From Paul Manafort to the Jan. 6 defendants, federal prosecutors and courts routinely seize passports and impose travel restrictions on those charged with or convicted of crimes to eliminate any flight risk.
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For the first time since then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lowered the threshold to confirm a Supreme Court nominee from 60 votes to a simple majority, Democrats have a Senate majority.
Despite Democrats’ advantage being as slim as it can be in the 50-50 split chamber, their majority means that there is little Republicans can do to block anybody whom President Joe Biden nominates, assuming his party votes unanimously to confirm. Biden has also vowed to nominate a black woman, meaning his pick will likely be the first to ever serve on the Supreme Court.
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The Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted in a recent letter that it has not been keeping track of the number of illegal aliens who have been deported after initially being released into the country.
As reported by Breitbart, the DHS on Biden’s watch has reinstated the controversial open-borders policy of “Catch and Release,” where illegals who are apprehended at the border are promptly released into the nation’s interior. Over the last year, this practice has seen at least one million illegals released into the country after initially being detained.
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Sixteen women on the University of Pennsylvania swim team said their transgender teammate, Lia Thomas, should not be allowed to compete in the women’s category, The Washington Post reported.
The teammates sent a letter to the university and to Ivy League officials asking that they not take legal action against new NCAA rules which would block Thomas from competing in the 2022 championships, according to the Post. The women said they supported Thomas’s decision to live as a transgender woman, but they say “the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity.”
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After GoFundMe banned Canada’s Freedom Convoy of truckers from using its service, CloutHub has stepped in to fill the void.
“There is no more important movement for freedom across the American continent right now than the Freedom Convoy 2022,” CloutHub founder Jeff Brain said in a press release. “We are proud to support the Canadian Truckers and will help support the other Trucker movements popping up around the world to fight against unlawful mandates. CloutHub is where the world connects and organizes to take on the issues they care about, including defending liberty and freedom.”
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The Richmond City Democratic Committee voted Thursday to censure Senator Joe Morrissey (D-Richmond) over threats Morrissey made to Petersburg NAACP President Lafayette Jefferson.
RCDC member Jimmie Lee Jarvis made the motion to censure the senator. “I was very upset to read, and then hear, Sen. Morrissey’s appalling and repeated threats of violence against a constituent, Mr. Jefferson,” Jarvis said according to The Virginia Scope.
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RICHMOND, Virginia – The House of Delegates passed a bill banning consideration of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions to Virginia’s governor’s schools. That’s a reaction to controversy at Thomas Jefferson (TJ) High School for Science and Technology, where officials instituted a merit lottery to try to expand the largely Asian American student base to underrepresented groups while still maintaining a high standard. Conservatives saw that as part of a broader wave of watered-down academic standards in the name of equity, and Republicans campaigned in 2021 on restoring Virginia’s educational standards of excellence.
Delegates debated HB 127 on Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Delegate Richard (Rip) Sullivan (D-Fairfax) said he and his wife spent years as proud TJ Colonials parents.
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In December, the United States, United Kingdom and Australia all announced diplomatic boycotts against the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and since then, several other nations around the world have joined the boycott.
A diplomatic boycott means that government officials from those nations will not attend the Olympic Games. This sent an important message to the citizens of those countries that attending the games even as spectators is immoral and at odds with the spirit of their own nation.
The Chinese Communist Party knew this, and in a preemptive attempt to avoid the embarrassment of empty bleachers, it made a decision on Jan. 17 not to sell spectator tickets to people from outside China’s mainland, and invite in controlled groups instead.
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Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) doubled down on his position that if public universities want to mandate COVID-19 vaccines, they must wait until the General Assembly passes a law to that effect.
“The COVID-19 vaccine is a critical tool in our fight against COVID-19, and it could save your life. The Attorney General has been vaccinated , has received the booster, and he encourages everyone to get the vaccine,” Miyares’ spokeswoman Victoria LaCivita told The Virginia Star. “He also promised to be an Attorney General that calls balls and strikes – and according to Virginia law, only the General Assembly can enact a statute that requires the COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of enrollment or in-person attendance, as it has with six other vaccines.”
