The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association (VHHA) announced Monday the launch of a new public awareness campaign focused on making sure patients and families in Virginia “know their rights to help them make informed medical decisions.”
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Following the resolution of the six-week United Auto Workers strike last month and the ensuing glut of news coverage, one could be forgiven for believing that private sector unions were experiencing a generational comeback the likes of which haven’t been seen since their halcyon days of the 1950s.
The reality, however, couldn’t be further from the truth: union participation in the private sector is now a tiny sliver of the overall employment picture in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unionization rate of private-sector workers currently sits below 6% at just under 7 million workers nationwide – down from 17 million in 1950.
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Never before has so much ‘infrastructure’ been funded and so little built.
Unless, that is, you label Pete Buttegieg’s ‘paternity’ leave as ‘human infrastructure.’ Which, by the way, is exactly what the Biden administration did with its trillion dollar infrastructure boondoggle in 2021.
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The number of homeless people in the U.S. jumped 12 percent to more than 653,000 people as pandemic spending expired, the highest level on record since the counts started in 2007.
Figures released Friday provide a snapshot of the number of people in shelters, temporary housing and in unsheltered settings. The report found 653,100 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023, a 12 percent increase from 2022. That figure of 653,100 people is equivalent to about 20 of every 10,000 people in the U.S.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with increased tensions in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific region, has generated many debates. Debates about the stability of the international order, the cohesion of NATO, and many others. But for the United States, one significant debate regards the size and expansibility of the American defense industrial base. It’s a discussion that is well past due.
Last year, Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl testified to Congress that, “What the Ukraine conflict showed is that, frankly, our defense industrial base was not at the level that we needed it to be to generate munitions.” But the challenge with ammunition is more symptom than cause, in economic terms something of a “leading indicator.”
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On Sunday night, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it was closing international railroad bridges at two major ports of entry in Eagle Pass and El Paso, Texas, after a surge of over 4,000 people illegally entered over the last 48 hours.
CBP reported that agents apprehended nearly 3,000 illegal foreign nationals on Saturday and Sunday in the Eagle Pass area alone. Groups of 400 came through at a time, undeterred by border barriers erected by Gov. Greg Abbott through Operation Lone Star. Without OLS, little to no law enforcement presence would exist in the region, officials have explained, because Border Patrol agents have been tasked with processing people to release them into the country.
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The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found that a border wall is the most effective way to curb illegal immigration, according to a newly released report obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute published a 2017 report last week from the Homeland Security watchdog, which found that in 25 border areas studied, a pedestrian fence, also known as a border wall, was the best solution to ending illegal immigration.
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A Trump-appointed federal judge has temporarily halted removal proceedings for the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery that began Monday, the Associated Press reported.
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House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., says he is “absolutely” going to bring articles of impeachment against Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his response to the southern border crisis.
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Three years after federal regulators granted emergency use authorization to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for older teens and adults, mainstream scientific research is confirming suppressed warnings from two years ago that the novel technology has a problem with “translation fidelity.”
Translation: it tends to make a bunch of wacky “off-target” proteins whose effects and severity are unknown.
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One agency in the Biden Administration has actively, albeit subtly, been turning to multiple groups funded by far-left billionaire George Soros in order to serve crucial roles in policy and enforcement.
According to Fox News, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been pulling individuals from the same network of progressive advocacy groups for various positions, with these groups all being funded by Soros and a handful of other left-wing billionaires. One such group is Governing for Impact (GFI), which has been bankrolled by Soros’ notorious Open Society Foundation, and with which the administration has been working behind the scenes on key agenda items.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) said in a Friday news conference that he will introduce legislation to the Virginia General Assembly to ban TikTok for minors, restrict other social media from gathering data about children, and expand state-funded mental health initiatives in public schools and colleges.
Youngkin revealed four new legislative efforts he intends to champion during the upcoming legislative session, after first calling for an additional $500 million to address youth mental health in a Friday press release.
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The federal government spent $1,058,839,000,000 in the first two months of fiscal year 2024 — October and November — according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.
At the same time, according to the MTS, it collected $678,264,000,000 in taxes — thus running a two-month deficit of approximately $380,576,000,000.
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Workers set to relocate Confederate Memorial were spotted Sunday in Arlington National Cemetery preparing the 109-year-old statue for removal. Plans were announced in September that the iconic work would be moved to grounds at Virginia Military Institute’s New Market Battlefield State Historical Park.
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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Friday subpoenaed two major players in the investment world for evidence in his investigation into Wall Street efforts to impose the liberal climate doctrine known as Environmental Social Governance or ESG and force carbon out of corporate America.
