A renowned constitutional scholar said what is happening now at the southern border does constitute an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution.
“The kind of organized entry that we are seeing now where you got some of the gangs down in Mexico facilitating it and getting paid to put people across the border, that does qualify as an invasion even when no arms are involved,” Rob Natelson, the Independence Institute’s senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence, said.
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The Chairwoman of the Montgomery County School Board says she intends to keep her job after storming out of a meeting earlier this week and offering the position to speaker at the meeting.
“I have not resigned,” Sue Kass told The Virginia Star by email Thursday.
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Former President Donald Trump on Thursday backed state-level legislation that would end crossover voting in Wyoming primary elections.
The bill, introduced by State Senator Bo Biteman (R-Ranchester), would prevent an individual from changing party affiliations on the day of the primary elections.
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Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock.
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The Special Forces warrant officer running to unseat renegade Washington Republican Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler in the 3rd Congressional District’s August 2 top-two jungle primary told The Star News Network he is fighting both Beutler and the Republican establishment in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
“I think we’re in the forefront of the Republican civil war because I’m going after an impeachment voter, so we’ve seen the I’d say GOP establishment try to quietly support Jamie Herrera Beutler along with four of the other impeachment voters,” said Joe Kent, who is a combat veteran of more than 20 years of Army service, including 11 deployments, mainly to Iraq.
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After previously being featured in a Music Spotlight column, Australian singer/songwriter Jasmin Bade released her new single, “Rent,” and its accompanying lyric video today with The Tennessee Star. “Rent” provides a bittersweet twist on the struggle to move on from a past relationship. Bade co-wrote the song with Emily Kroll, who penned the No. 1 hit “Just About Over You” by Priscilla Block, and Brian McKenna, son of Nashville songwriting legend Lori McKenna.
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The Biden administration missed another deadline to hold quarterly onshore oil drilling lease sales after a federal court ruled it was legally required to do so.
The Department of the Interior (DOI) defied the June 2021 court ruling which ordered the administration to halt its ban on new oil and gas leases, the Western Energy Alliance — a fossil fuel industry group that challenged the ban — said Wednesday. In August 2021, the DOI vowed to publish notices of competitive sales in December and hold a lease sale 45 days later, two promises it failed to keep, in court filings.
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Several major media outlets have run stories over the past few days on the identities of individuals funding the “Freedom Convoy,” including names of donors that leaked during a hack of crowdfunding site GiveSendGo.
Hackers breached GiveSendGo late Sunday and leaked personal information of roughly 90,000 Freedom Convoy donors, including names, email handles, IP addresses and zip codes. The site hosting the leaked data provided it to “journalists and researchers” upon request.
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U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas, represented by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the state of Texas are suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, challenging the constitutionality of its requirement that people wear masks on commercial airlines, conveyances, and at transportation hubs.
The lawsuit is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, TPPF said, where they think it will prevail. The statute being used to justify the CDC airline mask mandate is the same one used to justify the eviction moratorium over which TPPF sued and the Supreme Court struck down last year.
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The Biden administration announced Wednesday it will cancel $415 million in student debt for nearly 16,000 borrowers who claim they were misled by for-profit colleges.
The loans for almost 16,000 former students will be canceled under a legal provision called the borrower defense to repayment, which allows students to have their debts erased if they prove a for-profit school defrauded them, the Department of Education (DOE) said in a press release.
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Blackstone Inc. bought out Preferred Apartment Communities and the 12,000 apartments it owned in the Southeast for $5.8 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Blackstone is one the world’s largest commercial property owners, and it purchased the Atlanta-based apartment owner with its largest fund, which raised more than $50 billion in the last five years, according to the WSJ.
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The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday announced it would retain sole authority to issue airworthiness certificates and perform any final inspections on Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner aircraft.
Meanwhile, two members of Congress, including Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, have asked for an investigation into why the FAA decided not to penalize Boeing for fatal crashes involving its 737 MAX.
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The Chinese government’s Confucius Institutes have steadily disappeared from American college campuses following concerns from lawmakers, law enforcement and academic freedom groups about spying, censorship and propaganda. Florida even banned them in legislation last year.