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The House of Delegates Finance Committee advanced a bill to eliminate Virginia’s grocery tax and a bill to double the standard deduction on income tax; those are two key promises Governor Glenn Youngkin made in his campaign as part of his focus on “kitchen-table issues.”
HB 90, sponsored by Delegate Joe McNamara (R-Roanoke) exempts food for human consumption and essential personal hygiene items from state and local sales taxes. On Monday, Delegates Candi Mundon King (D-Prince William) and Delegate Richard ‘Rip’ Sullivan (D-Fairfax) expressed concern about how a different Youngkin-inspired tax bill would impact low-income Virginians. McNamara recalled those remarks in the Wednesday committee meeting.
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The investigative reporter and author of the new book “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win” told The Star News Network that U.S. colleges and universities, such as the case with Yale University and Joseph Tsai, are not complying with federal reporting laws in regards to their gifts from China and Chinese nationals.
“Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 is very explicit,” said Peter Schweizer, the founder and president of the Government Accountability Institute and the host of “The Drill Down” podcast. “It says that if U.S. colleges and universities take in foreign donations, they’re required to report those to the federal government.”
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The faith, trust, and confidence in our election process has been in steep decline for decades. Concerns over hanging chads and dimpled ballots from 2000’s presidential election may now have been replaced with questions about photo ID and drop boxes – but the overall result is the same: The American people simply don’t trust the outcome of elections.
In fact, recent polls show only 57% of voters believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. Similarly, just 61% of Americans believe Trump legitimately won in 2016.
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Black Lives Matter (BLM) removed fundraising features from its website Wednesday after California and Washington threatened to hold the group’s leaders personally liable for its missing financial records, the Washington Examiner reported.
BLM hasn’t had a known leader managing its $60 million bankroll since May 2021, the Examiner reported. California demanded that BLM cease all fundraising activities Wednesday due to the BLM Global Network’s failure to report on its 2020 finances, and the state said it would hold BLM leaders personally liable if they do not submit information about the organization’s finances within 60 days.
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A newly-released study from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University revealed that the sweeping lockdowns in response to the Chinese coronavirus had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study was conducted through an analysis of 24 different studies that all focused on government mandates ordering the closure of various aspects of everyday life, including school and business shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and stay-at-home orders, among others.
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Young women were five times less likely than young men to aspire toward STEM careers in 80 different countries, according to research and a report from the Institute for Family Studies published in late January.
Women preferred “people-oriented” careers such as nursing or teaching, while men preferred “things-oriented” careers generally falling into STEM or blue-collar categories, researchers reported.
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Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called on President Joe Biden to abandon NATO’s pledge to accept Ukraine as a member of the organization.
“It is not clear that Ukraine’s accession would serve U.S. interests,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Indeed, deteriorating conditions in the global security environment caution otherwise.”
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A U.S. operation lead to the death of the leader of the Islamic State in northwest Syria late Wednesday evening, the Pentagon said.
The mission resulted in the death of its target, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the known leader of the terror group ISIS, according to the Department of Defense. There were no American casualties and all U.S. forces were safely evacuated.
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Elementary and high schools throughout the country this week are having children participate in Black Lives Matter at School’s “Week of Action,” using lesson plan “resources” based on the activist organization’s core principles that seek to disrupt Western family structure, and teach children to affirm the “transgender” and “queer” lifestyles.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) at School has provided a toolkit for schools and teachers with a curriculum that features a movie for different grade bands matched to “the 13 guiding principles of the BLM movement.”
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One way of understanding the 2009-2014 Obama Administration policy of “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to recall two iconic incidents.
The first was the 2009 “reset.”
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On Wednesday, the United States Army announced that it will begin the process of discharging any soldiers who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine effective immediately.
As reported by ABC News, the Army is the last branch of the United States military to fully discharge those who do not comply with the strict vaccine mandates; the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have already discharged all personnel who refuse the vaccines, from active-duty members to entry-level members at boot camps.
