Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin recently announced in a press release that he will donate his first-quarter salary to the Virginia Law Enforcement Assistance Program (VALEAP).
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In just the span of about a week, legislation concerning ending the lives of unborn babies in two states starkly reveals that while many state lawmakers are standing up to protect human life, some appear to be underscoring the extremity with which they are prepared to go to dismiss it.
The states continue to take their respective stands in advance of the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, now awaiting a decision at the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is considered to present the most significant challenge to the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973.
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Khulia Pringle would seem an unlikely critic of the local Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. The St. Paul native embarked on a teaching career in the hope of improving a school system that she saw as failing her daughter. By the time she finished her training in 2014, she had grown so disillusioned with the public school system that she took a job with an education reform group, helping to recruit and place hundreds of tutors in schools across the state.
While she shares the union’s emphasis on pushing for higher pay and smaller classrooms, the self-described liberal education activist says the federation’s three-week strike last month provided final confirmation of her worst fear: The union and public education system place a higher priority on serving their own needs than they do on serving students and parents, 60% of whom are minorities.
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With Tyler Braden’s newest hits, “Try Losing One,” and “Seventeen”, he has proven that his star is on the rise. You will be hearing a lot more from this singer/songwriter in the future.
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Newly released federal inflation data show that prices continue to rise at the fastest rate in four decades, continuing the trend of soaring inflation.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Consumer Price Index, a key indicator of inflation, which showed prices rose an additional 1.2% in March, part of an 8.5 percent spike in the past 12 months.
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With one exception, every gold standard study of masks in community settings has failed to find that they slow the spread of contagious respiratory diseases. The outlier is a widely cited study run in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic, and some of its authors claim it proves that mask mandates “or strategies like handing out masks at churches and other public events—could save thousands of lives each day globally and hundreds each day in the United States.”
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A new study by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found that states led by Republicans did a better job than Democrat-led states at managing the coronavirus and keeping their states from slumping into an economic and social recession.
As reported by The Daily Caller, the three states that ranked the worst in mortality, economy, and schooling during the COVID pandemic were New Jersey, New York, and California, all of which had implemented some of the strictest lockdown measures in the nation. By contrast, the states that ranked the highest were Utah, Vermont, and Nebraska.
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Following four days of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late March, the full Senate voted 53-47 last week to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as an associate justice of the Supreme Court—fulfilling Joe Biden’s campaign pledge to name a black woman to the high court. Three Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in voting to confirm Jackson—Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, and Utah’s Mitt Romney.
Imagine a slightly different scenario: a Republican president nominates someone to serve on the Supreme Court and asks a 50-50 Senate to confirm that person. You can be absolutely sure that Democrats would force the vice president to break the tie to get that nominee on the bench. Remember when, in 2016, President Trump nominated Betsy Devos to be secretary of education and Vice President Mike Pence had to break a tie, even without an evenly split Senate?
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Truckers working between Texas and Mexico have been blocking two busy bridges at the southern U.S. border, amid rising tensions over an order by the office of Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott for tighter safety inspections that also have purportedly slowed traffic.
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A group of 40 House Republicans sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Monday, urging the agency to rescind a regulatory proposal forcing companies to disclose “climate-related risks.”
The Republicans, led by House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment Ranking Member Ralph Norman, slammed the financial regulator, saying it exceeded its congressionally-mandated authority in issuing the climate rule, in the letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The lawmakers added that the rule was especially inappropriate given the ongoing energy crisis.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed 26 bills from the 2022 General Assembly session, including nine of the ten bills sponsored by Senator Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) who helped lead efforts to block some Youngkin appointees. Youngkin also amended over 100 bills, including a bill introducing staggered elections at the Loudoun County School Board; Youngkin’s amendment would force all the members of the board to run for re-election this year.
“My goal as Governor is to make Virginia the best place to live, work, and raise a family and the bills I vetoed today reaffirm that commitment,” Youngkin said in a Monday evening announcement of the 25 newest vetoes. “I look forward to working together with members of the General Assembly in the future to ensure that we’re working for all Virginians. Together we can make the Commonwealth a place where businesses can prosper, students can thrive, and communities are safer.”