The subpeonas to BlackRock and State Street Global Advisers come months after Jordan made written requests for documents detailing how BlackRock pushed ESG policies in the investment world. Jordan said while his committee got some responsive materials from the two firms, he believes more is warranted.
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The Biden administration released proposed rules for green manufacturing tax credits on Thursday, leaving the door open for Chinese firms to capture their value.
The proposed guidance, released by the Treasury Department, clarifies the eligibility requirements for Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) subsidies meant to incentivize domestic manufacturing of products like solar panels and electric vehicle (EV) parts, according to its text. The guidelines do not include restrictions on entities linked to adversarial foreign countries, and they would allow for China-tied companies to capture the value of tax credits if they establish operations in the U.S. that meet all other eligibility requirements.
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Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs announced Friday that troops would be deployed to the southern border after her requests for help from the White House fell on deaf ears.
The governor signed an executive order to allow the troops to assist state and local law enforcement interdict fentanyl and human trafficking attempts, Hobbs said in her statement. Hobbs asked President Joe Biden Dec. 8 to reassign National Guard members already in Arizona, provide additional reinforcements to help reopen the Lukeville Port of Entry and reimburse the $512,529,333 the state has spent on migrant transportation, drug interdiction and law enforcement.
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To borrow from an old saying, nothing can be certain except for death and taxpayer funding for the abortion industry. At the request of pro-life members of Congress, the Government Accountability Office released the latest round of data detailing how much taxpayer funding goes to Planned Parenthood and other international abortion organizations. From 2019 through 2021, Planned Parenthood in the U.S. received $1.7 billion in taxpayer subsidies.
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A bipartisan effort is underway in the Senate to end what lawmakers are calling unemployment payments for “jobless millionaires.”
“Nearly 15,000 people who made $1 million or more last year were paid over $200 million in jobless assistance,” according to statement released Thursday on the effort by bill co-sponsor Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst.
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Congress voted Thursday to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with no reforms as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA.
Section 702 of FISA is a tool that intelligence officials have allegedly abused as it enables them to surveil Americans without obtaining a warrant. After the Senate passed FISA through the NDAA on Wednesday and failed to get sufficient support to eliminate the four-month extension, the House of Representatives finalized it in a vote on Thursday.
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Representative Bob Good (R-VA-05) said the House Freedom Caucus will work to oppose the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) supported by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA-04) crafted with leadership in Congress, which will reauthorize a controversial government surveillance law that House Republicans previously pulled due to backlash.
Good told John Fredericks, publisher of The Virginia Star, that he plans to rally Republicans against the proposed NDAA due to its inclusion of an extension for controversial government spying under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The current version of the bill, he explained, was created by Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY-08), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
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Anyone who lived through 2020 observed that some messages received treatment online that stood in stark contrast to other messages. Conservative voices and messages were censored and banned, while progressive voices and messages flowed freely. If a person spoke against COVID-19 lockdowns—and later vaccines—there was a good chance that a social media platform would take down the post. If one were to suggest that suspicious activities occurred surrounding the 2020 election, the label “misinformation” might appear.
The primary vehicle to censor internet speech is to label disfavored messages as dis-, mis-, or mal-information. While the category of malinformation is seemingly the most offensive – true information that government censors believe lacks sufficient “context” – the other categories can be just as malignant. Mis- and disinformation require someone to determine what is true and what is not.
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Abortion advocacy groups received close to $2 billion in federal taxpayer funding from 2019 to 2021, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released on Tuesday.
The GAO report was first requested in early 2022 by 142 congressional members led by Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn and New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, who underscored their concerns that taxpayer dollars are being used to fund abortion services. The report revealed that Planned Parenthood received approximately $1.78 billion in taxpayer funding from 2019 to 2021 and is receiving increased federal support under the current Biden administration.
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The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is set to provide House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) with access to over 1,700 emails from Joe Biden’s vice presidency, in the midst of an ongoing impeachment inquiry against him.
According to the Daily Caller, NARA will provide Comer and the committee with 62,610 total pages of records, which includes 1,799 emails and attachments. The emails are all from Biden’s tenure as Vice President, and are all relevant to Hunter Biden and his business relationship with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm at the heart of the corruption accusations against the Bidens. The agency announced its intentions to hand over the documents in a letter to Comer on Monday.