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Facebook parent company Meta is on pace to lose roughly $200 billion in market value as shares plummeted early Thursday.
The company’s shares dropped as much as 23% in pre-market trading which, if the losses hold, would lose Meta roughly $200 billion in market value.
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The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) redefined racism again on Monday with what it called an “interim definition.”
Racism is now defined by the group as occurring “when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity,” according to Professor Robert Livingston of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University.
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The House of Delegates passed a bill to repeal the 2020 law authorizing localities to ban firearms on locality property. Delegates debated the bill on Wednesday before the vote Thursday.
“House Bill 827 returns our code back to its prior position,” Delegate Tony Wilt (R-Rockingham) said on Wednesday. “Other portions of the bill: it eliminates the requirement to destroy firearms that are confiscated and rather allows them to be offered for sale through a licensed dealer. And it also limits the ability of localities to sue firearm manufacturers.”
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Though children are least likely to experience severe illness from COVID-19, the level of mental health distress many are exhibiting during the government’s response to the pandemic is “utterly devastating,” child psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald said in a recent interview.
The Los Angeles-based clinician expressed his concern during a late November podcast for the Unity Project, an organization working to end COVID-19 vaccine mandates for healthy children in grades K-12.
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After Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) wrote a legal opinion last week saying that vaccine mandates for public university students are illegal, several of the state’s largest schools have backed off their COVID-19 vaccine requirements.
“Absent specific authority conferred by the General Assembly, public institutions of higher education in Virginia may not require vaccination against COVID-19 as a general condition of students’ enrollment or in-person attendance,” Attorney General Jason Miyares said in his opinion.
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The Washington NFL football team on Wednesday officially announced its new name as the “Commanders,” according to multiple news reports.
The team changed its name from the Washington Redskins several years ago, amid decades of pressure from those who said the name was derogatory toward Native Americans.
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Very odd things are happening in Canada, not the least of which is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fleeing the capital city for security reasons, or so officials say. Canadians are a notoriously compliant, unquestioning, deferential lot. But this hasn’t stopped thousands of them from gathering near the parliament buildings in Ottawa to effectively shut down the central part of the city.
The trigger for this unprecedented protest is a vaccine mandate for long-haul truckers, whose big rigs now line the streets, horns blaring between a variety of protest chants, some of which are more printable than others (“Truck Trudeau,” and variations thereof, has been a common refrain). Last week, as the convoys moved toward and converged on the capital from the east, west, and south—numbers are disputed, but it seems certain they formed the longest convoys in history—it became clear that the list of grievances had grown to include just about everything associated with some of the most enduring, draconian, and nonsensical COVID restrictions in the world.
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On Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray declared that the greatest foreign threat to the United States is the country of China, adding that the nation’s recent escalation of tensions regarding the country of Taiwan are “more brazen” and “more damaging” than anything seen in recent history.
The New York Post reports that Wray made his remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. Just days before the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Wray said that China poses a threat “to our economic security and to our freedoms: Our freedom of speech, of conscience, our freedom to elect and be served by our representatives without foreign meddling, our freedom to prosper when we toil and invent.”
“I’ve spoken a lot about this threat since I became FBI director,” Wray continued. “But I want to focus on it here tonight because in many ways it’s reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before, and it’s vital, vital, that all of us focus on that threat together.”
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Record amounts of fentanyl and other drugs are being seized in Kansas after they’ve made their way north from Mexico and the state’s attorney general, Derek Schmidt, said he is trying to stop it. He joined a coalition of other Republican attorneys general at the Texas-Mexico border to see first-hand how the Biden administration’s open border policies are contributing to crime in Kansas.
In one briefing with the Texas Department of Public Safety, the AGs learned that Texas state troopers alone had seized enough fentanyl last year to kill over 200 million people. They also arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants for committing state crimes, including for child trafficking and drug smuggling, seized over five tons of methamphetamine, and over $17 million in cash as part of Operation Lone Star, Texas’ border security initiative.