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After a group of parents sued Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) for forcing students to continue wearing masks despite Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) issuing executive order banning that practice, LCPS declined to comment on the situation.
Wayde B. Byard, LCPS’ public information officer, told The Virginia Star Thursday that the only comment he could offer was already made by Superintendent Scott Ziegler.
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Halfway through the 2022 Virginia General Assembly session, the House of Delegates has passed a wave of Republican reforms focusing on taxes, law enforcement, and education, while much of the Senate’s work has involved Democrats killing Republican bills in committee. The legislature has just passed crossover, when each chamber sends its finalized bills to the other chamber. Now, the chambers will clash over conflicting policy as they evaluate each other’s bills and work on the budget.
“[W]e ran on a platform that was informed by what voters told us they wanted the General Assembly to accomplish on their behalf in 2022. They wanted lower taxes and safer communities. They wanted parents involved in their child’s education, not boxed out,” a Tuesday House GOP release said.
“As the House completes its work on our legislative priorities, I’m pleased to report that we’ve accomplished what voters sent us here to do,” Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) said in the release.
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This is a bad year to have paid the International Olympic Committee $100 million for the right to put its iconic rings on your soda cans or shampoo bottles. But this is what the rarefied air of being a top Olympic sponsor buys you in 2022: The Winter Games are being played in an authoritarian state with an atrocious human rights record, and none of its underwriters are eager to play up their association in the important American market.
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The Republican field in the race to challenge incumbent U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger for Virginia’s 7th Congressional seat is a crowded one.
Former Green Beret Derrick Anderson, State Senator Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania-SD17), Spotsylvania County Supervisor David Ross, Stafford County Board of Supervisors Chair Crystal Vanuch, Prince William County Supervisor Yesli Vega, teacher Gina Ciarcia, and Gary Adkins are among the candidates running in the Republican primary.
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Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal unveiled a bipartisan bill Wednesday aimed at curbing online harms to children.
The Kids Online Safety Act is the result of several hearings and a months-long investigation led by Blackburn and Blumenthal into how use of social media platforms affects teens and young children. If enacted, the bill would require social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable “addictive” product features and allow them to opt out of recommendation algorithms.
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A gun control activist and Black Lives Matter radical was arrested on Monday in the targeted shooting of Louisville, Kentucky mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg.
Quintez Brown was charged with attempted murder and four counts of wanton endangerment, after firing his gun inside Greenberg’s campaign office.
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Consumer spending surged in January amid soaring inflation, the Commerce Department announced Wednesday.
Retail sales grew 3.8% in January, far exceeding the 2.1% Dow Jones estimate, the Commerce Department announced Wednesday. January’s figure represents the largest monthly increase since March 2021 and a significant snapback from December 2021 when sales decreased by 2.5%.
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The Biden administration plans to make yearly COVID shots mandatory for all Americans, including young children, a Food and Drug Administration executive told a Project Veritas undercover journalist on hidden camera.
In the sting video released on Tuesday, Christopher Cole, Executive Officer of Countermeasures Initiative for the FDA, said: “Biden wants to inoculate as many people as possible.” According to Project Veritas president James O’Keefe, Cole has “over 20 years experience” at the FDA, and “claims to be directly involved in the approval process.”
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Parents and residents of San Francisco overwhelmingly voted to recall three school board members in the city’s first recall election since 1983.
Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga and Gabriella Lopez all lost their positions on the governing body, as the “Yes” option to the recall question gained more than 70 percent in all three cases.
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Russia’s months of military movements and Biden’s “strategic communications campaign” are psychological operations intended to intimidate Ukraine, Europe, and the rest of the world.
There won’t be a big war any time soon. The Kremlin’s low-cost, high-impact campaign might succeed if some Western leaders, especially in the United States, can help Putin.
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In a new report released Wednesday at the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, one of America’s top education scholars provides reviews and grades for the nation’s leading civics programs.
At a time when the purpose of civics education grows increasingly polarized, and many organizations present rival resources, Dr. David Randall, author of “Learning for Self-Government: A K-12 Civics Report Card,” evaluated 15 leading civics programs and graded them on their effectiveness.
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Twitter Tuesday evening banned a well-known Twitter account called @DefiantLs, which posted screenshots pointing out left-wing hypocrisy.
