He is known as the “zip tie guy.”
In one of the most iconic photographs of the January 6 Capitol melee, Eric Munchel, wearing tactical gear, is seen holding up a fistful of zip ties in the Senate gallery. Munchel, the media quickly concluded, brought the flex cuffs to arrest lawmakers attempting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. The woman photographed with him later was identified as his mother, Lisa Eisenhart.
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Dominion Energy Chairman and Virginia philanthropist Thomas F. “Tom” Farrell II has died, causing the Commonwealth of Virginia and it’s political leaders to mourn the loss of one of the most powerful businessmen in Virginia history. Farrell, age 66, passed away due to cancer on Friday, one day after relinquishing the Chairmanship of the company he had steered from 2007 to 2020. Mr. Farrell and his family have heavily influenced some of the most important business and political decisions in the Commonwealth.
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Twenty miles means a world of difference for Minnesota breweries that have grown as much as state law allows.
Minnesota’s alcohol laws are pushing breweries to expand in other states, Brad Glynn, Lift Bridge Brewing cofounder and vice president of marketing told The Center Square in a phone interview.
In May, Lift Bridge Brewing Co plans to expand to a New Richmond, Wisconsin location.
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Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam proposed 18 amendments to the budget legislation passed by the General Assembly, which includes giving the executive branch more authority to address issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I also propose three language amendments to ensure our ability to continue responding to needs related to the COVID pandemic by giving agencies the flexibility to respond and the authority to address the opportunities presented by the federal funding such as the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), until we can address the matter fully at a special session,” Northam said in a letter to the House of Delegates.
One amendment to the budget would grant the director of the Department of Planning and Budget the authority to direct the additional Medicaid revenue from the recent federal stimulus plan to current services. Another would grant the superintendent of public instruction the authority to issue temporary flexibility or waivers for deadlines and requirements that cannot be met because of the COVID-19 state of emergency and school closures.
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As Governor Northam and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced expansion of rail services in the Commonwealth of Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Peter Doran floated an expensive – and expansive – transportation policy position. Doran, a former foreign policy think tank CEO whose campaign has gained little traction outside of Northern Virginia, introduced a proposal for Virginia to build a “hyperloop” system and place the hub in Southwest Virginia.
Doran stated, “New technologies like HyperLoop will provide opportunities for people in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It will create jobs as well as new options for Virginians to have more choices in where to live and work. Providing realistic, current-gen (not last-gen) solutions that can tie Virginia’s far-flung regions together? That will make us the best.”
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On Easter, billions of people around the world will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ – the most important day of the year for the Christian community.
Christians believe Jesus Christ was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead. This act of selfless, sacrificial love for humanity is at the heart of Christianity. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.” It is through Jesus Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection that we are saved from sin and have hope for eternal life with God in Heaven.
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Thirteen states sued President Joe Biden’s administration over an American Rescue Plan provision prohibiting states from cutting taxes after accepting coronavirus relief funds.
The 13-state coalition argued that the provision included in the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package preventing states from cutting taxes if they accept relief from the federal government is unconstitutional. The coalition, led by Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
“Never before has the federal government attempted such a complete takeover of state finances,” Morrisey said in a Wednesday statement. “We cannot stand for such overreach.”
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Thursday said she is introducing a bill to strip Dr. Anthony Fauci of his government salary.
In a press release Greene posted on Twitter, the controversial Georgia Republican said her “Fire Fauci Act” would decrease “Dr. Always Wrong’s pay to $0 and the ‘We Will Not Comply Act’ will ‘prevent discrimination against the unvaccinated.’ “
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that Americans who are vaccinated for COVID-19 will now be able to travel domestically and internationally.
The CDC officially made the announcement during the White House Covid Briefing and said Americans will still need to wear masks and observe social distancing while traveling.
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On April 12, Christians will be celebrating Easter, the day on which the resurrection of Jesus is said to have taken place. The date of celebration changes from year to year.
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The Pentagon on Wednesday issued new rules, sweeping away Trump administration policies that largely barred transgender people from serving in the military, following through on an executive order President Biden signed after taking office, The Hill reports.
