Day: October 5, 2018

Larry Kudlow Sheds Light On What Will Likely Be A Major Priority For Trump In 2019

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by Michael Bastach   White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said President Donald Trump is likely to make building oil and natural gas pipelines a major priority next year to meet the needs of booming U.S. energy production. A focus on pipelines would hit two aspects of Trump’s agenda: energy dominance and rebuilding U.S. infrastructure. “We need infrastructure, including pipelines,” Kudlow said during an event at Economic Club of Washington on Thursday, The Hill reported. “We need east to west, we need west to east.” Kudlow said an energy executive spoke with Trump on Wednesday about the need for more pipelines to bring oil out of the Permian Basin, a major shale play straddling the Texas-New Mexico border. The Permian is the country’s most productive drilling regions, but there aren’t enough pipelines to get all the oil and gas to market. Kudlow said companies are forced to flare products they are unable to get out. “He’s got more than he knows what to do with. They’re burning it off, flaring,” Kudlow said, adding there were policies at the federal level that could help get more pipelines built. “The states have some problems. But we also have some leverage at the federal…

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Schumer Gives Bredesen Permission to Issue Wishy-Washy Statement on Kavanaugh

Jason M. Reynolds

After nearly three months of silence, Phil Bredesen issued a statement that says, in a roundabout way, he would vote yes for Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. The Democratic candidate for Tennessee’s vacant Senate seat said: Presidents have the right to appoint justices who share their values – elections have consequences. I believe a Senator’s responsibility to ‘advise and consent’ is not a license to indulge in partisanship, but should focus on the qualifications of the nominee, their ethics and their temperament. I believed that Judge Kavanaugh initially met this test, and I was prepared to say ‘yes’ to his nomination prior to Dr. Ford’s coming forward.  While the subsequent events make it a much closer call, and I am missing key pieces of information that a sitting Senator has, I’m still a ‘yes.’ Dr. Ford is a heroine, and has brought forcefully into the national conversation the many barriers women face in reporting and dealing with sexual harassment and assault.  I was disgusted by the treatment she received at the hands of the Senate and am determined to help bring about a fairer and far more respectful treatment of these issues.” Bredesen, a former Tennessee governor, has received…

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Kavanaugh SCOTUS Nomination Shows Tale of Two Tennessee U.S. Senate Candidates, Blackburn Ad Says

Jason M. Reynolds

The Marsha Blackburn campaign released an ad Thursday highlighting the choices that voters have in Tennessee’s U.S. Senate race when it comes to supporting Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. The ad, which is available here, shows a tale of two candidates when it comes to the nomination – U.S. Representative Blackburn (R-TN-07) and Democratic former Governor Phil Bredesen. The video also shows Tennesseans’ reactions. Blackburn has drawn a positive response for her strong commitment to Kavanaugh and President Donald Trump, while Bredesen has stayed silent for months and even was booed by Democrats earlier this week, The Tennessee Star has reported. Blackburn and Bredesen are running for the Senate seat that is being left empty by Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), who is retiring. Bredesen has tried to flee from his ties to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s, but that’s hard given that Schumer has poured money into his campaign. Schumer recruited Bredesen to run for the Senate. Blackburn has said that Bredesen is following Schumer’s directions to stay silent. Speaking about the contrast, Blackburn campaign communications director Abbi Sigler said, “Marsha has been upfront and honest with Tennesseans. She will always support constitutionalist judges and justices who will not…

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Commentary: The Battle of Brett Kavanaugh

