Day: January 14, 2019

Tennessee Church Recently Blasted by PETA Might Consider New Contest Lampooning the Group

Chris Butler

A new contest that allows people to judge the most repulsive and offensive ads PETA puts out might amuse members of Nashville’s Cornerstone Church. As FOX News reported last year, PETA, short for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, blasted church officials for using wild animals in one of its sermons. This week PETAKillsAnimals.com launched a new contest where people get to vote on the dumbest PETA marketing campaign. “Participants have a chance to win a 12-month subscription to a meat delivery service,” according to a press release the group put out. “Since its conception, the animal liberation group PETA has run countless marketing campaigns designed to shock and repulse the public. Among others, our contest highlights PETA’s controversial comparison of Holocaust victims and chickens as well as PETA’s recent, widely ridiculed attempt to change common idioms such as ‘bring home the bacon.’” People who vote can choose ads that trivialize the holocaust or make light of sexual violence, the group said. “There are 10 campaigns to choose from in the contest going back decades. PETA’s campaigns include tasteless Holocaust comparisons, attempting to rebrand fish as ‘sea kittens,’ and PETA’s recent headline-grabbing criticism of common idioms,” according to PETAKillsAnimals.com As FOX News reported, Cornerstone Nashville church officials used…

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Commentary: Trump Is Right, Congress Needs to Do Its Job

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by Rachel Bovard   As the partial government shutdown enters its third week with little hope of an end in sight, President Trump continues to demand funding for a southern border wall. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) flat out refuses to pass any funding at all. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has washed his hands of the matter, telling Trump to work it out with Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) while he moves the Senate onto other topics. Predictably, both chambers clocked out for the weekend on Thursday afternoon. When senators and House members make the rounds on the upcoming Sunday shows wringing their hands about the shutdown, somebody might ask why they only worked less than three days this week. Apparently, the crisis at the border, and the resulting government shutdown, are an emergency to everyone except the people responsible for addressing it. In the face of congressional intransigence, President Trump has toyed with the idea of declaring a national emergency. On Friday, the president said that option was currently off the table, and with good reason. Although funding the wall through an emergency declaration is likely legal, it would create more problems for the president than it solves, both politically and practically.…

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Report: Job Slashing Hedge Fund Looking to Buy The Tennessean as Part of Gannett Purchase

Tennessee Star Staff

The Wall Street Journal and Market Watch are reporting that Digital First Media, a hedge fund backed media company renowned for purchasing newspapers and gutting the operations through firings and drastic cost cutting, is preparing a bid to purchase Gannett, which owns The Tennessean, along with about 100 other newspapers around the country. Market Watch reported on Sunday: A hedge-fund-backed media group known for buying up struggling local papers and cutting costs is planning to make an offer for USA Today publisher Gannett Co., according to people familiar with the matter. MNG Enterprises Inc., one of the largest newspaper chains in the country, has quietly built a 7.5% position in Gannett’s stock and plans to publicly urge the McLean, Va., publisher to put itself up for sale, the people said. MNG, better known as Digital First Media, will also offer to buy Gannett GCI, +0.52% for $12 a share, they said, which would represent a 23% premium over Friday’s closing price of $9.75. The shares, which fell steeply last year, have been rising lately. Closely held Digital First is known for its contentious history with the newspaper industry in part because of its penchant for slashing costs. It has over…

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Georgia’s Failed Gubernatorial Candidate Stacey Abrams Meets with Chuck Schumer as 2020 Senate Speculation Mounts

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by Jason Hopkins   Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams met with top Democratic leadership in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss a potential run for the Senate in 2020. Abrams held talks Thursday with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The discussion comes as Abrams, considered the unofficial leader of Georgia Democrats, mulls her next political moves. The former state representative and romance novelist rocketed to fame during her 2018 gubernatorial bid against Republican Brian Kemp, the state’s former secretary of state. National Democrats had hoped Abrams would make history as the first black female to be elected governor of a U.S. state. However, Kemp ultimately emerged victorious in what was one of the closest elections in Georgia history. The contest also became one of the state’s ugliest campaigns in recent memory. Despite publicly admitting she wouldn’t receive enough votes to force an election runoff, Abrams refused to use the word “concession” because it, according to her, would denote a meaning of “right, true or proper.” She has continued to claim, without evidence, that Kemp used his secretary of state position to maliciously suppress voters and refuses to…

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Tennessee State Lawmakers Eye Penalties for Shelby County Defiance of New Law on Illegal Aliens