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Rocket Lab USA, a private rocket provider, broke ground on a factory for its Neutron rocket at a site adjacent to the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia’s Eastern Shore on Monday. Politicians and officials at the event praised the expansion of Rocket Lab in Virginia as a sign of the expanding importance of Virginia’s spaceport.
“This is the first announcement of an aerospace production facility on the Eastern Shore,” Virginia Space CEO Ted Mercer said.
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A video posted to the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account features a self-described “trans demiboy non-binary” elementary school teacher who argues parents’ claims that pre-K through third grade children are not ready for indoctrination in gender ideology are signs of “internalized homophobia and transphobia.”
“Hi, I’m a queer teacher and I, 1,000 percent, do not support this bill,” states Amanda Tooley, who apparently now uses the name “Skye” and goes by “Mx. T” in her classroom at Saturn Street Elementary Arts and Media Magnet School in Los Angeles.
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Most of the nation’s 48.2 million public K-12 students are assigned to their schools based on geographic school districts or attendance zones, with few options for transferring to another public school district. This method of school assignment intertwines schooling with property wealth, limiting families’ education options according to where they can afford to live.
A 2019 Senate Joint Economic Committee report found that homes near highly rated schools were four times the cost of homes near poorly rated schools. This presents a real barrier for many families – and 56% of respondents in a 2019 Cato survey indicated that expensive housing costs prevented them from moving to better neighborhoods. The challenge has only deepened as housing prices skyrocketed during the pandemic, putting better housing and education options out of reach for many.
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Eighteen months after the contents of Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop were confirmed to be authentic and released to public, a South Carolina congresswoman is finally calling for an investigation.
“I’ve got news for Hunter Biden: when Republicans take the majority next year, he will be called to testify before the Oversight Committee that I sit on,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC-01) said on Tiwtter. “Republicans will get to the bottom of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which the mainstream media refused to cover in 2020.”
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Democrats are scrambling to recapture the youth vote as President Joe Biden’s approval rating plummets among the group, Politico reported Sunday.
Biden’s approval rating among people aged 18-30 dropped significantly over the course of 2021, with a CBS News poll released in January recording a 70% drop compared to February 2021. Gallup released a poll the following month that showed only 31% approved of Biden, compared to former President Barack Obama, whose rating from Gallup with the demographic never fell below 42% throughout his entire presidency.
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Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is suing the Biden administration over claims it is ignoring immigration law that requires the federal government to arrest, detain and deport foreign nationals in the U.S. illegally.
The lawsuit alleges that the Biden administration’s immigration policy exceeds the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, is arbitrary and capricious, illegally bypassed notice and public commenting, and is unconstitutional.
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A Republican lawmaker in Oklahoma is sounding the alarm on what he says is just the “wicked woke stepsister of” Critical Race Theory.
Oklahoma state Senator Shane Jett has proposed legislation to prohibit the teaching of so-called Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in K-12 public schools. The Oklahoma State Department of Education (DOE) is using the seemingly nice sounding name “Social and Emotional Learning” to implement the curriculum as a loophole in a state law that restricts teaching concepts like CRT, according to Jett.
Jett believes his bill, if passed, would shut that loophole and keep SEL out of public schools.
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A North Carolina congressman has introduced a bill to require the federal government to restart rebuilding the border wall, which was halted by President Joe Biden.
U.S. Rep. Ted Budd, R-NC, introduced the Build the Wall Now Act, which removes all legal impediments to building the border wall. Among other things, it unlocks an additional $2.1 billion that was appropriated in fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 that weren’t spent.
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An Iowa judge ruled has ruled that Democratic candidate and former Rep. Abby Finkenauer cannot run in her party’s June 7 primary to unseat seven-term incumbent GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Polk County district Judge Scott Beattie said late on Sunday that Finkenauer lacked the valid signatures she needed on her nominating petition. The judge said Finkenauer failed to submit a petition with enough signatures after two Republicans challenged her signature collection.
