by Jeff Minick This is the day we honor the mother who bore us, reared us, laughed with us (and sometimes laughed in private at us), argued with us, taught us everything from table manners to hygiene, protected us, and believed in us. She picked us up when we…
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A majority of Americans support requiring proof of vaccinations when traveling on planes and attending events with large crowds, a Gallup poll released Friday shows.
The survey found that 57% of Americans supported requiring proof of vaccination on airplanes and that 55% supported requiring proof for events like concerts, shows and live sports. Just 43% and 45% of Americans said they were opposed, respectively.
Majorities of Americans, however, rejected “vaccine passports” for dining at restaurants, going to work and staying in a hotel. Just 40%, 45% and 44% of Americans supported requiring proof of vaccination for each activity.
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Multiple police departments told the Daily Caller News Foundation that recruiting officers is not an issue, but budget constraints have limited their ability to increase manpower.
Almost a year after George Floyd died during an arrest where former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes resulting in nationwide civil unrest and the defund the police movement, most police departments say they still have a sufficient number of candidates but lack the funding to recruit them.
“The Minneapolis Police Department, like every department, has seen a drop in application numbers over the last several years,” Minneapolis Police Department Spokesperson John Elder told the DCNF. “Whereas we have seen a reduction in applications, we still have ample qualified candidates who wish to be Minneapolis Police Officers and Cadets [and the department’s] recruitment efforts are ongoing.”
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The right to worship freely is often called America’s first freedom. Our founding fathers understood religious freedom not as the state’s creation but as an unalienable right from God.
This universal right is enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.”
Today, however, religious freedom is threatened or restricted entirely for millions of people around the world. Over 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with high or severe restrictions on religious freedom. In far too many places across the globe, governments and others prevent individuals from living in accordance with their beliefs.
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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that she is a “Planned Parenthood baby,” praising the nation’s largest abortion provider for saving babies.
The New York Democrat criticized pro-life Republicans and defended Planned Parenthood during a virtual hearing Thursday where she revealed that her mother received prenatal care from Planned Parenthood.
“If we want to talk about Planned Parenthood, let’s talk about how many lives Planned Parenthood has saved and how many babies have been born because of the prenatal care provided by Planned Parenthood,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
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Violent crime surged in several U.S. cities that saw massive Black Live Matter and anti-police protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death last summer.
The upswing of violent crime, including homicides, coincided with the protests, increased anti-police sentiment among Americans and declining morale in police departments, which have since struggled to recruit new officers. The number of murders alone increased by 36.7% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to public information compiled by data analytics reporter Jeff Asher.
“We are definitely at a critical manpower shortage here,” Louisville police union spokesperson Dave Mutchler told the Daily Caller News Foundation last week. “The climate that we all find ourselves in right now is a lot more demanding and stressful on officers.”
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No disrespect to its border-state sponsors, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and House members Henry Cuellar and Tony Gonzales (both Texans, Democrat and Republican respectively), but there are better names for the “Bipartisan Border Solutions Act.”
The “Bipartisan Band-Aid for Biden’s Border Mess” works. It’s a little long, but more descriptive than the current title.
Given the severe overcrowding at Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shelters, building four new regional processing centers along America’s southern border, as the legislation calls for, may be necessary at this point.
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The National Center for Health Statistics, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention subagency, reported this week that America’s fertility rate dropped for the sixth consecutive year. Total births declined by 4 percent in 2020, down to 1,637.5 children per 1,000 women. The statistical replacement rate for the U.S. population, by contrast, is roughly 2,100 births per 1,000 women. Overall, the 3,605,201 births last year in the United States represented the lowest number since Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
It is perhaps too early to tell whether yet another annual incremental birthrate decline is anomalous, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or flows naturally from existing demographic trendlines. Sociologists and demographers will pore over the data, but it is difficult to ignore the broader trend and place the blame squarely—or even predominantly—on the virus and the myriad draconian lifestyle restrictions the virus engendered.
On the contrary, many had speculated before this week’s report that the extended COVID lockdowns might lead to a one-time annual increase in the birthrate as couples sheltered in place together for months on end.
