Day: April 1, 2021

Northam Proposes Legalizing Marijuana in July

Eric Burk

Marijuana legalization is back on track for July, after Governor Ralph Northam announced amendments to legalization legislation. In February, legislators surprised marijuana policy watchers by delaying the effective date of legalization until 2024, leading the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia to blast the bills as worse than nothing. Since then, legalization advocates have lobbied Northam to amend the legislation to go into effect in July, when most other recently-passed bills take effect.

Read More

Commentary: New Census Data Show Homeschooling Tripled During the Pandemic—And One Key Group Is Driving the Surge

Virginia Star Staff

My daughter had a friend over this week whose parents just took her out of public school for homeschooling, and my neighbor recently unenrolled her child from public school to homeschool for the rest of the academic year. These families are much more than local anecdotes—they are representative of a national trend.

New Census Bureau data show that 11.1 percent of K-12 students are now being independently homeschooled. This is a large uptick from 5.4 percent at the start of the school shutdowns last spring, and 3.3 percent in the years preceding the pandemic.

Read More

China Revives Dubious Theory That U.S. Military Base Was Source of Coronavirus

Virginia Star Staff
Fort Detrick

A top Chinese government official on Wednesday seized on the findings of a World Health Organization report about the origins of the coronavirus, and revived a baseless theory that a U.S. military lab in Maryland was somehow involved in spreading the virus.

Hua Chunying, the spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, endorsed the theory at press conferences on Tuesday and Wednesday, both before and after the release of a World Health Organization (WHO) report regarding the origins of the virus.

Read More

Texas Coronavirus Cases Drop over Two Weeks After Restrictions, Mask Mandate Lifted

Virginia Star Staff

Covid cases are falling in Texas, over two weeks after Gov. Greg Abbott (R) lifted restrictions, including the statewide mask mandate, Breitbart reported. 

In March, Abbott announced the end of the statewide mask mandate, which had been in effect since July, and lifted restrictions allowing businesses to operate at 100 percent capacity.

Read More

Trump Considering Holding a Rally Soon, Says ‘Hope’ He’ll Run Again in 2024

Virginia Star Staff

Former President Trump is considering holding a rally in the near future.

“We’re thinking about doing one relatively soon just to let everybody know that there’s hope in the future,” Trump told daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Tuesday during her podcast “The Right View with Lara Trump.” “I love doing them. But more importantly, I think we get the word out.”

Read More

Over 100 Professors Sign Letter Demanding Transparency with Colleges’ Ties to China

Virginia Star Staff
China College

Over 100 American college professors signed a joint letter on Tuesday demanding greater transparency of their colleges and universities with regards to business dealings with the Chinese government, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

The letter states, in part, that “universities and research institutions in liberal democracies also have a responsibility to respond to transnational academic repression and to protect a diversity of views. At a minimum, this requires real transparency over agreements signed with counterparts in autocratic states.”

Read More

DeSantis to Take Executive Action Against ‘Vaccine Passports’

Virginia Star Staff

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) vowed that he would issue an executive order forbidding local governments and businesses from requiring “vaccine passports” to show digital or physical proof of vaccination against COVID-19, The Hill reports.

At a news conference, the Florida governor announced he would introduce “an executive function, emergency function” against vaccine passports and requested the Republican state legislature draft a bill forbidding such passports.

Read More

Commentary: President Biden’s American Job Killing Tax Plan

Virginia Star Staff

There is a deep irony in President Joe Biden’s decision to start looking for support for his American Job Killing Tax Plan in Pittsburgh, Penn. 

And make no mistake: Biden’s so-called American Jobs Plan is a tax increase bill masquerading as an infrastructure bill – which is in turn masquerading as a jobs bill. It will not create jobs or ultimately improve our infrastructure. It will kill jobs and make infrastructure projects more expensive in time and money.  

Read More

Commentary: Did PPP Work?

Virginia Star Staff

As the Small Business Administration official who oversaw the Paycheck Protection Program, I’m often asked, “Did PPP actually work?”  

PPP was a response to state and local governments mandating shutdowns as a way to slow the spread of COVID-19. The premise was this: Encourage lenders to provide small businesses and nonprofits with forgivable, SBA-guaranteed loans over an eight-week period as a payroll-support measure. This small business financial support was designed to help prevent mass unemployment as Americans were confined to their homes.  

Read More

Song Suffragettes Celebrate Seventh Anniversary

Bethany Bowman

NASHVILLE, Tennessee- Nashville is famous for its writers’ rounds. The Song Suffragettes is the only all-female writers’ round and they have been consistently performing at the Listening Room on Monday nights for seven years.

Todd Cassetty founded Song Suffragettes for the simple reason of giving female singer-songwriters a place to play their music and be heard. Those who follow country music know that it is not an even playing field when it comes to women getting record deals and having their music played on country radio.

Read More

Top House Republican Argues Trumpism Is the Future of the Party

Virginia Star Staff
Jim Banks

A memo from Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks, who leads the powerful Republican Study Committee, argued that the party must “embrace our new coalition” and double down on Trumpism in order to be successful in the future.

The memo, titled “Cementing GOP as the Working-Class Party,” argues that “President Trump’s gift didn’t come with a receipt,” and that Republicans should not fight their “coalitional transformation” or corporate donors retreating from the party.

Read More

Virginia Family Foundation Sues over New Transgender Public School Guidelines

Eric Burk

The Family Foundation is suing the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) over its Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools. The model policies took effect March 6, 2021, and school boards must adopt policies consistent with the model by the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year. However, the Family Foundation says there are legal problems with the policies and that the VDOE did not properly address comments made during a legally required public comment phase.

Read More