The owner of the account, who has always been anonymous and remains so, said the account was banned for an alleged “ban evasion,” despite the fact that the account owner says he or she has “never had an account suspended so I’ve never had a ban to evade.”
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RICHMOND, Virginia – Governor Glenn Youngkin signed a school mask-optional bill into law from the steps of the capitol on Wednesday afternoon, hours after the House of Delegates approved his amendments adding an emergency clause and a March 1 effective date.
“Today, we are reestablishing, restoring power back from parents. We are also reestablishing our expectations that we will get back to normal, and this is the path, this is the path. So thank you all for coming. And now, we’re going to do a little work,” Youngkin told the crowd before signing the bill.
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The House of Delegates passed HB 787, Delegate Dave LaRock’s (R-Loudoun) bill focused on controversial teaching in schools. On Tuesday, the bill passed 50-49, with Delegate Carrie Coyner (R-Chesterfield) joining Democrats in opposition and Delegate Kim Taylor (R-Dinwiddie) not voting.
Before hearing the Democratic amendments, House Education Chair Glenn Davis (R-Virginia Beach) explained a Republican amendment, “which makes it very clear that you can teach literature, history, whatever you’d like that takes into account the past or present beliefs that are set in subsection A above, Mr. Speaker.”
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National pro-life leaders and lawmakers committed themselves publicly on Valentine’s Day to protecting life not only by promoting pro-life legislation, but also by providing concrete service to mothers and their children, born and unborn.
The pro-life leaders joined with the Heritage Foundation to announce they are prepared for a post-Roe America, and to pledge their support for girls and women experiencing unexpected pregnancy.
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There are few more easily observable measures of the cost of everyday living than the price of gasoline at the pump. As has been widely reported, gas prices in the United States recently hit a seven-year high. The striking thing, however, is not just how high gas prices have gotten, but how fast and far they have risen.
Based on statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration—the statistical arm of the Department of Energy—weekly average retail prices for regular unleaded gasoline in the United States increased 94 percent in less than two years. Average gas prices rose from $1.77 per gallon during the week ending April 27, 2020, to $3.44 per gallon during the week ending February 7, 2022—nearly doubling in the process.
That was the largest percentage increase in gas prices within a two-year window since October of 2005, more than 16 years ago. In the election of 2006, Republicans—then the party in power—lost 30 House and six Senate seats, thereby losing control of both chambers, before losing the presidency two years later.
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President Joe Biden’s latest nominee to the Fed has faced criticism for embellishing her resume, but recently some economists have raised the possibility that her most famous research contains fatal flaws.
Lisa Cook, a professor of international relations and economics at Michigan State University, was nominated to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on Jan 14. Three weeks later, on Feb. 5, an anonymous Twitter account pointed out a mistake in Cook’s 2014 paper, “Violence and economic activity: evidence from African-American patents, 1870-1940.”
The anonymous tweet sparked a flurry of blog posts criticizing Cook’s paper. Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia University, compared Cook’s dataset with a more recent dataset from the Brookings Institution and said the results did not match. “Hey—this is a lot different!” wrote Gelman.
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Crowdfunding service GiveSendGo came back online Tuesday after a Sunday hack forced the site to temporarily shut down.
“Sunday evening, February 13th, GiveSendGo was attacked by malicious actors attempting to eliminate the ability of its users to raise funds,” the company said in a statement posted to Twitter, acknowledging the hack publicly for the first time and announcing that the site was back online.
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Wholesale prices jumped a full percentage point in January and 9.7 percent over last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday, as inflation continues its rapid rise.
“On an unadjusted basis, final demand prices moved up 9.7 percent for the 12 months ended January 2022,” BLS said.
That increase comes after a 0.9% increase in November and a 0.4% increase in December.
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The George Washington University’s president publicly apologized Friday for a fall 2021 surveillance pilot program that tracked students’ and employees’ locations on campus without their consent.
“I write to inform you of a data analytics pilot program that took place on the university campus during the Fall 2021 semester, and to apologize on behalf of the university for the failure to inform you in advance of commencing this project,” Mark S. Wrighton wrote.
