Commentary: Defensive Gun Uses in Month of July Show Protective Benefits of Second Amendment

I testified before Congress’ Joint Economic Committee last month in a hearing focused on “the economic toll of gun violence.”

Of course, there’s no doubt that gun violence imposes a tremendous cost on society, both financially and in far less readily calculable ways. How does one measure, for example, the mental and emotional toll of being shot?

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‘Taking Down a Landscape Business Owner’: Rep. Thomas Massie Sounds the Alarm on Viral IRS Training Video

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a video showing potential IRS agents training Friday and urged Americans to notice a billionaire wasn’t the target.

“Notice the scenario in this IRS recruiting program is ‘taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles,’ not ‘taking down a billionaire who uses the corporate jet for private trips,’” Massie posted.

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Commentary: The Democrat Push to Redefine Infertility

The Democrats continue to weaponize the administrative state, from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago to the vast expansion of the Internal Revenue Service.

Shortly after Congress voted, with no Republican support, to expand the IRS by 87,000 new employees, Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Judy Chu of California introduced a bill to use the IRS as a vehicle to redefine infertility.

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Another Pregnancy Care Center in Massachusetts Is Vandalized, Abortion Activists ‘Jane’s Revenge’ Takes Credit

In the latest attack on a pro-life organization, pro-abortion extremists spray-painted threatening messages and anarchist symbols outside a pro-life pregnancy center in Massachusetts late Wednesday or early Thursday, according to police.  Since last May, when a draft ruling was leaked indicating that the U.S. Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe v. Wade,  there have been about 94 attacks on pro-life facilities and churches.

Bethlehem House Inc. Pregnancy Care Center in Easthampton, 99 miles west of Boston, was targeted by pro-abort vandals, who splattered red paint across the white exterior of the facility. One message sprayed painted in black on the ground outside the center read: “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you!”

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Younger Americans Identify as Independent More than Republicans, Democrats Combined

Younger Americans are still less willing to commit to one political party, newly released polling data shows.

Gallup released survey data Thursday showing that Millennials and Gen Z Americans are sticking with the “Independent” label. In fact, more of the surveyed Millennial and Gen Z Americans identify as Independent than as Republican and Democrat combined.

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Historic American Muscle Car Will Be Fully Electric by 2024

Dodge’s popular muscle cars, the two-door Challenger and four-door Charger, will be discontinued in 2023 and replaced in 2024 by a fully electric model, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Dodge announced two new electric vehicles at the Dodge Speed Week event in Pontiac, Michigan, this week, according to a press release by Dodge parent company Stellantis. The first was the Dodge Hornet, a Compact Utility Vehicle that offered both a plug-in hybrid and traditional gas engine model, and the second was the battery-powered muscle car, the Charger Daytona SRT Concept, named in honor of the Charger Daytona, the first car to break 200 mph on a NASCAR track.

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New Chief of Staff for Customs and Border Protection is Son of Top Virginia Democrat

Nathaniel Kaine, son of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), has been appointed chief of staff for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Tim Kaine, the Democrats’ 2016 vice presidential nominee, serves on the Senate Armed Services and Budget committees, both of which are involved in funding and oversight for the border enforcement agency.

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Catholic Group Unveils Ad Slamming Biden for ‘Failure’ to Protect Churches, Pregnancy Centers from Attacks

CatholicVote, a Catholic advocacy organization, released a seven-figure ad campaign Wednesday targeting President Joe Biden for failing to protect Catholic churches and pregnancy resource centers from escalating attacks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

There have been 64 incidents against pro-life organizations and 69 against Catholic churches since the court’s decision to overturn Roe was leaked May 2, according to CatholicVote. The ad shows a clip of Biden, who is Catholic, encouraging pro-abortion protesters alongside a video of John F. Kennedy, America’s only other Catholic president, condemning attacks on churches.

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Church Sues Police Department, City for Taking Its Weed and Shrooms

A religious organization in Oakland, California, that celebrates controlled psychedelic mushrooms and marijuana use is suing the city, the police department and one of its officers for allegedly violating its First- and 14th-Amendment rights in connection with a 2020 raid that seized substances from its building, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Oakland police raided Zide Door Church of Entheogenic Plants that year, taking cash and roughly $200,000 in mushrooms and cannabis following claims it was running an unpermitted cannabis dispensary, the outlet reported. The church is accusing authorities and one particular officer of discriminating against its religious beliefs.