While it’s “good news that they’re seizing more, there’s no reason to think that there’s less of it eluding seizure at the border because the border’s wide open in large swaths,” Schmidt told The Center Square. “I don’t think it’s a good news number. I think it’s an indication of the increased volume coming across the border, not an indication of increased success in stopping it at the border.”
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At least eight of Joe Biden’s nominations for the Department of Justice have been placed on hold by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), due to the Department’s failure to answer Cotton’s questions about its inaction over the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
As reported by Fox News, Cotton’s criticisms have focused specifically on the DOJ’s failure to properly defend a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, which ended up under siege by far-left domestic terrorists on a daily basis throughout 2020 and even into 2021. Cotton has already sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland pointing out that, on top of letting the courthouse itself be attacked, the DOJ has not offered any legal assistance to several U.S. Marshals who have been sued for defending the courthouse against rioters.
“These courageous officers were attacked by left-wing street militants with weapons such as mortar fire, ball bearings, and blinding lasers,” Cotton’s letter reads in part. “A refusal to represent these Deputy Marshals would violate the Department’s long-standing practice — not to mention its moral duty — to defend law-enforcement officers when they’re sued for actions in the line of duty.”
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The flow of natural gas through a key Russian-controlled pipeline suddenly stopped Wednesday as tensions continue to increase between Russia and the West.
The Yamal-Europe pipeline’s liquified natural gas (LNG) flows, which are operated by Russian state-run firm Gazprom and have usually been pumped westward from Russia to Germany through Poland, were halted early Wednesday, European data showed, according to Reuters. The sudden stoppage reportedly represented a setback after leaders expected the pipeline to return to its normal flow pattern.
In December 2021, Gazprom slowed the pipeline’s gas flows, which represent 10% of the region’s supply, and the company reversed the flow direction from westward to eastward. The sudden reversal sent natural gas prices, which had already spiked amid a European energy crisis, even higher.
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President Joe Biden plans to send another 3,000 troops to Europe amid continued tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
Biden is sending about 2,000 troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Poland and Germany this week. The president is also moving about 1,000 soldiers based in Germany to Romania, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration officials.
“They are trained and equipped for a variety of missions during this period of elevated risk,” a senior defense official told the Wall Street Journal.
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The federal government, like many private companies that have offices in different locations, has provisions to adjust employees’ pay based on their location. It’s called locality pay.
For example, an employee in San Francisco, Calif. has a significantly higher cost of living than an employee in Casper, Wyo. San Francisco’s locality adjustment is an additional 41.44% of base pay.
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“The Postal Inspection Service data revealed that mail theft reports soared by 600% over three years, from about 25,000 in 2017 to roughly 177,000 through August of 2020,” Frank Albergo said. “But when asked to explain the apparent explosion in mail theft, the Inspection Service backtracked and said the figures might be inaccurate.”
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NASHVILLE, Tennesee- Before you ask, yes, Bobby Cyrus is related to Billy Ray Cyrus. Bobby Cyrus is Billy Ray Cyrus’ younger cousin. They both hail from the same region around Louisa, Kentucky where bluegrass music was a prominent part of their heritage. Their grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher and church music was an integral part of their upbringing.
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An Iowa representative introduced Tuesday a bill that would allow parents to watch live footage of their children in public school classrooms.
“I think we need to showcase the great work our teachers do,” Rep. Norlin Mommsen, R-DeWitt, a farmer, told The Center Square in a phone interview Tuesday.
He said that through the COVID-19 pandemic, parents learned they wanted to be more involved, and this is a mechanism of facilitating parental involvement.
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Although Connecticut will add 60,000 jobs this year, the state won’t be back to pre-pandemic levels of employment until 2023, industry groups say.
“The inability to grow jobs at the national average or even at the top of the Northeast means that Connecticut’s economy is going to continue to grow slower than the rest of the country and the Northeast,” Chris DiPentima, president and CEO of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, told The Center Square. “The slow job growth means that businesses are not meeting the customer demand that they have. Connecticut, in turn, is not realizing the state’s total economic growth potential. Most businesses are hopeful that the state will put some policies in place to fuel growth and the jobs added each month will increase. This will help recover the jobs that we’ve lost before the end of this year.”