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Maryland state House Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment Monday enshrining abortion rights within the state, the Associated Press reported.
The proposal was introduced by state House Speaker Adrienne Jones, who said the Supreme Court “has allowed some of the most restricting abortion legislation we’ve seen in a generation,” according to the AP.
Jones appeared to refer to the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans most abortions after six weeks, to stay in effect while the court considers whether the law is constitutional.
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Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation isn’t just imposing accountability for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 political trick to dirty up Donald Trump with the FBI; it’s also encroaching on the credibility of President Biden’s current chief foreign policy adviser and point man for the current Russia-Ukraine crisis.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was a senior adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign and, by his own admission, spread the word to reporters back then that Democrats believed Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin to hijack the election and had a secret computer channel to the Kremlin. Neither proved true.
But long before that Russia collusion narrative crumbled like a stale Starbucks muffin, Sullivan gave sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee disputing that anything the Clinton campaign spread around Washington was misinformation.
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Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is lifting the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and will not extend its mask requirement into March.
The Democratic mayor also says that as of Tuesday many businesses in the nation’s capital will no longer be required to check that customers have at least one dose of the vaccine before allowing them to enter. However, they will still be allowed to make such a request on their own, according to dcist.com.
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New York City recently fired nearly 1,500 municipal workers who failed to comply with its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, officials said Monday.
City officials said 1,430 workers were fired Friday and that the number represents less than 1% of the city’s 370,000-person workforce. The number was also far smaller than what they had predicted.
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Fifty-five federal agencies have issued rule changes to track employees and others who request religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Critics of the tracking say the practice is discriminatory against people of faith.
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The real pandemic in this country is one of growing fascism from our so-called political Left.
The far-Left Democratic Party doesn’t care about your essential freedoms—from speech and the free flow of ideas to freedom of assembly—particularly when those freedoms stand in the way of their pursuit of power.
This is the party, after all, who opposed Abraham Lincoln and stood in the way of integration well into the 1960s. Where Democratic hatred of freedom has become glaringly apparent in recent times is with their obsession with COVID vaccine mandates and mask mandates, most especially for school-aged children. This “pandemic” has exposed what is truly afoot here, fascist authoritarianism at its most potent and dangerous.
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In the 15-minute time span before the joint session of Congress convened at 1:00 p.m. on January 6, 2021, two incidents that set the stage for the day’s ensuing chaos happened simultaneously.
First, a man named Ryan Samsel, after taking some sort of direction from Ray Epps, overran a thin line of police and metal racks in what would be the first official breach of Capitol grounds around 12:50 p.m. (Samsel was charged and has been incarcerated for more than a year; Epps faces no charges.) Joining Samsel were members of the Proud Boys and a still-unknown number of FBI informants.
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A petition by teachers nationwide pledging to teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) to students regardless of whether states pass laws against the practice has reached more than 8,000 signatures.
“From police violence, to the prison system, to the wealth gap, to maternal mortality rates, to housing, to education and beyond, the major institutions and systems of our country are deeply infected with anti-Blackness and its intersection with other forms of oppression,” the Zinn Education Project’s petition page says. “To not acknowledge this and help students understand the roots of U.S. racism is to deceive them — not educate them.”
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The Senate has approved Governor Glenn Youngkin’s amendments to the recently passed school mask-optional bill. The amendments, which an aide said Youngkin sent to the Senate on Monday evening, include clauses making the bill take effect on March 1.
“As you can probably tell from my remarks, I would like this to take effect yesterday, but that’s not going to happen. And I do believe that we’re going to need a transition time for some of our Northern Virginia school districts and probably elsewhere in the state,” co-sponsor Senator Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax City) said on the Senate floor on Tuesday evening.
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Nine families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting have reached a settlement in their case against the firearms maker Remington, according to several news reports Tuesday.
The settlement comes roughly seven years after the suit was filed, according to a court document filed Tuesday and reviewed by CNN.
Remington was the maker of the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used in the massacre in which the lone shooter killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut.
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Drawing on research from a multimillion-dollar Mark Zuckerberg-linked initiative viewed as pivotal in the 2020 presidential election, 14 states carried by Joe Biden have appealed to him for billions of dollars more to secure elections for the next decade. But most of them have spent less than half their shares of previous federal funding to counter alleged Russian election meddling and other “threats” to election security.