The new Defense Department policies, released on the International Transgender Day of Visibility, allow transgender people who meet military standards to enlist and serve openly in their self-identified gender. The new regulations will also give access to medical transition-related care, and prevent discrimination against transgender military members, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters.
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A report released Tuesday by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) revealed that the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), a group funded by Facebook founded Mark Zuckerberg, spent over $36 million in 14 urban counties in the state of Texas in an effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, according to Breitbart.
The report states that “Texas counties were given money to help shift voting to the mail and away from traditional procedures in Texas law. The large blue-leaning counties received huge sums to transform their elections,” while “smaller red counties did not receive anything close.” Among the initiatives that were pursued by this funding were “drive-thru voting, mail voting sorting assets, polling place rental expenses, and…voter education/outreach/radio costs.”
The county that most benefited from these funds was Dallas County, which received just over $15 million, followed by Harris County (where Houston is located) at $9.6 million. The remaining 12 counties all received less than $3 million.
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An estimated 46 million people — or 18% of the country — would be unable to pay for health care if they needed it today, a recent poll conducted by Gallup and West Health found.
In another survey by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the majority of hospitals in the U.S. have yet to comply with a transparency ruling implemented this year that would help patients shop around for the most affordable prices.
Gallup’s findings are based on a poll conducted between February 15 and 21 among 3,753 adults with a margin of error of 2%.
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Governor Ralph Northam announced the signing of 14 bills on Wednesday, March 31, which was a deadline for the Governor to take action on legislation passed in the 2021 General Assembly sessions. According to his announcement, took action on 552 bills with no vetoes, although he sent some back to the General Assembly with amendments.
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The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled Thursday that Charlottesville can remove a statue of Robert E. Lee and a statue of Stonewall Jackson from its parks. In February 2017, the city chose to remove the Lee statue, triggering a lawsuit. Then, in the wake of the violent Unite the Right rally, the city reaffirmed its decision to remove the Lee statue and to remove the Jackson statue as well, according to court documents.
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South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan announced on Friday his intent to propose legislation that would strip the Major League Baseball association of its antitrust exemption, claiming the league’s aggressive stance against Georgia’s recent election reform bill has rendered it open to more federal oversight.
The MLB announced on Friday its intent to move the 2021 All-Star game out of Georgia over that state’s recent package of election reforms that included voter I.D. requirements and other security measures.
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Former President Donald Trump has released a statement Friday night about the latest action of Major League Baseball through his Save America PAC, which he formed shortly after leaving office in January.
“Baseball is already losing tremendous numbers of fans, and now they leave Atlanta with their All-Star Game because they are afraid of the Radical Left Democrats who do not want voter I.D., which is desperately needed, to have anything to do with our elections,” the statement reads. “Boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections. Are you listening Coke, Delta, and all!”
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The Virginia Public Access Project has provided additional information about the delegate registration and vote counting processes for the 2021 Republican Party of Virginia unassembled convention. The May 8th convention will determine the Republican nominees for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General. The Virginia Star has previously covered the process, and VPAP provided additional detail about changes made to the delegate selection and counting process.
The process is very different from a traditional primary with a polling location in each neighborhood. For one to become a delegate to the convention, one must file a pre-file form with your local Republican committee. Then, one must show up to one of the 30+ voting locations across the Commonwealth as assigned per voting locality.
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Georgia finally enacted some laws to protect ethical voting. My American Spectator colleague, David Catron, refers to these laws as “election integrity laws” — and that is what they are.
“Jim Crow”? What on G-d’s Earth are the leftist Crazies talking about? What are the Leftists saying?
… that Blacks and Hispanics do not want election integrity?
… that Blacks and Hispanics, 158 years after slavery ended, do not have access to a photo ID?
… that Blacks and Hispanics, 158 years after slavery ended, cannot figure out how to vote honestly and need vote harvesters?
… that Blacks and Hispanics, 158 years after slavery ended, do not want integrity at the voting booth?