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The Republican Party of Virginia held its unassembled convention to pick party nominees for governor, attorney general, and lieutenant governor on Saturday. Official results will be slow to come in, thanks in part to a decision to hand-count the tens of thousands of ranked-choice ballots. As a result, campaigns and elections watchers are looking at turnout estimates for clues about who the nominees might be. Estimates from Republican Governor’s Association officials claim about 52 percent of the over 53,000 registered delegates turned out.
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Virginia is trailing the rest of the United States in processing certain unemployment claims. That’s led to a class-action lawsuit against the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC), filed in April. VEC Commissioner Ellen Hess asked for an extension until the end of May to respond to the lawsuit, but on Wednesday, a district judge ruled that the VEC could only have a four-day extension from May 7 until May 11.
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Along with a working vaccine, Joe Biden inherited a V-shaped economic recovery, but he is now planting the seeds of its destruction. Inflation, federal deficits, high taxes, incentives for workers to stay home, and incentives to avoid investment – they’re all coming back. Together, these elements create the perfect brew for a Lyndon Johnson-style stagflation. If Biden and the Democrats so quickly wreck the good economic path they were given, it will be one of the worst examples of government malpractice in U.S. economic history.
In the first, dark days of the COVID-19 national economic shutdown last spring, there was a clear need for major stimulus. Both parties united to pass an effective and much-needed response.
The U.S. gross domestic product saw a 33.4% surge in the July-September third quarter of 2020, after plunging 31.4% in the April-June second quarter. The economy continued to grow at a 4% rate in the fourth quarter, and the stock market (despite COVID) ended 2020 with the S&P 500 index up 16% for the year as a whole.
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Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder and executive director of Black Lives Matter’s national arm, has funneled business to a company led by a man she identified as the father of her only child, a Daily Caller News Foundation review of business records, interviews and social media posts found.
The company, Trap Heals, was formed just days before partnering with Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and later became the charity’s “lead developer of the art & cultural efforts,” according to business records, interviews and an archived version of Trap Heals’ website. Two other activist groups Cullors led paid Trap Heals a collective $238,000 to produce an election night livestream and for consulting services, campaign finance records show.
In numerous public mentions of their work, Cullors and Turner did not disclose that they had a child together. But in at least one instance, Turner said Cullors was directly involved in Trap Heals’ partnership with BLM Global Network.
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The teachers union in the middle of a scandal for influencing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official school reopening guidance gave nearly $20 million to Democrats in the 2020 election cycle, filings show.
Federal election filings reveal that the American Federation of Teachers and its local affiliates spent $19,903,532 on political donations during the 2020 cycle, with nearly all of the funds going to Democrats and liberal groups.
Last year’s AFT donations include $5,251,400 for the Democrats Senate Majority PAC and $4,600,000 for the Democratic House Majority PAC, according to data compiled by The Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets database.
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The U.S. economy reported an increase of 266,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate rose slightly to 6.1%, according to Department of Labor data released Friday.
Total non-farm payroll employment increased by 266,000 in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report, and the number of unemployed persons ticked up to 9.8 million. Economists projected a million Americans would be added to payrolls prior to Friday’s report, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“The pieces are really coming together for a burst in activity,” Sarah House, senior economist for Wells Fargo’s Corporate and Investment Bank, told the WSJ. “We’re expecting to see the labor market recovery shift into an even faster gear with the April jobs report.”
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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 Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines are highly effective against and prevent illness from common variants of the virus, according to recently released studies.
The vaccine made by Pfizer is effective against the coronavirus variants that originated from the U.K. and South Africa, according to multiple studies released Wednesday that examined real-world vaccinations, The New York Times reported. Moderna reported that an early-stage trial suggested its vaccine is effective against the South African variant and a third variant originating from Brazil when given as a single-dose booster shot.
“At this point in time, we can confidently say that we can use this vaccine, even in the presence of circulating variants of concern,” London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine infectious disease researcher Annelies Wilder-Smith told the NYT.
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During 2020 the US birth rate fell 4% lower than the year before – the largest drop in nearly 50 years, according to government data released Wednesday.
The report showed the number of births fell across all ethnicities and origins.
“This is the sixth consecutive year that the number of births has declined after an increase in 2014, down an average of 2% per year, and the lowest number of births since 1979,” the National Center for Health Statistics said.