Chris Butler

Tennessee’s top political leaders are reportedly rebuking Memphis for not going along with a new law to detain illegal immigrants for federal officials. As The Tennessee Star reported, Shelby County officials say they won’t cooperate with a new Tennessee law that helps federal officials detain and deport illegal aliens. The state law took effect Jan. 1. Senate Speaker Randy McNally and House Speaker Glen Casada are unhappy, according to The Associated Press. “Shelby County needs to reevaluate their position,” McNally said in a statement. “As outlined in the law, continued refusal will result in the forfeit of state economic and community development grants which would negatively affect the local economy in Shelby County.” The law threatens local governments with the loss of future state economic and community development money if they have sanctuary policies. Federal immigration officials have the power to deport illegal aliens arrested on other charges. But some local laws have kept those local law enforcement officers from cooperating with the feds. The new law bans those local policies. That includes barring local policies that require federal officials to obtain a warrant or show probable cause beforehand. As The Tennessee Star reported last fall, county officials, specifically the folks at…

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Nebraska State Senator Joni Albrecht Introduces Bill Mandating Clinics Tell Women About Abortion Reversal Pill

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by Grace Carr   The Nebraska Legislature is considering mandating doctors inform women seeking medication abortions that the abortive process can be reversed, after a state senator introduced a bill to the state legislature Friday. Nebraska Sen. Joni Albrecht introduced a bill requiring doctors to inform women that they can reverse their abortion if they choose not to go through with the medication abortion midway through the process, ABC7 reported Saturday. The abortion reversal pill aims to reverse the effects of a chemically induced abortion within the first 24 hours of taking mifepristone or RU-486 by flooding the woman’s body with progesterone, according to the abortion reversal pill’s website. Abortion reversal has a 55 percent success rate of saving pregnancies, according to the site. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists maintains, however, that there is no medically accepted evidence saying “abortion reversal” is legitimate. “Every day I wake up so grateful for my second chance at choice and that’s exactly what this bill provides for women,” 24-year-old Rebekah Hagan said, applauding the bill, ABC7 reported. Medication abortions account for 55 percent of abortions in Nebraska, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. The proposal comes after Idaho passed a bill in May requiring doctors to provide women seeking medicinal abortions with information telling…

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Tennessee Amusement Tax Punishes Small Business, NFIB Says

Chris Butler

If you own a small gym in Tennessee then state officials force you to pay what is called an amusement tax, and that’s especially bad for the state’s overall physical health, according to a business expert. Large gym owners don’t have to pay this tax. Small business owners must pass the higher costs of doing business down to their customers. The tax amounts to about 10 percent, said Jim Brown, Tennessee director of the National Federation of Independent Business. Tennessee officials used the amusement tax to take about $16 million out of the economy and put it in state coffers last year, Brown told The Tennessee Star. The Volunteer State, Brown went on to say, is not among the healthiest of the 50 states. Tennessee, for instance, ranks as the nation’s sixth most unhealthy state, according to a 2017 Tennessean article. And this tax discourages people from getting in shape. That’s why Brown said he and other grassroots groups plan to push hard to do away with the tax this new legislative session. “We can talk a lot about health care reform, but we don’t talk enough about health reform. This is excellent tax reform that is health reform,” Brown…

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Government Agency Run By Obama Holdovers Reportedly Paid Staff Despite Not Having Money During Shutdown

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by Tim Pearce   Employees at a federal agency run by Obama holdovers received paychecks Friday despite having no federal money appropriated to do so, according emails obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Staff at the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) received an email Friday morning explaining that they had all received paychecks deposited into their bank accounts by mistake. CSB officials are working with the Interior Business Center (IBC), a federal shared services provider that handles payroll for dozens of agencies, to correct the mistake. “Folks, if you check your bank account this morning, you are likely to find that you were paid. As I reported to you last night, IBC made an error in processing the payroll for Pay Period 1 and no staff, furloughed or exempt, should have been paid. PLEASE DO NOT ACCESS THE FUNDS. We are working with IBC to determine how to remedy this situation and it is best if you don’t access the funds,” an email, sent staff-wide from a generic agency account, said. The email was sent by Thomas Zoeller, the CSB’s senior adviser and acting general counsel, according to a source familiar with the payroll error. During a government shutdown, federal employees fall into…

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Ted Cruz Calls Out Tim Kaine For Putting Politics Over His Constituency

