to then be reelected again since Grover Cleveland did it in 1892.
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Bari Weiss writes a compelling, must-read piece in City Journal about the indoctrination mills masquerading as educational institutions. Take a few minutes, read it, and come back.
One thing that isn’t being considered is that children not in these elite institutions in leftist places, who know they have no meritocratic chance of getting into elite colleges because they are not ideologically pure or from an ideologically “safe” geographical location or they’re white, are self-selecting out and going to state universities and smaller colleges. What once used to be an insult — getting turned down by an elite institution — is becoming a choice.
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The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday ratified changes the Senate made to a massive $1.9 trillion relief package that critics say contains hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful spending unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the 220-211 vote, almost exclusively along party lines, the measure now goes to President Joe Biden, who said he will sign it. One Democrat – U.S. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, who also voted against the initial bill – voted against the measure Wednesday. No Republicans voted for it.
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At least three high-profile district attorneys in the United States who have been funded by far-left billionaire George Soros have since gone on to implement pro-amnesty policies that have released numerous criminal illegal aliens, as reported by Breitbart.
The district attorneys include Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, Chicago’s Kimberly Foxx, and Diana Becton in Contra Costa County, California, as confirmed by the investigation from the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). These officials, like others around the country, have gone out of their way to see illegal aliens released from local custody before they can be arrested and deported by ICE.
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United Teachers Los Angeles and Los Angeles city officials have come to a tentative agreement, creating a path for the nation’s second-largest school district to reopen.
Students in the Los Angeles Unified School District would return to in-person classes in mid-April under the tentative agreement struck Tuesday evening, according to city and union officials, The New York Times reported. The Los Angeles school board and United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) members still need to ratify the agreement.
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A top U.S. military commander warned lawmakers on Tuesday that China has adopted an “increasingly assertive military posture” as it seeks to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant military force.
“Its rapidly advancing capabilities and increasingly competitive posture underscore its drive to become a regionally dominant, globally influential power,” Adm. Philip Davidson, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, testified before members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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The Biden administration told the Supreme Court Tuesday it will not seek to expand the Trump-era decision to limit immigration for migrants who will depend on government benefits, NBC News reported.
The Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration was working to expand the definition of “public charge” to include denying admission to migrants who might rely primarily on government benefits as a source of income, NBC News reported. Any migrant needing government assistance for over one year in any three-year period would have been included in the expanded definition.
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In yet another unprecedented display of the incumbent vice president taking on duties normally reserved for the president, Kamala Harris took a solo call from the Prime Minister of Norway on Tuesday, as reported by Fox News.
Harris took the call from Prime Minister Erna Solberg, with Harris “affirming her commitment to deepening the strong alliance between Norway and the United States,” while also “thanking the Prime Minister for Norway’s close security partnership with the United States, and generous contributions to development and health security efforts around the world.”
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At 2:00 AM on Saturday, February 27, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a “COVID relief and economic support“ bill at a cost to taxpayers of $1.9 trillion. The next Saturday, Senate Democrats passed a very similar bill, and President Biden stated he will sign it. This will be the sixth “COVID relief” law and swell the tab for such legislation to a total of $5.3 trillion. The combined cost of these laws to every household in the United States will be an average of $41,036.
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The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Judge Merrick Garland as President Biden’s attorney general.
Garland was confirmed in a 70-30 vote in the evenly-divided Senate, making him the leader of the Justice Department and the country’s top law enforcement officer.
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In 2020 and 2021, the Democrat-led General Assembly passed nearly 20 percent more bills through strict party-line votes than in the three previous years when Republicans controlled both chambers. According to a data visualization from the Virginia Public Access Project, in 2020, 24 percent of bills passed were passed along party lines with Democrats voting for and Republicans voting against. In 2021, that number grew to 25 percent. In the Republican controlled sessions of 2017, 2018, and 2019, the percentage of bills passed along party lines was respectively 7.7 percent, 4.7 percent, and 5.7 percent.
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The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors approved a gun ban in parks, county buildings, and at permitted events in a six to three vote March 2. The vote is the culmination of months of consideration of the ban, made possible by legislation passed in the 2020 General Assembly.