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by Michael Walsh   As the smoke starts to clear over the senatorial battlefield, the outlines of the conflict have come into stark relief. What began, like Gettysburg, with the accidental clash of two mighty armies, has become a death struggle between the reactionary forces of cultural-Marxist leftism in their purest, most deracinated form, and the restorative powers of the American Republic-as-founded, including the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, and the orderly workings of our constitutional government. It’s a fight only one side can win, and it had better be ours. The Pickett’s Charge of the Left came last week, with an all-out assault (to use the feminist Left’s current mot du jour) on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s record, morals, life, and future. Pinning their hopes on the plainly insincere and deceptive testimony of a fabulist—what, in fact, was “credible” about Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony?—the Left augmented her baseless charges against the judge by quickly moving the goalposts from an alleged “attempted rape” to an indictment of the radicals’ favorite bugbear, the Privileged White Male Patriarchy. Marked by their usual crude reductionism of a human being to a bloody fanged Marxist stereotype, the Democrats stripped Kavanaugh of his humanity, hurled unsubstantiated accusationswith…

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Letter to the Editor: The Way to Lower Healthcare Costs Is to Support and Elect Candidates Who Will Apply Free Market Principles

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doc nurse senior patient

Dear Tennessee Star, During the U.S. Senate debate I was glad to see Congressman Marsha Blackburn speak out against single payer healthcare. Being in the healthcare industry professionally since 1980 and now as a health consultant focused on health care legislation and helping companies and individuals navigate health care costs, pricing and affordability and keeping legislators informed from the provider perspective of the hindrances to care as a result of government intrusion – I know that single payer health care has disastrous implications. Obamacare has taken us in the wrong direction since 2010 – limiting access to plans, skyrocketing double digit cost increases each year, a diminishing individual marketplace, disappearing insurance plans and greatly reducing provider choice – it has been in direct contradiction to the two promises given to the American Healthcare consumer – If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, and it will reduce the costs to consumers. It is unfortunate that many mainstream Democrats are taking a bad idea and setting the stage to make matters much worse. Now many Democrats support Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to nationalize our health care system via single payer – also known as “Medicare for All.” In reality,…

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Obama’s Anti-Discipline Policies Set Our Students Up for Failure

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by Walter E. Williams   President Barack Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan, gave a speech on the 45th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where, in 1965, state troopers beat and tear-gassed hundreds of peaceful civil rights marchers who were demanding voting rights. Later that year, as a result of widespread support across the nation, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. Duncan titled his speech “Crossing the Next Bridge.” Duncan told the crowd that black students “are more than three times as likely to be expelled as their white peers,” adding that Martin Luther King would be “dismayed.” Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and her special assistant and counselor, Alison Somin, have written an important article in the Texas Review of Law and Politics, titled “The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline” (Spring 2018). The article is about the departments of Education and Justice’s “disparate impact” vision, wherein they see racial discrimination as the factor that explains why black male students face suspension and expulsion more often than other students. Faced with threats…

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With FBI Report Done on Kavanaugh, It Is Time For Bredesen to Speak Up, Republican National Committee Says

Jason M. Reynolds
Phil Bredesen

The FBI report is in. Senator Bob Corker read it, and said there’s “zero corroboration” of the claims against Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Other senators have reached the same conclusion. Then there is Democratic former Governor Phil Bredesen. Republicans said they were confident they had the votes to confirm Kavanaugh after senators studied the FBI reports, the Los Angeles Times said. Two key Republicans, Senators Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Susan Collins (R-ME) praised the report. For nearly 90 days Bredesen has refused to say anything about whether he would vote for Kavanaugh if he were already a senator. Bredesen is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) who is retiring. His opponent, U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07), has given very vocal support in favor of Kavanaugh and President Donald Trump, who nominated the judge for the Supreme Court. She has repeatedly said Bredesen is following the orders of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to stay silent on the issue. Bredesen’s base wants nothing but resistance, as a booing crowd of Democrats in Chattanooga demonstrated when he dodged the Kavanaugh question, the Republican National Committee said in a press release.  The RNC questioned his handling of sexual harassment claims…

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Seven Witnesses Corroborate Kavanaugh’s Account Of The Devil’s Triangle