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Gun Groups Caution against Richmond Gun Buyback Event

Richmond held a gun buyback program Saturday in an attempt to curb gun violence, but some critics have cautioned that such programs would not likely have that effect.

Individuals who seek to get rid of their firearms on a no-questions-asked policy were to do so at Liberation Church in Richmond. The city council approved the gun buyback event and bought the firearms using gift cards.

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John Fredericks Commentary: Godzilla Wins 2022 NFL Football Preview

Well here we are again! Welcome to the first NFL 2022 edition of GodzillaWins.com, our NFL football preview! 

I don’t speak for Jack from Tunica and Nate from Reno, I’ll let them get crushed by me again this year – but as for Godzilla – I am poised for a record setting year! 

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Commentary: Virginia is Ground Zero for the ‘Latino Realignment’

The left denies it, but it’s truly happening – a massive realignment is underway in the American electorate as Latinos are leaning in with the GOP. This November, Republicans are running Hispanic nominees in key battleground districts, headlined by rising stars like Myra Flores, Cassy Garcia, and Monica De La Cruz in Texas, Michelle Garcia Holmes and Alexis Martinez Johnson in New Mexico, Lori Chavez-DeRemer in Oregon – and of course, Yesli Vega in Virginia. Over the past two years, the Old Dominion has been ground zero for this shift, providing a glimpse into what the future of the Republican Party might look like on a national scale.

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Commentary: Green Fascists Are Destroying the World

Earlier this summer, the CO2 Coalition was banished from LinkedIn. The CO2 Coalition, with only three full-time employees and an annual budget of under $1 million, had committed the unpardonable sin of sharing contrarian perspectives on climate science. Its work, produced by a network of volunteers that includes dozens of distinguished scientists, offers indispensable balance on a topic that requires honest debate now more than ever.

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With $3.2 Billion in Excess Cash, Youngkin Setting Aside $397 Million for Tax Relief Proposal in 2023

RICHMOND, Virginia — Governor Glenn Youngkin is directing $397 million in excess funds to be set aside for unspecified tax relief in 2023, as Virginia has $3.2 billion in excess cash — $2 billion in unplanned revenues plus Fiscal Year 2022 spending that was $1.2 billion less than planned.

“Today I formally report to the General Assembly that Virginia ended the fiscal year with a record general fund balance,” Youngkin said at a Friday morning joint meeting of the House of Delegates Finance and Appropriations Committees and the Senate Finance Committee.

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Biden’s New Spending Bill Supersizes the EPA’s Budget

The Democrats’ massive climate spending package, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday, will give over $40 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), just as the bill allocates almost $80 billion to expand the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The bill, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, includes $369 billion in total climate spending, and will give the EPA more than $40 billion in the current fiscal year to combat climate change, enforce environmental standards and secure “environmental justice,” according to a Congressional Research Service report. The EPA’s enacted budget for 2022’s fiscal year was about $9.5 billion, according to the agency figures, meaning the bill will more than quadruple the EPA’s current annual spending.

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Planned Parenthood to Spend $50 Million on 2022 Midterm Elections

On Wednesday, the far-left pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood that it would be spending a record total of $50 million on the midterm elections this year, with the stated goal of electing as many pro-abortion candidates to office as possible.

The Daily Caller reports that the statement was released by Planned Parenthood Votes, one of the political advocacy groups in the broader orbit of the main Planned Parenthood organization. The statement declared that the historic sum would be “strategically used to elect abortion rights champions” in the aftermath of the decision earlier this year by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, which returned the issue of abortion back to the individual states to be decided.

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Commentary: The Top Five Cities with the Highest Inflation in America

My wife and I recently were out for our morning walk and she commented on how weird inflation is. Some prices are sky high, she observed, while others have barely budged.

A carton of eggs is up 33 percent over the last year, while tomatoes haven’t changed at all. Airline flights are through the roof, but the cabin we rented on our last vacation was several hundred dollars less than in previous years. Our electric bill is soaring, but her personal care products and my son’s new sneakers were about the same (or less) than what she had previously paid.