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President Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” could soon become law.
The budget-busting legislation, sold as emergency COVID response and “stimulus,” passed the Senate over the weekend. But even the liberal-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact is pointing out that almost all of the bill’s spending is unrelated to the health effects of COVID-19.
“Total spending directly on COVID-19’s health impacts ranges from $100 billion to $160 billion,” fact-checker Jon Greenberg writes. “At the high end, direct COVID-19 spending represents about 8.5% of the bill’s $1.9 trillion cost.”
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The Republican National Committee will not comply with a cease-and-desist order by Donald Trump’s lawyers to stop using the former president’s name and likeness in fundraising materials.
Tump’s legal team sent a letter Friday to the RNC demanding the group stop using the “unauthorized use of President Donald J. Trump’s name, image, and/or likeness in all fundraising, persuasion, and/or issue speech,” according to Politico.
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Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine was able to neutralize the highly transmissible Brazilian virus variant, a new lab study showed.
The effectiveness of the vaccine against the variant was “roughly equivalent” to the original strain, researchers told the New England Journal of Medicine. Its ability to combat the variant, known as P.1, is especially encouraging in Brazil, where it has spread throughout the country.
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The jury selection process in the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd will continue despite an active appeal to reinstate previous charges, the Associated Press reported.
Judge Peter Cahill said he will continue with the trial unless the appeals court rules that a third-degree murder charge can be reinstated against former officer Derek Chauvin, the AP reported. Prosecutors have asked the court to pause the trial as the charges are considered.
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In a rare nearly-unanimous decision, the Supreme Court sided with a Christian college student whose right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion were initially silenced by his college campus in Georgia, as reported by ABC News.
The 8-1 decision was led by Justice Clarence Thomas, with Chief Justice John Roberts being the sole dissenting vote. Writing for the majority, Justice Thomas said that Chike Uzuegbunam, an African-American Evangelical Christian, can seek nominal damages from Georgia Gwinnett College, after officials at the school told him he was not allowed to hand out Christian literature on the campus’s “free speech zone.” This comes even after the school reversed course from its initial restrictions, and after Uzuegbunam ultimately graduated.
“It is undisputed that he experienced a complete violation of his constitutional rights when respondents enforced their speech policies against him,” Thomas wrote. “Because ‘every violation [of a right] imports damage,’ nominal damages can redress Uzuegbunam’s injury even if he cannot or chooses not to qualify that harm in economic terms.”
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A group of Republican state attorneys general alleged in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that President Joe Biden’s climate policies are a major overreach and could damage their states’ economies.
The 12-state coalition said Biden overstepped his constitutional authority by declaring there were “social costs” of continued greenhouse gas emissions in a Jan. 20 executive order. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Court of Missouri, argued that assigning such costs is a “quintessentially legislative action” that falls within Congress’ authority.
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Arizona and Montana filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s administration Monday in an effort to block the limits on deportations, Fox News reported.
Attorney General Mark Brnovich of Arizona, joined by Attorney General Austin Knudsen of Montana, filed a lawsuit in response to the 100-day deportation moratorium arguing that it will negatively impact their states. Brnovich said the immigration rules will cause a “humanitarian crisis,” Fox News reported.
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As New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday announced the attorneys who will conduct the independent review on the sexual harassment allegations against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Republicans in the state Legislature said they intend to seek the embattled leader’s impeachment.
James appointed Joon H. Kim and Anne L. Clark to look into the sexual harassment allegations. Kim is a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Clark focuses on employment law.
James said the state is committed to a thorough review and heralded Kim and Clark as experts. Kim and Clark will be able to issue subpoenas, depose people and review records. They will give James’ office a weekly update throughout the investigatio
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The Looney Toons skunk Pepe Le Pew is the latest fictional character to fall victim to cancel culture warriors. The comically lecherous Le Pew was axed from Warner Brothers’ new “Space Jam” movie after being called out in the media for perpetuating “rape culture.”
The popular toon has reportedly had his scene cut from “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” the sequel to the film he was a part of in 1997.
The hybrid live-action animation scene was shot in June 2019 and featured both Le Pew and actress Greice Santo, according to Deadline.