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by Molly Prince   Georgetown Prep alumni have come forward corroborating Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that two phrases in his high school yearbook were not sexual references. Four of Kavanaugh’shigh school classmates explained in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that ‘Devil’s Triangle’ was a drinking game the group came up with while at Georgetown Prep. The letter further explained the rules of the game: ‘Devil’s Triangle’ was a drinking game we came up with in high school. It was a variation on the game ‘Quarters’. When we played ‘Devil’s Triangle’, four people sat at a table. On the table, three small glasses of beer were arranged next to one another to form a triangle. Each of the four participants took turns being the ‘shooter.’ The shooter attempted to bounce a quarter into one of the glasses. If the quarter landed in one of the glasses, the person at the table sitting nearest to that glass had to drink the beer. The letter also stated that they were not aware at the time that the name had any other meanings. During a committee hearing on Sept. 27, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse questioned Kavanaugh about the phrase “Devil’s Triangle.” “Drinking…

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Pompeo Terminates Iran Treaty After UN Court Hands Tehran a Victory in Sanctions Lawsuit Against Washington

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by Will Racke   Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Wednesday the U.S. will terminate a 63-year-old treaty with Iran, hours after a top United Nations court ruled in favor of Tehran in a lawsuit challenging U.S. sanctions. Pompeo said the abrogation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity was “39 years overdue,” referring to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran that resulted in the overthrow of the U.S.-friendly shah. Until Pompeo’s announcement, the Treaty of Amity had remained in force even though Washington and Tehran have not had normal diplomatic relations since 1980. The move follows a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that ordered Washington to lift any sanctions on Iran affecting humanitarian exports. Iran had sued the U.S. in July, arguing the renewal of sanctions that had been lifted as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal violated the 1955 treaty. At a press briefing Wednesday morning, Pompeo called Iran’s claims under the treaty “absurd.” He also accused Tehran of exploiting the ICJ for propaganda purposes as it tries to preserve the framework of the nuclear deal. In its ruling, the ICJ said U.S. sanctions had violated Iran’s rights under the treaty by making it “difficult if not…

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Ken McIntyre: ‘I Was a Crime Reporter in Maryland in the Early ’80s and I Never Heard of Teen ‘Gang-Rape’ Parties’

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by Ken McIntyre   “Oh, I think everyone in the county remembers these parties,” Julie Swetnick says with a smile during her nationally televised interview. Um, not me, Julie. I had my first job as a reporter in Montgomery County, Maryland, at the time Swetnick claims Brett Kavanaugh and other teenage boys routinely were drugging and gang-raping girls at a series of house parties in the county, which adjoins Washington, D.C. In fact, I worked for the Gaithersburg Gazette, in a newsroom about a mile south of Gaithersburg High School, where Swetnick graduated in 1980. (I was a 1973 graduate of Magruder High, a rival of Gaithersburg High.) I got a full-time job as a reporter at the widely distributed Gazette after graduating from George Washington University in 1979 and doing an internship there the previous summer. I covered Gaithersburg and Rockville city governments, including the city councils and agencies such as the police departments. (Rockville is the Montgomery County seat.) I never heard word one about teen parties where girls routinely were sexually assaulted, much less where gang rapes were on the agenda, as Swetnick claims of gatherings attended by  Kavanaugh, now President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. In…

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The History Russians and Communists Want Us to Forget

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by Jarrett Stepman   The Soviet Union did not free the world of tyranny in World War II. It merely helped defeat one evil while ruthlessly attempting to supplant it with another one. But you wouldn’t know that from reading an Associated Press article from early September. The Associated Press originally stated that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were “allies” at the beginning of World War II. It then issued the following correction:  … In 1939, despite sharp ideological differences, the two powers entered into a non-aggression pact that paved the way for them to carve up Poland and for the Soviet Union to take the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. That pact was never formally recognized as an alliance, and in 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union. It’s noteworthy that according to Haaretz, this correction took place after Russia put pressure on the publication. The Daily Signal reached out to AP about the correction, but it didn’t respond to the request for comment. The truth is that the USSR and Nazi Germany were functionally allies in the early stages of World War II, as historian Timothy Snyder explained in his book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.” The “sharp ideological differences”…