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Around 1,000 illegal migrants are entering the interior of the U.S. daily without overwhelmed border officials able to gather identifying information or take them into custody, The Washington Post reported Friday.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officials are occupied processing unaccompanied migrant minors and family units while attempting to control the number of male adults who enter the U.S., leading to some illegal migrants entering the U.S. unknowingly, according to three CBP officials who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, the Post reported. The number of migrants who are able to evade officials, known as “got aways,” has increased substantially in recent weeks, two of the officials told the Post.
A “got away” is someone who crosses the border illegally, is not apprehended and has not been turned back, according to CBP. The agency spent over $1 billion in the last 20 years on surveillance technology to monitor for illegal crossings, though officials haven’t always able to apprehend illegal migrants.
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The Arizona House passed a bill Thursday that bans abortions based on diagnosis of genetic abnormality, such as Down syndrome.
S.B. 1457 states that the rights of “an unborn child at every stage of development” must be acknowledged and prohibits abortions based on the sex, race, or genetic abnormality of the child. The bill makes exceptions for medical emergencies.
“A person who knowingly” performs such an abortion “is guilty of a class 3 felony,” according to the legislation.
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Hunter Biden said in an interview that a laptop of his purported emails released before the election “could be” his, but that it may have been stolen or released with the help of Russian intelligence.
“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence,” he said in an interview with CBS, which will air in full Sunday.
Biden at first said that he was unsure whether the laptop is his.
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Nearly 300 Americans face a slew of charges related to the melee on Capitol Hill last January. As I’ve reported over the past few months, offenses range from assaulting a police officer to destroying government property to trespassing.
More than 70 protestors stand accused of “aiding and abetting” various crimes; even people who didn’t vandalize the Capitol or even enter the building have been charged with helping others do damage and interrupt Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results.
Nonviolent offenders languish behind bars for months, denied bail, and transported to Washington, D.C. to await delayed trials. Federal prosecutors suggest President Trump could be indicted for fueling the chaos that day. Democratic congressmen want their Republican colleagues held accountable for their alleged role, too.
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An all new LIVE STREAM of War Room: Pandemic starts at 9 a.m. Central Time on Saturday.
Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon began the daily War Room: Pandemic radio show and podcast on January 25, when news of the virus was just beginning to leak out of China around the Lunar New Year. Bannon and co-hosts bring listeners exclusive analysis and breaking updates from top medical, public health, economic, national security, supply chain and geopolitical experts weekdays from 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon ET.
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The U.S. economy reported an increase of 916,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate fell to 6%, according to Department of Labor data released Friday.
Total non-farm payroll employment increased by 916,000 in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report, and the number of unemployed persons fell to 9.7 million. Economists projected 675,000 Americans would be added to payrolls prior to Friday’s report, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“There’s a seismic shift going on in the U.S. economy,” Beth Ann Bovino, an economist at S&P Global, told the WSJ.
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After the CEO of Georgia-based Delta Airlines caved to pressure from left wing activist groups and criticized a bill signed into law requiring voter identification for absentee ballots, Georgia’s House Republicans responded by voting to strip Delta of a major tax credit.
Delta has long-enjoyed a $35 million tax credit on jet fuel in the Peach State, but Thursday night, that tax credit was jeopardized, as House Republicans voted along party lines to end it, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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Redistricting for Virginia’s legislative districts will not be complete in time for the 2021 House of Delegates elections, according to a draft timeline presented at a Virginia Redistricting Commission (VRC) meeting Tuesday. Census data is not expected until mid-August, which starts a 45-day timeline for the commission to send completed House and Senate maps to the General Assembly. As a result, Virginia may have House of Delegates races three years in a row: 2021, 2022 based on new districts, and the regularly scheduled 2023 election.
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Major League Baseball on Friday announced that it would be pulling its 2021 All-Star game out of Georgia due to concerns over the state’s new voting law passed and signed last month.
“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” Commissioner Robert Manfred said in a statement on Friday. “Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.”
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When Facebook and Instagram threatened to impose “additional limitations” on Lara Trump for posting her interview with her father-in-law, the former president, she didn’t back down.
The Fox News contributor and former producer for Inside Edition jumped ship for an alternative platform that only left beta testing in November.
Lara Trump’s podcast “The Right View” debuted on Clouthub soon after Facebook and Instagram removed her Donald Trump interview, Clouthub CEO Jeff Brain told Just the News.