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You wouldn’t think any possible controversy could append itself to that day, except that we are living in preternaturally contentious times. Two days ago, Rep. Cori Bush, a freshman Democrat from St. Louis, was testifying about racial disparities in health care, focusing specifically on childbirth. While describing her own medical experiences, Bush used the unwieldy phrase “birthing people” instead of “mothers.” Apparently, this was an awkward attempt to use inclusive language.
Predictably, this rhetorical gambit earned her a fair amount of ridicule on social media. I’m sure Rep. Bush has many virtues, but neither self-awareness nor self-deprecating humor are at the top of that list. Just as predictably, Bush lashed out at those who mocked her wording for their “racism and transphobia.” She also accused her critics of trivializing an important subject, which was a more substantive rejoinder. Bush was discussing racial disparities in America’s medical system, which is no laughing matter, and invoking her own harrowing experiences in hospital delivery rooms to do it.
Yet breezily trying to replace the word “mothers” as a sign of wokeness a few days before Mother’s Day wasn’t likely to go down well. It was Cori Bush’s own peculiar choice of words that distracted listeners from her story.
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Another Wyoming Republican is throwing his hat into the GOP primary race in an effort to unseat Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY-At Large District). Darin Smith, a Cheyenne-based businessman, announced his candidacy Friday, according to a press release. The Wyoming native describes himself as “pro-God, pro-family, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-veteran, pro-oil…
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To the delight of actual conservatives everywhere, it appears that U.S. Representaative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will soon finally be out of the GOP leadership, rectifying a huge mistake made less than three months ago by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House GOP leadership when they steadfastly supported her against a groundswell of calls from voters for her removal.
At that time, McCarthy passionately defended her presence in leadership ahead of a secret ballot vote, with many describing his contribution as decisive in turning the tide toward keeping Cheney as House GOP conference chairman. That McCarthy would be forced to reverse himself just a few months later shows that his judgment as a leader is fatally flawed.
The question conservatives should be asking now is not why we need to oust Liz Cheney but how she ever got into leadership in the first place?
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The City of Virginia Beach is requiring police officers to turn on body cameras as soon as they are on their way to a call, according to an April 29 video released by the city. Additionally, the Virginia Beach Police Department is in the process of adding switches to officers’ gun holsters to automatically turn their cameras on when the gun is drawn, with an implementation goal of July. Their tasers have a device that activates recording on all nearby officers’ cameras as soon as the taser and camera are turned on.
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Governor Ralph Northam anticipates ending COVID-19 social distancing and capacity restrictions on June 15. In a Thursday briefing, Northam credited vaccinations with driving COVID-19 case numbers down.
“The data gives us a very clear message. The vaccines are working,” Northam said.
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On Saturday, May 8, up to 53,000 Virginia Republicans who pre-registered as delegates will nominate candidates for state-wide offices in November, including governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.
It’s been a long time coming.
The nominating process for Republicans, an unassembled convention with about 40 voting locations across the Commonwealth – open for voting from 9:00 AM-4:00 PM – is a convoluted and confusing affair that took months to negotiate and consummate after numerous marathon and agonizing Zoom calls by the Party’s State Central Committee.
It’s been a long time coming.
The nominating process for Republicans, an unassembled convention with about 40 voting locations across the Commonwealth–open for voting from 9:00 AM-4:00 PM–is a convoluted and confusing affair that took months to negotiate and consummate after numerous marathon and agonizing Zoom calls by the Party’s State Central Committee.
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The New River Valley will have passenger rail service by 2025 for the first time since 1979, thanks to the new $257.2 million Western Rail Initiative announced by Governor Ralph Northam on Wednesday. The initiative is part of an agreement with Norfolk Southern. Northam said the passenger service would boost tourism and economic growth.
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A federal judge in Washington D.C. ruled on Wednesday that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) does not legally have the authority to uphold a federal freeze on evictions due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to ABC News.
The ruling was made by Judge Dabney Friedrich of the D.C. Circuit Court, who subsequently ordered that the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) vacate the policy. The eviction moratorium, which had been in place since it was first implemented last year under the Trump Administration, was meant to assist those who have been unable to pay rent due to the shutdown of small businesses, forbidding landlords from evicting such tenants until said tenants can return to work and start paying their rent again.
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What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?
Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?