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I had a junior high social studies teacher who was fond of saying that if it reached its logical conclusion, liberalism would eventually become fascism. He was long dead before Ilhan Omar hit the scene, but he would be gratified to see his prediction in action.
Omar’s Combating International Islamophobia Act passed the House of Representatives on a narrow party line vote recently. If it becomes law, it will mandate a new State Department bureaucracy to report on anti-Islamic activity as a human rights violation. English is Omar’s second language, and the wording of the bill shows it. Its definition of Islamophobia is not precise. An example of the text includes “acts of physical violence against, or harassment of, Muslim people, and acts of violence against, or vandalism of, Muslim community institutions, including schools, mosques, and cemeteries, and instances of propaganda in government and nongovernment media that attempt to justify or promote racial hatred or incite acts of violence against Muslim people.”
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RICHMOND, Virginia – The Senate Privileges and Elections Committee blocked Governor Glenn Youngkin’s nominee for Secretary of Natural Resources, former Trump EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) moved to remove Wheeler’s name from a Senate resolution to confirm the nominees.
“We received a letter from 150 former EPA employees, who suggested that Mr. Wheeler had undermined the work of the EPA and worked against the environmental interests in this country. We think that members of the governor’s cabinet ought to be able to unite us as Virginians, and certainly the secretary of natural resources ought to be one that we have confidence in, in terms of working for the preservation and conservation of our natural resources,” Deeds said.
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CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker has resigned from the company due to an undisclosed relationship with his “closest colleague.”
In a memo to employees, Zucker wrote, “As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years. I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong. As a result, I am resigning today.”
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Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, author of the new book “Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win,” told The Star News Network that the leader of Senate Republicans, Kentucky’s Sen. A. Mitchell “Mitch” McConnell, is tied to the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party through his wife’s family.
“When Mitch McConnell married Elaine Chao, he married into a family with very substantial connections on mainland China and the Chinese Communist Party,” said Schweizer, who is also the president of The Government Accountability Institute.
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RICHMOND, Virginia – The Republican-controlled House of Delegates passed two bills addressing the minimum wage, including a repeal of increases passed by Democrats in previous sessions. Delegate Nick Freitas (R-Culpeper) and Delegate Sally Hudson (D-Charlottesville) debated about the need for minimum wage increases on the House floor Monday.
“I have it on good theological guidance that nothing in this bill is going to cause you to be cast into eternal darkness and gnashing of teeth,” Freitas said, defending his HB 320 against a claim that eliminating minimum wage increases harms “the least among us,” a reference to Jesus’ teaching in the Bible.
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The omicron variant may be nearing its peak in some states, but across the country it’s produced a dizzying array of conflicting signals on whether the nation should remain under a COVID national emergency or move on to an endemic “new normal.”
Comedian Bill Maher’s “I don’t want to live in your mask-paranoid world anymore” monologue went viral last week, just days after the Atlantic, the standard-bearer journal for the liberal intelligentsia, ran a story headlined: “COVID Parenting Has Passed the Point of Absurdity.” Accompanying the article was a black-and-white photo of a woman frozen in a more desperate and primal state of panic than the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Omicron, for most people without co-morbidities, produces much milder symptoms than do the coronavirus’s previous variants, but it’s far more infectious, racing through schools, shutting down classrooms and forcing parents to consult their district’s ever-shifting COVID “decision trees” on a seemingly daily basis.
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President Joe Biden’s commitment to only nominate a a new Supreme Court justice who is a Black female does not have broad support, a newly released poll suggests.
The ABC/Ipsos poll found that 76% of surveyed Americans say Biden should consider “all possible nominees” to fill Breyer’s seat while 23% say Biden should “consider only nominees who are Black women, as he has pledged to do.”
Biden promised several times during the campaign to nominate a Black female justice, saying he is “looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court.”
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A large coalition of state financial officers announced their opposition to one of President Joe Biden’s top nominees for the Federal Reserve over her “radical” policy positions.