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Big pharmacies are distributing Americans’ private medical information to law enforcement agencies without a warrant, lawmakers said in a Tuesday letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Law enforcement agencies discreetly get a hold of thousands of Americans’ prescription records per year with no warrant, and often with no legal review, according to Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, Democratic Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Democratic California Rep. Sara Jacobs. The lawmakers are pushing HHS to increase its regulations to protect Americans’ data and require a warrant to obtain it.
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The U.S. Department of Defense is being urged by members of Congress to develop a national security plan to address China’s interest and investments in seabed mining.
Virginia U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, led over two dozen legislators including fellow Rep. Jen Kiggans in sounding the alarm on China’s involvement in mining critical resources, such as nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese and zinc from the seabed.
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Inventors figure out how to create something that is better than what existed before, and then protect their rights to the idea/creation with a patent. This is a fundamental principle of private property, one which our nation’s entire economic system is based.
The U.S. Constitution enshrines this basic idea into the DNA of our nation as Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 known as the Patent and Copyright Clause plainly states, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
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Proposed new legislation would revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit organization that is providing material support for terrorist groups.
The bipartisan bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tenn., and U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., comes out of the House Ways and Means Committee, which unanimously approved the legislation last week.
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With Christmas fast-approaching, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa put out a “naughty list” of government agencies that have high no-show rates of employees who have not returned to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic ended.
According to Ernst’s list, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Social Security Administration top the list with just 7 percent office occupancy rates.
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Senator Dick Durbin said the quiet part out loud on the Senate floor yesterday in opposing Republican efforts to do something about Joe Biden’s wide open borders. He noted that the U.S. military – which Team Biden has also been wrecking with its purges of patriots, forced jabs with illegal, unsafe vaccines and Marxist policies and leaders – needs to tap what he described as “undocumented” persons who “want to serve and risk their lives for this country.”
In other words, the senior Senator from Illinois believes that we should encourage enlistment by not only U.S. citizens and those immigrants who have come here legally. He wants the ranks to be open to those whose first act in this country has been criminally trespassing to get here.
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The national debt continues to rise sharply to record levels during the ongoing debate in Congress over the next federal spending bill.
The federal government has already piled another $383 billion onto the debt so far into the 2024 fiscal year, which began on October 1.
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The Senate could soon take up a bipartisan bill defining the liability protections enjoyed by artificial intelligence-generated content, which could lead to considerable impacts on online speech and the development of AI technology.
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal in June introduced the No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act, which would clarify that liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act do not apply to text and visual content created by artificial intelligence. Hawley may attempt to hold a vote on the bill in the coming weeks, his office told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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NASA said it is working on a timeline for its next crewed mission to the moon after a Congressional watchdog reported that the space agency’s planned 2025 date was “unrealistic.”
The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in late November that NASA’s timeline for the Artemis III mission was “unrealistic.”
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If the Biden administration doesn’t intend to punish medical professionals for refusing to participate in so-called gender affirming care, from using patients’ preferred pronouns to referring them for castration, it’s certainly not acting like it.
That was the impression of at least two of three judges on a 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel hearing a pre-enforcement challenge to the feds’ reinterpretation of the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition on sex discrimination in Section 1557 as covering gender identity as well.
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The Senate Banking Oversight Committee met with top U.S. bank CEOs on Wednesday about the possible effects of new regulations, proposed in July, that would raise capital requirements, titled Basel III endgame, according to CNBC. The new restrictions would not tackle problems that caused the most recent banking crisis earlier this year and would disproportionately affect smaller borrowers, like average Americans, by tightening credit conditions and restricting access to affordable debt in the form of mortgages, credit cards and more, experts told the DCNF.
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Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin sent a letter to two federal agencies within the Biden administration, urging them to require federal employees to return to the office in order to save the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) from a budget deficit he claims threatens the future of public transportation in Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Youngkin urged the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM)and Office of Management and Budget to order its employees back to their offices “to infuse needed energy into the Greater DC regional economy and provide WMATA with a sustaining ridership level.”
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Recently-revealed documents indicate that the American software company Microsoft actively worked with Chinese government-run media outlets to spread Chinese propaganda.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Microsoft – the second-largest corporation in the United States – entered into partnerships with several outlets run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including China Daily and People’s Daily, with the latter being the official newspaper of the CCP’s Central Committee, while the former is published by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. In 2020, the U.S. State Department declared that the parent company of People’s Daily was “substantially owned or effectively controlled” by the CCP.
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Banks filed at least six reports concerning Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings that flagged President Joe Biden’s home address in Delaware and raised concerns about possible criminal activity involving money laundering or human trafficking, according to a U.S. Senator who investigated the first family’s finances for years.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the top Republican on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, told the Just the News, No Noise television show Thursday night that the Suspicious Activity Reports (SARS) chronicled about $12 million in transactions over several years, some of which passed through Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home where he had allowed his son to stay.