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The chairwoman of the House Republican Conference faces her second fight for her job in the coming days, a fight she is going to lose, the other loser in the is former Speaker Paul D. Ryan and his ring of Republicans opposed to the leadership of President Donald J. Trump.
Wyoming Republican Rep. Elizabeth L. Cheney, who has led the House Republican Conference since Jan. 3, 2019, has strong ties to Ryan, especially through at least two members of the former speaker’s political family, Kevin Seifert and Jeff Livingston.
Other members of Ryan’s political family – such as Brendan Buck, who led the communications shop for Ryan, when he was the chairman of Ways and Means, and when he was speaker – have backed Cheney’s rebellion against Trump, but Seifert and Livingston are actively involved in Cheney’s operation.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials performed a record low number of deportations in April despite illegal border crossings occurring at a 20-year high, according to the agency.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials deported 2,962 immigrants in April, a 20% decline from March, an agency spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation Wednesday. The April numbers mark the first time the agency has deported less than 3,000 individuals in one month since the beginning of ICE’s records, The Washington Post first reported.
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President Biden has issued a National Day of Prayer proclamation in which the word “God” does not appear once.
“I invite the citizens of our Nation to give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and I join all people of faith in prayers for spiritual guidance, mercy, and protection,” Biden says in the proclamation.
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The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the federal health agency run for decades by celebrated White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, has spent over $400,000 funding a series of experiments that grafted the scalps of aborted fetuses onto living mice, studies that were meant to investigate the human skin’s propensity for developing infections.
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee- With both of Alex Kline’s parents being attorneys, writing/playing country music wasn’t even on the radar for the teen growing up in California. No one she knew even listened to country music.
Kline’s grandmother was a skillful classical pianist and her father grew up playing piano as well. Her dad would occasionally play classical pieces for the family and her grandmother encouraged her to play as well.
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The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims dropped sharply to 498,000 last week as the economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Department of Labor.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics figure released Thursday represented a large decrease in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending April 24, when 590,000 new jobless claims were reported. That number was revised up from the 553,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
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The Republican Party is riding hard into a box canyon chasing after donor rolls and privileges while its enemies take aim from the walls above at the base it drags along below.
Earlier this year, on the eve of Donald Trump’s second impeachment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) denounced the former president’s conduct surrounding the Capitol building riot as “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” adding that there was “no question . . . President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” Trump shot back, calling McConnell a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.”
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Within a roughly two-month period, the heads of the three largest public school districts in the country have all resigned, as reported by Breitbart.
The most recent resignation comes from Chicago, where the CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Janice Jackson, announced her resignation on Monday. After serving for nearly three years in the position, Jackson declared that it was time to “pass the torch to new leadership.” Under Jackson’s command, CPS began clashing with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-Ill.) over the issue of whether or not schools should return to in-person learning, with Lightfoot attributing the constant stalemates and delays to the union’s “aspirations,” which she said are more “akin to a political party” than a union.
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The Biden administration is reportedly considering changes to a Trump-era public health order that allows for asylum-seeking migrants to be rapidly expelled to their country of origin, BuzzFeed News reported Wednesday.
The Biden administration’s unofficial plan could grant humanitarian exceptions to some migrants allowing them to enter the U.S. regardless of former President Donald Trump’s implementation of Title 42, a public health order issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic allowing officials to expel migrants at the southern border, BuzzFeed reported.
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Officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County are withholding materials subpoenaed by the state legislature as part of its audit of the county’s 2020 election, claiming that surrendering them would constitute a security risk for both law enforcement and federal agencies.
A Monday letter sent from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to Ken Bennett, the former Arizona secretary of state and the liaison between the state Senate and the auditors, said the county had elected not to turn over “several routers” requested by the legislature due to an alleged “significant security risk to law enforcement data utilized by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office as well as numerous federal agencies.”
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Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano’s (D) office is getting more funding, after the Board of Supervisors adopted a budget for 2022 on Tuesday, according to the Tysons Reporter. The budget includes $8 million for Descano’s office, about 27 percent more than $6.3 million for fiscal year 2021. But that’s far less than the $19.1 million budget Descano has said his office needs.
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Marijuana sales won’t be legal in Virginia until 2024, according to legalization bills passed by the General Assembly in 2021. But King George County is already moving to potentially ban sales. At its April 27 meeting, the Board of Supervisors requested County Attorney Matt Britton to research how to implement such a ban.