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No matter what we are told by the “experts,” science is constantly evolving and is rarely ever as settled as those in power want us to believe. Doctors are often forced to make consequential decisions and recommendations based on partial or incomplete sets of data and information. Perhaps no one knows this better than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
According to Fauci, it is now safe for schools to reopen. All it took was the passing of President Biden’s “COVID relief bill,” which will likely be signed into law this week. “As we now have the relief bill signed at $1.9 trillion — a lot of that is going into addressing COVID-19 including help to the schools to allow them to more safely bring the kids back,” Fauci said on Monday. Considering that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 95 percent of the money appropriated from the bill to fund schools will not be spent this year, there was no reason for Fauci to present its passing as a prerequisite for reopening schools — unless of course we fool ourselves into believing that he is motivated by science, and not by whatever the Biden administration tells him to say.
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Ponder this, why in the world does God put up with us? God being God could do anything he wanted. He created each one of us and he created us out of love, but we creatures have turned our back on God since the beginning of time. Why didn’t God give up on all of us?
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An Office of the State Inspector General (OSIG) employee who helped investigate the Virginia Parole Board (VPB) is suing Inspector General Michael Westfall. Jennifer Moschetti’s lawsuit, filed on Monday, states that she was placed on pre-disciplinary leave on March 5, days after she approached the General Assembly as an anonymous whistleblower. On Tuesday, Governor Ralph Northam’s Chief of Staff Clark Mercer said the lawsuit was motivated by politics and criticized the OSIG report.
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Delegate Elizabeth Guzman (D-Prince William) and Delegate Glenn Davis (R-Virginia Beach), who are both running for lieutenant governor, started their education debate on Twitter during the 2021 General Assembly session. On Saturday, the two candidates met on Zoom to continue their discussion about the future of education in Virginia.
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You have to hand it to the Left: they are relentless and always at war on a thousand fronts. As my father once told me when he was in Congress, “The shame is our people come and go, while evil never sleeps.” As I have pointed out, leftists are on the level of religious zealots; politics and government are their religion, the vehicle by which perfection and utopia will be achieved in this world.
The worst that can be said about many on the Right, however, is that they are just careerists. Most are nine to five types on weekdays and politics is not a religion for them. They consider politics a necessary evil. So if it seems like the Left is always on the move, it’s because politics is a lifestyle for them and they fully intend to reshape this country into their vision for it, everything else be damned.
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The Department of Surgery in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo has launched an Anti-Racism and Health Care Equity initiative.
The initiative includes a lecture series, with Harvard University Professor Cornel West as the inaugural speaker, presenting a speech via Zoom called “Beyond the Knife” on February 18. At the event, West discussed systemic racism, recent social movements and their relation to healthcare.
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A bill that would require local governments to approve extensions of public health emergency orders after 15 days is ready for adoption by the Missouri House.
House Bill 75, sponsored by Rep. Jim Murphy, was perfected Wednesday in a floor debate and awaits only a floor vote to be transferred to the Senate, where a raft of similar bills are matriculating in committees.
HB 75, which has already passed through the House Special Committee on Small Business and Rules – Legislative Oversight committees, would allow local public health officials to order a closure for no more than 15 days.
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President Joe Biden called for an examination of collegiate due process protections enacted under former President Donald Trump’s administration in a Monday executive order.
The president announced his “Executive Order on Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free from Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation” on International Women’s Day, calling on the Education Department to evaluate a Title IX regulation issued under the Trump administration that encouraged due process for those accused of campus sexual misconduct.
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“I have grave concern that the court was defrauded intentionally … There was some type of agenda, an inappropriate agenda beyond an objective intelligence or criminal investigation,” said Kevin Brock, a retired FBI assistant director for Intelligence who helped implement most of the intelligence and informant rules the FBI uses today.
“I struggle to find any other explanation,” Brock told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Any other explanation just doesn’t pass the smell test. I mean, the glaring — the Steele dossier, for an experienced counterintelligence agent in the field, was blinking red lights Russian disinformation campaign, and yet you’re going to have the highest levels of the FBI executives use that to create an investigation?”
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