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Commentary: America Needs Help for Its China Addiction

With China’s decision to close negotiations with the U.S. following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, it’s fair to ask how the U.S.’s rapport with the People’s Republic got to this tense point in the first place.

The actor Dennis Quaid said his involvement with cocaine had three stages: “the fun, the fun with problems, and then just the problems.”

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Republican Governor Sues Biden Admin for Refusing to Clean Up Native Americans’ Contaminated Lands

Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska filed a complaint in Alaska’s United States District Court to compel the Department of the Interior (DOI) to take responsibility for hundreds of contaminated areas that the federal government transferred to Alaska Natives.

Dunleavy and the state of Alaska filed the lawsuit in mid-July as a last resort after the DOI allegedly ignored calls to identify and clean up 650 former federal military installations, oil drilling sites and other projects that are contaminating Native Alaskan lands, according to court filings. Despite the Biden administration’s emphasis on securing “environmental justice” for minority communities, the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), nor any other associated federal agency, is taking responsibility, the lawsuit alleges, allowing pollution and toxic waste to creep into natives’ food and water systems.

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China Rations Energy Supplies Amid Severe Drought

China imposed sweeping power cuts to households and factories in Sichuan province, including those belonging to major electronics companies where drought conditions have strained the region’s hydropower-based energy production capacity.

Water levels at hydropower reservoirs that supply the province of 94 million people have fallen by as much as 50% in August as China faces its largest heatwave since 1961, the AP reported, citing data from the Sichuan Provincial Department of Economics and Information Technology. After the provincial government ordered solar panel, cement, electronics and fertilizer factories to reduce power consumption, many shut down or reduced operations.

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Federal Court Allows Biden to Once Again Pause Oil and Gas Drilling

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday threw out a lower court’s order that would have stopped the Biden administration’s moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, according to court filings.

The 5th Circuit court appeals court vacated the Louisiana district court’s decision to block the Interior Department’s (DOI) leasing pause after Louisiana and a dozen other states filed a lawsuit against the administration, arguing that they would suffer injury from the policy, according to legal documents. The federal court determined that the lower court’s directive does not specifically outline what the Biden administration is and is not permitted to do.

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Judge Chastises DoD, Marine Corps in Order Granting Class Action Status in Vaccine Mandate Case

U.S District Court Judge Steven Merryday issued a blistering rebuke of the Department of Defense and Marine Corps for refusing to grant religious accommodation requests to service members.

Merryday did so when issuing a 48-page ruling Thursday in which he granted class action status for all active and reserve U.S. Marine Corps service men and women in a lawsuit filed against the Secretary of Defense over the department’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

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White House Equity Initiative Celebrates ‘B.L.A.C.K. to School’ Event to Recruit and Retain Black K-12 Teachers

The White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans is featuring a “roundtable” event that seeks to promote K-12 public school systems that recruit and retain black teachers.

The invitation for the event, scheduled for Tuesday, August 23, says “B.L.A.C.K. to School” seeks to support “Black school, district, and state educational leaders and creating K12 systems that effectively recruit and retain Black teachers.”

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Commentary: Ahead of Midterms, 14 States Improve Election Integrity Laws

by Jack Fitzhenry and Hans von Spakovsky   With primaries underway and with midterms and other fall ballot contests looming, multiple states are demonstrating a commitment to ensuring that their elections remain worthy of public confidence. Since 2021, The Heritage Foundation has been tracking the content of every state’s laws…

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Commentary: What We Know about the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid (So Far)

“There’s so much we don’t know!” says any liberal losing an argument about the dramatic FBI raid last week on Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach residence and private club.

There are, indeed, some things that we do not know, but what we do know is already quite revealing. We know that the raid – which involved 30 FBI agents and three Justice Department lawyers – lasted over nine hours and was by day’s end reclassified as a “search” by all government agencies and the entire legacy media. We know that this supposed “search” was personally ordered not by FBI Director Christopher Wray, but by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a highly partisan Biden Administration appointee who has implied that parents objecting to critical race theory in public schools are domestic terrorists, and who refused to provide home security protection to Supreme Court justices in the majority of the recent ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

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Biden Administration to Stop Buying COVID Vaccines, Treatments and Tests

The Biden administration plans to stop buying vaccines, treatments and tests as early as this fall, with the hope of full commercialization of the products in 2023, White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha revealed on Tuesday.