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State Senator Johnson Hosts Annual ‘Boots And Jeans, BBQ And Beans’ Sunday in Franklin

Jason M. Reynolds

Boots, barbecue, blue jeans and beans are meeting up with politics once again in Franklin. State Senator Jack Johnson (R-TN-23) is holding his 12th annual “Boots & Jeans, BBQ & Beans” event Sunday at 4 p.m. at The Factory In Franklin. Johnson’s event will feature live music from the Austin Brothers and Martin’s BBQ. The event also will feature an all-star lineup of Tennessee GOP figures, including: State Senator Randy McNally (R-TN-05), lieutenant governor U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07), Republican nominee for U.S. Senate Bill Lee, Republican nominee for governor State Senator Dr. Mark Green (R-TN-22), Republican nominee for Congress Brandon Ogles, Republican nominee for State House District 61 State Representative Glen Casada (R-TN-63) State Representative Sam Whitson (R-TN-65) Speaking about the event, Johnson said, “I am thrilled and honored to be able host my 12th annual Boots & Jeans, BBQ & Beans event. My family and I look forward to this all year and seeing all of our friends and neighbors come together for a family-friendly afternoon of BBQ and live music.” Event details and tickets are available here. Johnson has lived in Middle Tennessee since graduating from Texas State University with a degree in education, according to his…

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American Conservative Union Gives High Honor to Kerry Roberts

Chris Butler

Members of the American Conservative Union have awarded State Sen. Kerry Roberts (R-Springfield) with that organization’s highest accolade for adhering to conservative principles during this year’s legislative session, according to a press release on Roberts’ website. ACU members recognized Roberts with their Award for Conservative Excellence, based on their extensive review of how lawmakers voted on important legislation, according to the website. Roberts is one of only two state senators in the Tennessee legislature to receive the award. The other is State Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown). Roberts did not immediately return The Tennessee Star’s request for comment Thursday, and neither did anyone from the ACU. The ratings, at both the federal and state levels, are an initiative of the American Conservative Union Foundation’s Center for Legislative Accountability. “These ratings are designed to reflect how elected officials view the role of government,” the ACU said in a press release announcing ratings for Tennessee lawmakers in 2018. The overall 2018 score for the Tennessee General Assembly fell by one-half percentage point compared to the 2017 session, with the Tennessee Senate falling by eight percentage points — 86 percent to 78 percent. The Tennessee House, meanwhile, improved by seven percentage points — 70…

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Bredesen, Bloomberg ‘Two Peas in a Pod,’ GOP Says

Jason M. Reynolds

New York native Phil Bredesen is at it again. Just two weeks ago the National Rifle Association chastised him for claiming an endorsement that was over a decade-and-a-half old. Now he is buddying up to perhaps the nation’s richest anti-gun advocate, Mike Bloomberg. The former Tennessee governor has a “D,” not an “A” rating from the NRA-ILA, like he claimed in an ad, The Tennessee Star previously reported. He received the “A” rating in 2002 as governor, but is currently down to a “D.” NRA-ILA Political Victory Fund executive director Chris W. Cox  is using Twitter to call Bredesen out for his use of the old “A” rating, Breitbart reports. @PhilBredesen It’s not 2002, you’re not governor and you’re not A-rated by the NRA. Its 2018, you have earned a D rating for turning your back on self-defense and supporting the Hillary/Schumer/Bloomberg gun control agenda. @VoteMarsha is a 2A champion. You’re not. #stoplying pic.twitter.com/Wi0ORRmQTv — Chris Cox (@ChrisCoxCap6) September 20, 2018 Bredesen is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) who is retiring. U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07) is his opponent. Now, former New York Mayor and gun control advocate Bloomberg will host a…

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