The states’ letter to the president cites a report by the Election Infrastructure Initiative, a progressive nonprofit that estimates $53 billion in taxpayer money will be needed to ensure election security over the next decade.
The Election Infrastructure Initiative is an arm of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which in 2020 distributed nearly $400 million in private grants – $350 million from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan – to local election offices in 48 states and the District of Columbia for the pandemic-challenged presidential election.
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Former U.S. Representative for Virginia’s Second Congressional District Scott Taylor is considering a run for his old seat.
In an email, Taylor stated that he is considering running for VA-2. He also shared the results of a poll that showed significant support for him in a Republican primary.
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Critical social justice’s (CSJ) march through America’s institutions is very nearly complete. CSJ, and its woke evangelists, easily penetrated and commandeered U.S. colleges and universities.
Even White House occupant Joe Biden speaks incessantly about “white supremacy.” The Department of Homeland Security tells us white domestic terrorism is the top threat to America.
Not to be left out, corporate America has proclaimed its total fealty to woke ideology. Leaked documents show companies like Coke imploring their employees to “be less white.” Raytheon—whose laser-guided bombs are disproportionally dropped on people of color—tells its white, straight, Christian, able-bodied, English-speaking employees to deconstruct their identities, “identify [their] privilege,” and “step aside” in favor of other identity groups. AT&T offers employees training that says racism is a “uniquely white trait,” telling white employees that they “are the problem.” It’s pure racism, of course. But not a single Fortune 500 CEO has spoken out against it. They’re too frightened to do so.
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The House of Delegates passed SB 739, which will require schools to make masks optional. After Republicans were surprised by bipartisan votes in the Senate last week to amend the bill to include the mask clause and to pass the bill, Republicans hustled the bill through the necessary House committee hearing and through three required floor sessions, including a two-minute-long pro-forma session on Sunday. By 1 p.m. on Monday, Republicans had already delivered the bill to Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has committed to adding an emergency clause to make it take effect immediately.
After Youngkin adds the clause, both chambers can pass the bill and emergency clause with simple majority votes, setting up the bill to be law and in effect potentially by the end of the week, House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Scott) said on The John Fredericks Show Monday morning.
“Once we adopt his [Youngkin’s] amendments, he’s already signed it and sent it back, it’ll be the law, and we can put this behind us,” Kilgore told The Virginia Star’s publisher, John Fredericks.
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With support from its Republican governor, Vermont is on a course to become the first state in the nation to guarantee a right to abortion and contraception in its constitution.
The Vermont House voted 107-41 for Proposition 5, a proposed amendment that would guarantee sexual and reproductive freedoms to Vermonters once it is placed on the ballot and voters give their support in November.
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Democrats are weighing whether to extend an individual stock trading ban to spouses of lawmakers.
The Ban Conflicted Trading Act “prohibits a Member of Congress or certain congressional officers or employees from (1) purchasing or selling specified investments, (2) entering into a transaction that creates a net short position in a security, or (3) serving as an officer or member of any board of any for-profit entity.”
The legislation in its current form would not apply to the spouses of lawmakers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul has made headlines over the years with his millions of dollars in stock purchases, particularly with technology companies.
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Recent images from the Los Angeles railyards of a sea of cardboard wreckage, the remnants of thousands of stolen packages, have made national headlines. Union Pacific railroad said criminal rail theft in LA has increased by more than 2.5 times since December 2020. Yet while most media coverage focuses on this third-world scene, little has been made of the consequences for the small business sellers ripped off by this grand theft.
Whether it comes in the form of widescale package theft by criminal enterprises or organized smash-and-grab robberies at brick and mortar stores, theft has become a big problem for small businesses. A new survey finds that nearly all small business owners experienced an increase in theft in 2021.
This isn’t the shoplifting of your parent’s generation. Elaborate criminal networks steal and resell goods at below-market rates on internet marketplaces such as Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Alibaba. The cost of lost inventory and ensuing cut-rate online competition puts tremendous pressure on small business margins that are already strained by the highest inflation in 40 years and severe supply chain disruptions.
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