Sarah Bloom Raskin would put U.S. financial and economic stability at risk to achieve her “preferred social outcomes” if confirmed, the top financial officers of 25 states wrote to Biden in a letter Monday. Raskin, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, has taken particular aim at addressing climate change through aggressive financial policies.
“As State Treasurers, Auditors, and financial officers, we write to express our strong disapproval of Sarah Bloom Raskin as your choice for Vice-Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Bank. We urge you to withdraw her nomination,” the letter stated.
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President Joe Biden’s nominee to regulate the banking industry has previously expressed support for economic reparations to black Americans, Fox Business reported Monday.
Lisa Cook, a professor of international relations and economics at Michigan State University, has an extensive history of supporting “race-specific” financial compensation “because the injury was race-specific,” Fox reported. Cook was nominated on Jan. 14 to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
“Everybody benefited from slavery. Everybody. So, I think that we absolutely need some sort of reckoning with that,” said Cook on the EconTalk podcast in September 2020. “One thing I do support is H.R. 40 … I think that’s absolutely what needs to be done,” said Cook in a March 2021 talk at Berkeley Haas, referencing a bill that would establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals.
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A worker rights group is calling out two powerful teachers unions, claiming that they “hold the education of kids hostage” in a press release.
Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF), told the Daily Caller News Foundation that teachers unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are taking advantage of a labor law provision passed in the 1930s for the private sector.
“In several states across the country, union officials, specifically teachers’ union officials, have been granted a really unique privilege called exclusive monopoly bargaining,” Mix said, adding that former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed granting such privileges to public-sector unions while in office.
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The Washington Post has recused its new national editor, Matea Gold, from the news organization’s coverage of the FBI and Justice Department over a personal conflict of interest. A month before Gold was promoted, her husband, Jonathan Lenzner, was named FBI chief of staff.
A Post spokeswoman told RealClearInvestigations that the paper’s managing editor, Steven Ginsberg, will be overseeing coverage of the Justice Department and the FBI. Kristine Coratti Kelly, the paper’s chief communications officer, said the decision does not reflect on Gold’s objectivity or credibility.
“We have every confidence in Matea’s professionalism and high standards,” Kelly said. “She has recused herself from this area of coverage to avoid even the appearance of partiality.”
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The crisis on the Russian-Ukrainian border has been a surreal spectacle for some weeks. This is not how invasions occur and wars begin. The potential aggressor does not mass large forces on the border of a possible target country before full international view and issue continuous statements to the international media about its intentions. And the senior military officials of great powers do not—as Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley ( leading man of the Afghan debacle) and some of his colleagues have done—publicly speculate on the psychology and likely intentions of the leader of the country implicitly threatening to start a war. Whatever Milley’s talents may be, there is no reason to believe that mind-reading is among them. It is, in any case, not part of his brief to give regular bulletins on what he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions may be.
This is Gilbert and Sullivan warmongering.
If Putin intended to invade Ukraine he would do so as he did with Crimea in 2008 and attempt to achieve some element of surprise. Instead he has made an international public spectacle of amassing six to 10 divisions on the Ukraine border, which every informed person in the world knows is inadequate to defeat and dominate a resistant country of 40 million people. This is theater: Russia pretends to threaten to be going to war; America pretends to react strongly, the NATO allies send forces to neighboring countries that are not under threat while asserting that they will on no account deploy forces into Ukraine, but will apply sanctions to Russia; some even propose preemptive sanctions against Russia although it has not actually done anything objectionable. (Russia could never be more than moderately inconvenienced by sanctions, especially if China and Germany ignore them.)
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After students at George Mason University (GMU) fought the school’s administration on mandatory booster shots for COVID-19, the school Monday announced that it has scrapped the mandate, though it did not credit the students for their efforts.
“George Mason University announced today it will strongly encourage students who remain unvaccinated to get the COVID-19 vaccine and booster, but no longer require it, in observance of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ opinion,” the school said in a message written by President Gregory Washington.
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