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In the typical scenario, students, staff, and faculty submit themselves to the mercies of hectoring lectures and demeaning demonstrations that purport to reveal white privilege and the oppressive conditions faced by “underrepresented populations” in their institutions. Former Smith College staffer Jodi Shaw’s account of how, as part of such training, she was humiliatingly reduced to her racial identity and reprimanded for her role in the oppression of non-white co-workers is but the most recent high-profile example being discussed and debated.
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s multimillion dollar investment in the 2020 presidential election process may extend into this year or beyond, at least if Fulton County is any measure.
Georgia’s largest county, which encompasses the blue-leaning city of Atlanta, received more than $6.3 million in private grants from the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to conduct elections during the 2020 pandemic, but recently reported it did not use all the money last year.
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Some spouses of immigrants working in the U.S. won’t be required to submit new fingerprints to renew their visas, the Department of Homeland Security said in a court filing Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Trump administration required new fingerprints to safeguard against misrepresentation in 2019, though the requirement caused tens of thousands of immigrants to lose their visas due to processing delays, the WSJ reported. The requirement will be suspended for two years starting May 17, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) decided.
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Republicans are hitting back at Facebook and the Big Tech giants in Silicon Valley after Facebook’s Oversight Board announced Wednesday that it will uphold its ban of Former President Donald J. Trump.
Facebook claimed in a statement that Trump post “violated Facebook’s rules prohibiting praise or support of people engaged in violence,” when he called Capitol protestors “great patriots” and and “very special” on Jan. 6.
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As the state of Texas considered several comprehensive bills aimed at cracking down on voter fraud, multiple large corporations have released statements condemning the measures with baseless allegations of voter suppression, according to The Hill.
On Tuesday, 52 different companies signed onto a letter demanding that the state legislature reject any such bills, without providing any evidence or naming any specific pieces of legislation. Among the signatories were the tech company Microsoft and American Airlines.
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Following the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, students and faculty at Hamilton College received an email denoting some of them as white supremacists and calling for the admissions office to better block such students from enrolling in the future.
It was part of a larger push to grow a “defund the police” effort at the private, New York college.
The email came from leadership at the school’s Student Assembly and was signed by President Saphire Ruiz as well as Fall Vice President Eric Stenzel and Spring Vice President Christian Hernandez Barragan.
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With the exception of those who may have glanced at the February edition of Vogue magazine or recently browsed the New York Times style section, we have not seen or heard much from Kamala Harris since she was sworn in as the 49th vice president of the United States on January 20.
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Gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin was joined on the campaign trail by United States Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) Wednesday. The former CEO of the Carlyle Group is currently in a seven way race for the Republican nomination for Governor in Virginia, hoping that the last minute endorsement from the conservative stalwart will help seal the deal.
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A grassroots group of conservatives and Republican state leaders is pushing back after the Biden administration tied federal education funding to adopting controversial critical race theory teachings in schools’ curriculum.
The Biden administration in April proposed a new Department of Education rule that gives preference in grant awarding to schools that incorporate into their curriculum content from the “1619 Project,” a controversial history project that is the most prominent work containing critical race theory ideas.
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House Minority Whip Steve Scalise is openly backing the ousting of Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from her Republican leadership position and supporting New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to replace her.
“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda, and Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for Conference Chair,” his spokesman, Lauren Fine, said in a statement first reported by Punchbowl News.
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President Joe Biden’s administration and the Department of Justice are reportedly preparing to challenge bills banning biological males from women’s sports, multiple sources told the Daily Beast.
“We are having conversations with the Biden administration about additional actions that they should be taking as it relates to anti-LGBTQ bills that we’re seeing in these states,” Human Rights Campaign (HRC) president Alphonso David told the Daily Beast. “But we want to make sure we don’t lose sight of how important those words are, and how important his early actions have been to support and protect LGBTQ people throughout the country.”
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ROANOKE, Virginia – Winsome Sears made a campaign stop as a part of her statewide RV tour in Roanoke on Thursday. The former Delegate is seen by many as an insurgent candidate in the wide-open race for Lieutenant Governor. Sears served in the United States Marine Corps as an electrician.…
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