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Observers of the Supreme Court should ask themselves what’s the more preposterous mainstream media mindmeld: whether Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself or resign over his wife’s political activism, or the legal brilliance of the Supreme Court Justice-to-be, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Truth be told, what we have here is the myrmidon media’s mockery of the most brilliant Supreme Court justice ever, one they have derisively dismissed as a lawn jockey of the Right, a lackey of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, someone who will be tutored on race by future Justice Jackson, and now a pawn or puppet of his wife. The actual contrast between the two judges could hardly be greater. Of course, neither justice should be held completely responsible for the allies he attracts.
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As inflation rose last year to a 40-year high, Americans’ credit card debt also soared, according to analyses published by the personal-finance website WalletHub.
In its Credit Card Debt study, Wallethub found that consumers racked up $87.3 billion in new debt in 2021. During the fourth quarter of 2021, debt increased by $74.1 billion, the largest increase ever reported, Wallethub notes. It was also a 63% larger increase than the post-Great Recession average for a fourth quarter.
By the end of 2021, the average household credit card balance was $8,590. “That’s $2,642 below WalletHub’s projected breaking point,” the report states.
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Next Monday is Tax Day, the last day for Americans to file their 2021 tax returns. This year’s Tax Day coincides with President Biden’s recent proposal to raise taxes on small businesses, corporations, and individuals by $2.5 trillion. His plan would partly reverse the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed at the end of 2017 that led to historic shared economic prosperity in 2018 and 2019.
While Biden is seeking to contract the size of the private economy through tax increases, numerous states are making positive reforms, including cutting taxes, to expand economic opportunity and well-being for their residents. Rather than fixating on Washington, policymakers can harness these best practices in the states and, eventually, adopt them at the federal level when the political climate allows. Call it the Great Opportunity Project.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin signed 700 bills into law according to a Monday afternoon announcement; Youngkin faced a deadline of April 11 to take action on bills passed at the end of the recent General Assembly session.
“Today marks another important step in a journey for the people of Virginia, one which started even before our nation’s founding. Every year the duly elected representatives of the people assemble to pass new laws on behalf of their constituencies, and I am honored to sign these 700 bills into law this year,” the governor said in the announcement.
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Nearly 100 House Republicans are urging Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals, saying they had the hallmarks of an influence peddling scandal.
The letter led by Reps. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the chair of the House GOP Study Committee, comes as the U.S. attorney in Delaware enters his third year investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes, foreign lobbying and money movements.
In all, 95 House GOP members signed the letter.
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For nearly 70 years, families have traveled to Disney for vacation, not indoctrination.
Sadly, America’s preeminent entertainment company has joined a growing list of corporations bent on pushing woke ideologies.
For decades, Congress has unthinkingly supported these companies. Conservatives need to reassess whether Disney’s bottom line is worth protecting.
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Amazon plans to go on the offensive against the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) following its successful bid to unionize Amazon workers on April 1 in New York City, according to legal documents filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Amazon intends to appeal the Amazon Labor Union’s victory in a 55% majority vote at a Staten Island, New York City warehouse to unionize the facility’s workers. The company argues that labor groups influenced the outcome of the vote.
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On Tuesday, a wind energy company was found guilty in federal court of killing over 150 eagles with their wind turbines over the course of the last ten years.
The Daily Caller reports that ESI Energy, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, pleaded guilty in a federal court in Wyoming to violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. ESI had failed to apply for a special permit granted to some wind energy companies that provides them immunity from inevitable bird strike deaths caused by the massive propellers of the wind turbines.
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The Homestead Festival, a first-of-its-kind outdoor event, will make its debut on June 3-4, 2022, at Grammy-winning and New York Times best-selling author Rory Feek’s 100-acre historic farm in Columbia, Tennessee. Combining music and meaning, the two-day affair features musical performances, including headliner Kevin Costner and Modern West, as well as master-class lectures by prominent homesteading community leaders such as Dr. Temple Grandin, Joel Salatin, Justin Rhodes, and many others.