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The investigation into the Virginia Parole Board will be investigated, if legislators approve a proposal from Governor Ralph Northam. On Wednesday, Northam finalized his amendments to a budget passed by the Virginia General Assembly, including money for an investigation.
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There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.
1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.
Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits. But at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back.
Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.
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Within a week of blaming “white supremacy” for the murder of six Asian and two white women by a white man in Georgia, progressives are now blaming “assault weapons” for a mass shooting in which a Trump-hating Muslim immigrant with a history of violence, mental illness, and racial animus gunned down 10 white people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket.
Beyond the duplicity of highlighting race only when the killer is white and the victims are not, progressive lawmakers, activists, and journalists are using a litany of falsehoods in an attempt to ban common semi-automatic guns used for home defense and hunting.
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Towards the end of his questioning of George Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross, Eric Nelson, the attorney for former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, uncovered a bombshell that has been left out of mainstream media coverage.
“You and Floyd – Mr. Floyd, excuse me – I’m assuming, like most couples, had pet names for each other?” Nelson asked Ross.
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China is not our friend. Since the Clinton Administration, and through the Bush and Obama years, American policy proceeded as if trade and cultural ties would work automatically to liberalize the Chinese. Instead, these ties have enriched and strengthened China, allowing it to build first-class infrastructure, a robust economy, and a substantially more capable military in a mere 30 years’ time.
Simultaneously, these policies have hollowed out our own industrial base, rendering most of our industries, including the tech sector, dependent on Chinese inputs. In the name of efficiency, we have lost resilience, jobs, and independence.
The prospect of a military confrontation with China is now closer than it was at the beginning of this process. Along with its rising confidence and capability, China has advanced a self-serving and novel view of its authority, asserting sovereignty and rights of exclusion deep into the South China Sea.
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The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims increased to 719,000 last week, even as the economy continues to slowly recover from the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Department of Labor.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics figure released Thursday represented an increase in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending March 20, when 658,000 new jobless claims were reported. That number was revised down from the 684,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
Roughly 18.2 million Americans continue to collect unemployment benefits, according to the report.
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Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson called on the Biden administration Wednesday to turn over intelligence records regarding Hunter Biden’s work with a Chinese energy company with suspected ties to the Chinese military.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, Grassley and Johnson said that it is “imperative” for Congress to understand the relationship between the Biden family and CEFC China Energy, the now-defunct energy conglomerate.
CEFC China Energy paid Biden approximately $6 million from August 2017 to September 2018 for consulting and legal services, according to a report that Grassley and Johnson released last year.
The Republicans said in the report that banking regulators flagged some of the wire payments from CEFC to Biden for “potential criminal financial activity.” Grassley and Johnson also noted that CEFC’s founder, Ye Jianming, was an official in the mid-2000s for a front group of the Chinese Communist Party.
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Landlords are struggling after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) extended a national ban on certain evictions apparently to slow the spread of COVID-19.
The CDC extended the moratorium, first enacted in Sept. 2020, through June 30.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa on behalf of Asa Mossman of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and other housing providers.
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Workers at a Baltimore plant responsible for producing two separate coronavirus vaccines mistakenly mixed up their respective ingredients, ruining approximately 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and pausing all production at the plant, the company confirmed Wednesday.
The facility, run by Emergent BioSolutions, had partnered with both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca to produce vaccines. Federal officials said that the mistake was a result of human error, according to The New York Times, which first reported the mix up that reportedly occurred several weeks ago.
A quality control review “identified one batch of drug substance that did not meet quality standards at Emergent BioSolutions, a site not yet authorized to manufacture drug substance for our COVID-19 vaccine,” Johnson & Johnson said in a statement. “This batch was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process.”
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Senator Amanda Chase, candidate for the GOP nomination for governor, says she will run as an independent if Pete Snyder is nominated. Chase appeared on The Jeff Katz Show on Tuesday, where she said that the convention process selected by the Republican Party of Virginia is rigged.
“After all the conventions that I participated in for over a decade, I can tell you, that these conventions are rigged. It’s voter suppression,” Chase said.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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