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The House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill that would repeal the student loan plan issued by the Biden administration after its original plan was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.
The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan was issued by the Department of Education on July 10, less than two weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s plan to forgive $10,000 of student debt held by all borrowers making less than $125,000 a year. House Republicans, who have opposed all student debt forgiveness plans by the administration, passed a bill that would repeal the SAVE plan on Thursday, by a vote of 210 yeas to 189 nays.
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The House passed a bill Wednesday that would neutralize one of the key policies underlying the Biden administration’s electric vehicle (EV) push.
The Choice in Automobile Retail Sales (CARS) Act passed by a bipartisan vote in the legislature’s lower chamber, and it will now head to the Senate. The bill would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from imposing new vehicle emissions rules that either mandate the use of a specific technology or reduce the availability of new cars based on the type of engine.
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The super PAC tasked with “making the case to the American people for President Biden’s bold, progressive policy agenda,” scaled down its operations in 2022, according to new tax forms obtained by Axios.
Build Back Together, a dark money group that accepts unlimited donations from anonymous donors, only raised $8 million in 2022, down from the $41 million it raised in 2021, Axios reported. The group also wound down its expenditures, spending just $15 million in 2022, less than half of the $33 million it spent in 2022.
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The United States announced new visa restrictions that would target both Palestinians and Israelis who are believed to be involved in violence in the West Bank.
The immediate family members of those implicated in the attacks may also be subject to the visa restrictions, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin joined a coalition of governors from 17 states who on Monday sent a letter to President Joe Biden that urged the administration to prevent “dangerous and adversarial governments to infiltrate our country” by purchasing “swaths of real property throughout the United States.”
Citing multiple reports that companies linked to China are purchasing large amounts of farmland, including near U.S. military installations, the governors wrote to demand the Biden administration “reckon with the fact that such entities are plain threats to our national security, our farmers, and our citizenry.”
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has inspected fewer pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, with foreign facilities, including those from China, seeing the largest decreases, according to a study released in December.
In 2022, the total number of inspections of drug manufacturing establishments by the FDA decreased by 79% for foreign and 35% for domestic facilities compared to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study by Emily Cuddy, Yun Peng Lu and David B. Ridley using data acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests. Despite the drop in inspections, there was no corresponding decrease in imports or manufacturing, while resources allocated by the FDA toward inspections surged per inspection.
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House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., released evidence Monday of regular monthly payments from one of Hunter Biden’s business entities to his father, President Joe Biden.
Comer released bank records obtained via subpoena that allegedly show direct monthly payments from one of Hunter Biden’s business entities, Owasco PC, which is also under investigation by the Department of Justice tax-related charges.
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The best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection, recent studies suggest.
A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal’s Archives of Disease in Childhood, found “no association” with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and “critical” or “serious” risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.
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A group of lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee has unveiled legislation Monday to restrict the intelligence community’s warrantless surveillance authority and impose stiffer punishments for violations.
Spearheaded by Arizona GOP Rep. Andy Biggs, the plan boasts Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Ranking member Jerold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., as cosponsors, The Hill reported.
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Multiple legislatures across the country attempted to pass or passed some form of school choice legislation this year.
“Policymakers in 40 states debated 111 educational choice bills – 79 percent of which related to ESAs,” Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, said when announcing the findings of a newly published EdChoice report, the “ABC’s of School Choice.”
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The state of Nevada paid $12.5 million for transgender medical services and procedures over the past eight years, according to documents obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Nevada Department of Health and Human Services provided data to the Daily Caller News Foundation showing that from January 2015 to May 2023, the state paid $12,572,974 for transgender medical procedures, therapy and treatments through Medicaid and Nevada Check Up (NCU). The payments were for insurance claims tagged with “Gender Identity” and national drug codes, as well as for claims tagged with procedure codes related to transgender care, including surgeries, infertility, counseling and speech therapy, according to the documents.
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The public-private efforts to restrict and suppress purported “mis-, dis- and malinformation” across tech platforms started almost immediately after the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, ramped up a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and included U.S. and U.K. military contractors and plans to cut off financial services to dissenters and sue them.
That’s according to a “highly credible whistleblower” who says they were recruited to participate in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) “through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by” the Department of Homeland Security, independent journalists who reviewed the Twitter Files at new owner Elon Musk’s invitation said Tuesday.
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