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As cartels continue to devastate American communities with fentanyl, they’re now finding more customers for the drug in northern Mexico, Noticias Telemundo reported.
Migrants and locals just south of the border, in areas like Tijuana, Mexico, are seeing more users on the streets turning to the drug, the report detailed.
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Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, leading a coalition of 15 Republican attorneys general, has called on the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) to cancel its plan to revise Title IX.
The DOE’s plan to do so, they argue, appears to be an attempt by the federal government to infringe on parental rights in education, erode the rights of women’s and girls’ sports, and reverse existing guarantees for victims of sexual harassment and assault.
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The number of commercial and backyard flocks with confirmed avian flu increased by 36% in the past week, according to data on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) website.
Three of the 57 new cases reported were in Missouri, bringing the state total to nine cases of Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu Influenza (HPAI) in seven counties—Bates, Dade, Gentry, Jasper, Lawrence, Ralls and Stoddard. Approximately 421,000 birds were in those flocks.
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The Alabama legislature passed a bill Thursday criminalizing sex change treatments for children including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries.
The bill, if signed by Gov. Kay Ivey, would treat the castration of children and other sex-change treatments as Class C felonies which, according to Politico, carry a penalty of up to ten years in prison for medical practitioners.
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The pharmaceutical company Moderna on Friday recalled 764,900 doses of its Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine after a “foreign body” was found in a vial.
The contaminated lot was manufactured at a contract manufacturing site, ROVI, in Spain, and was distributed in mid-January 2022 in Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Spain, according to a company press release.
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More details are emerging about the four Secret Service employees entangled in an alleged bribery scheme carried out by two men accused of masquerading as Department of Homeland Security law enforcement agents.
An affidavit filed Wednesday night in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. revealed that one of the Secret Service agents involved in the bribery scheme was a special agent assigned to First Lady Jill Biden’s protective detail. Another was a Uniformed Division officer at the White House.
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Facing an April 11 deadline, Governor Glenn Youngkin signed over 100 bills last week, including Senator Siobhan Dunnavant’s (R-Henrico) SB 656, a bill requiring Virginia public schools to notify parents about sexually explicit instructional material, allow parental review, and provide non-explicit alternatives. The bill instructs the Department of Education to create model policies and requires school boards to pass similar policies.
“These kinds of materials that are being presented in school as an opportunity to develop that relationship between the parent and the child, talk about uncomfortable and challenging things,” Dunnavant said in the Senate Committee on Education and Health in February. “We heard in testimony from the subject matter experts that there was not a consistent policy across the school boards in Virginia, and that it was extremely variable. And as a result, having clear guidelines from the Department of Education would accomplish exactly what everybody thinks already exists, but it doesn’t.”
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A Virginia parent won a legal victory when a Fairfax County judge dismissed four charges of libel and slander with prejudice Friday.
Harry Jackson, a former PTA president of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology who opposed changes to the school’s admissions policy, was facing libel and slander charges in the wake of claiming that a proponent of the new admissions policies exhibited “grooming behavior” on social media. The new policies, which critics have characterized as “race-based,” eliminated standardized testing requirements and were found by a federal judge to discriminate against Asian Americans.
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In the 1980s and 90s, I worked in child advocacy. One of my jobs was to teach children how to protect themselves from abuse. First and foremost I taught children that adults should not be telling children to keep secrets. I taught children if an adult were to tell a child that something the adult does or says must be kept secret from mom or dad, the adult was doing wrong. The first way for a child to protect themselves was to immediately tell mom and dad about adults wanting to keep secrets.
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The Walt Disney Company is staying silent following reports it helps the children of its employees with sex change procedures through its benefits program.
A leaked video shared by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo Thursday purportedly showed a Disney internal meeting in which a man explained Disney’s efforts to help employees “express their gender” at the company. Disney has not publicly addressed its efforts to help employees medically transition their children to the opposite sex following the release of the video, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., has filed a bill that would give states a greater ability to enforce immigration laws when the federal government won’t.