Speaking at an event sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Jha said that the administration needs to get past the crisis phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in order for this to happen.

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FDA Approves Most Expensive Drug in History

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday approved a gene therapy for a rare blood disease which is set to reach the market at a record $2.8 million for a single dose, according to a press release by the therapy’s creator, Bluebird Bio.

Beta-thalassemia is an inherited blood disorder that causes a patient’s blood to fail to circulate oxygen through the body, according to the FDA press release concerning the approval. Bluebird’s new therapy, Zynteglo, infuses patients with cells that have a working copy of the gene responsible for the disorder, allowing the patient to produce blood that functions properly, according to a Bluebird press release.

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Report: Americans Spend Thousands to Get Their Names Written on Ukrainian Munitions

Americans are spending as much as $3,000 to get their names on Ukrainian weapons and munitions, according to a report by the Washington Post.

Ukrainian forces will scrawl messages on munitions used against Russian forces invading the country for as little as $30 on an 82mm mortar round, the Post reported. $3,000 could earn the donor a Ukrainian T-72 main battle tank named in their honor.

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Virginia Student Assessments Show Improvement but Still Below Pre-COVID Levels

Standards of learning tests (SOL) for the 2021-2022 school year show improvement across most subjects from the previous academic year, but the administration is warning that there’s still an achievement gap compared to pre-COVID-19 levels. In a virtual press conference Thursday, Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) officials said that gap shows the impact of virtual learning.

“The research is becoming clearer and clearer: students whose schools were closed for in-person instruction suffered the most. Being in person for school matters,”  Superintendent of Public Education Jillian Balow said.

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Lawmakers Worry Amtrak Potentially Helping Illegal Immigrants Cross Border

Lawmakers sent a letter to Amtrak Wednesday requesting a briefing as well as all documents related to how taxpayer subsidized Amtrak may be used to transfer illegal immigrants across the border.

The Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee signed the letter, led by railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee Ranking Member Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark.

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Commentary: People Warning of a Pending Civil War Are the Most Likely to Incite One

As Joe Biden’s polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover. 

This time the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a “civil war.”  

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New York Attorney General Sends Threatening Letter to Church Suggesting Their ‘ReAwaken America Tour’ Is ‘Extremist’ and ‘Racially Motivated’

A letter sent by New York Attorney General Letitia James to Cornerstone Church in Batavia, New York, threatened the church, in advance of its hosting a ReAwaken America Tour event this past weekend, with investigation and prosecution of “acts of violence, intimidation, threats, or harassment” toward others based on “a belief or perception” of characteristics including “race,” “national origin,” “gender,” and “sexual orientation.”“national origin,” “gender,” and “sexual orientation.”

“As New York’s top law enforcement officer, I have significant concerns that the ReAwaken America Tour’s upcoming event at the Cornerstone Church in Batavia, New York on August 12 and 13 could spur extremist or racially motivated violence,” James said in the letter sent to Clay Clark, organizer of the tour, and General Michael Flynn, who travels with it, in care of the church.

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Commentary: FBI Unit Leading Mar-a-Lago Probe Earlier Ran Discredited Trump-Russia Investigation

The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.

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South Carolina Supreme Court Temporarily Halts Heartbeat Law

The South Carolina Supreme Court has temporarily blocked continued enforcement of the state’s Heartbeat law, which bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected.

The court’s order Wednesday grants abortion providers an emergency motion that will halt enforcement of the law which has been in effect since June 27, several days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

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Commentary: Peter Strzok Remains Exhibit A of the FBI’s Politicization

Before the Trump era, members of official Washington who held ostensibly nonpartisan positions of public trust made some effort to conceal their biases. Indeed, many of these figures would hold themselves out as uniquely apolitical and dispassionate. But sheer hatred of Donald Trump has made them throw off that mask. Turn on MSNBC or CNN at almost any hour of the day and you will hear their liberal ranting.

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