Posey and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced his bill, the Immigration and Enforcement Partnership Act of 2022, after the Biden administration decided to terminate Title 42, a federal public health rule used during national public health emergencies. Moody has sued the administration several times for violating immigration law.
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Border authorities are seeing a continued flow of migrants crossing into the U.S. that are from countries beyond Central America ahead of an expected surge when Title 42 ends.
Title 42, the Trump era order, which has resulted in the expulsion of over 1.7 million migrants, will end May 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Friday.
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On Thursday, a federal court upheld Joe Biden’s mandate that all federal government employees be forced to take a coronavirus vaccine.
The New York Post reports that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Louisiana issued a ruling that overturned a lower court’s decision to block the mandate, which was first issued in September of 2021. In January, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown had ruled the mandate unconstitutional, determining that the rule constituted an overstep in federal authority.
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On Thursday, a researcher with the University of Kansas was convicted of covering up illegal work he was doing on behalf of China while living in the United States.
According to ABC News, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson is still weighing a motion to have the case against Feng Tao of Lawrence, Kansas dismissed. Robinson asked Tao’s lawyers to submit in writing their arguments for dismissal. Until then, the trial will proceed accordingly.
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Moderate Senate Democrats joined Senate Republicans on Thursday in an effort to block President Joe Biden from lifting Title 42, a measure enacted during the pandemic that allows for the quick expulsion of migrants.
The bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed legislation that would halt the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from ending the policy, which the agency announced would cease on May 23, without an adequate plan in place.
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee- Even though I am not much of a whiskey drinker, I am always drawn to a good whiskey song. Something about the solace of sipping the stuff leads to a deeper examination of one’s true self.
Karissa Ella’s newest single “Whiskey Whispers Your Name” is all that and more. They led me to further delve into this rising singer/songwriter and find out what drives her.
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Egg prices continue to soar as the country approaches Easter weekend with more states experiencing H5N1 avian influenza A outbreaks, killing millions of birds.
Meat and egg producers in at least 24 states have experienced the worst avian flu outbreak since 2015, killing nearly 23 million birds and driving the price of eggs and poultry even higher, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), USA Today reported.
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Who hasn’t noticed that current trends have been leading us away from human happiness? We will be better prepared to make the desperately needed corrections if we recapture the forgotten power of the American idea offered in Robert Curry’s Common Sense Nation. Curry introduces us to the English, French, Scottish, and American Enlightenment. That will equip us to distinguish between the path that leads to ordered liberty and the other path that is now leading us toward chaos.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigned on creating 20 new charter schools in Virginia, but the Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee killed Republican-led charter school legislation. As a result, Republicans are pivoting to lab schools — schools that are part of the local district operated as partnerships with education programs at local higher ed institutions. Legislation to expand Virginia’s lab schools to institutions with programs beyond education is currently in conference committee with negotiators from the House of Delegates and the Senate to try to create a compromise to send to Youngkin.
“It’s going to be an opportunity for us to move some charter-schools-lite through,” House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Scott) told The Virginia Star during a discussion of top priorities at the beginning of the 2022 special session.
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Loudoun County Public Schools has announced that it will hold town hall sessions at four locations on April 18, 19, and 21, with some sessions held simultaneously. On Tuesday evening, the school board also voted to form a parent advisory group.
“These Community Town Hall meetings will be facilitated by RTI International, an external firm leading strategic planning on behalf of the division. Loudoun County School Board members will also be in attendance. These sessions are designed to create a space for community members to think about and articulate their vision for all students in LCPS moving forward. Participating community members will have an opportunity to offer input and provide feedback on the most important actions they’d like to see the division take over the next five years, as well as programs and practices that they hope will be added, discontinued, or otherwise considered,” the district announced.
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Barack Obama has long bragged about his supposedly scandal-free presidency, a claim that conveniently ignores a host of ethical problems, from Hunter Biden profiting off access to Obama’s White House to the IRS harassing conservative activists. But the biggest scandal of Obama’s presidency is still coming into focus: his administration’s spying on a political opponent, Donald Trump, based on nothing more than a dirty trick deployed by Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
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