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by Molly Prince   Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz criticized his Democratic colleague Sen. Tim Kaine on Sunday for holding a large portion of his constituency hostage in order to advance his party’s political agenda. “You’ve got my friend Tim Kaine coming on [‘Meet The Press’] in a minute, he represents Virginia,” Cruz told host Chuck Todd. “There are a lot of federal workers in the commonwealth of Virginia.” “If Tim Kaine and [fellow Virginia Sen.] Mark Warner were to say ‘We’re going to put the jobs of the men and women of Virginia ahead of our partisan interests, ahead of the fact that our base hates [President] Donald Trump,’ it would take only five more Democrats in the Senate to have the votes to say this second ‘Schumer Shutdown’ is over, we’re reopening the government and we’re going to implement common sense border security that the American people want,” Cruz continued. The Republican-led House passed a stopgap funding bill on Dec. 20 that included appropriations to construct a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. However, with a 51-seat majority, Senate Republicans fell short of the necessary 60 votes needed to send it to Trump’s desk for signature. Consequently, a government shutdown has been in effect…

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Company Accused of Screwing Up TNReady Wants Another Chance

Chris Butler

Tennessee auditors may have recently put out a rotten review of how Questar Assessment, Inc. handled TNReady, but that is reportedly not discouraging company officials. According to the Chattanooga-based WRCBtv.com, Questar officials want the job again. Specifically, they want a new state contract to continue overseeing the same service in the fall. They will bid for it, the website reported. As The Tennessee Star reported last month, the TNReady online student assessment tests had login delays, slow servers, and software bugs, according to an audit Tennessee Comptrollers released. As reported, last year Republican Gov. Bill Haslam said TNReady “has had several hiccups” and that criticism of it “was earned.” Auditors, however, went into more detail in their report. “The first signs of trouble began on April 16, 2018 and continued through the end of the month,” auditors said in a press release. “Auditors determined that many of these issues occurred primarily because of Questar Assessment, Inc’s performance and updates to the student assessment system. Auditors also found the Department of Education’s oversight of test administration fell short of expectations.” Over the course of the audit, the department and Questar worked constantly to address the issues that caused or contributed to the spring…

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Commentary: Dump The National Emergencies Act

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by Julie Kelly   One of the more revelatory aspects of the Trump era is how the national media, after taking an extended nap between 2009 and 2017, now are very worried about constitutional overreach by the executive branch. Presidential power-grabs – which were super cool just five years ago when Barack Obama threatened to use “a pen and a phone” to work around a Republican-controlled legislative branch – suddenly went out of style in January 2017. Obama needed to take unilateral action as a last resort, the media argued, because of those big, bad Republicans. “Blocked for most of his presidency by Congress, Obama has sought to act however he could,” lamented the New York Times in August 2016. “In the process he created the kind of government neither he nor the Republicans wanted – one that depended on bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency.” But it was for our own good, insisted the Times. “An army of lawyers working under Obama’s authority has sought to restructure the nation’s health care and financial industries, limit pollution, bolster workplace protections and extend equal rights to minorities. Under Obama, the government has literally placed a higher value on human life.” Thanks, Obama! The former president often defended himself…

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Trump Predicts DACA Will Bring Hispanic Voters ‘Over to the Republican Side’ Amid Shutdown Stalemate

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by Evie Fordham   President Donald Trump predicted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) could become a larger factor in his border wall funding fight during a flurry of tweets Sunday morning. “Democrats are saying that DACA is not worth it and don’t want to include in talks,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Many Hispanics will be coming over to the Republican side, watch!” Democrats are saying that DACA is not worth it and don’t want to include in talks. Many Hispanics will be coming over to the Republican side, watch! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2019 Trump continued to call out Democrats for punting on negotiations to end the shutdown, perhaps referring to the roughly 30 Democratic lawmakers reportedly attending a retreat with lobbyists in Puerto Rico, according to the Washington Examiner. “I’m in the White House, waiting. The Democrats are everywhere but Washington as people await their pay. They are having fun and not even talking!” he wrote. I’m in the White House, waiting. The Democrats are everywhere but Washington as people await their pay. They are having fun and not even talking! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2019 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Republicans need to “abandon”…

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Minnesota Receives ‘C’ Grade From Center for Education Reform, Cautions Against Walz’s ‘Authoritarian’ Approach

Anthony Gockowski
students in class

Minnesota received an overall C grade in parent empowerment on the Center for Education Reform’s annual Parent Power Index, which factors school choice, charter schools, personalized learning, teacher quality, and transparency into its grading system. With two school-choice programs, Minnesota received an F grading in the area of school choice, but still managed to score above the national average. Only one state, Florida, received an A for its school choice programs. Minnesota currently offers a K-12 Education Credit, which is an individual tax credit program that “offers families refundable tax credits for non-tuition educational expenses like tutoring, educational after-school programs and books.” The state also offers an Education Deduction program that allows “parents to deduct educational expenses, including tuition, tutoring, books, and more.” Overall, Minnesota ranked fourth on the Parent Power Index, which states that “only a lack of private school choice prevents this star from rising as high as it could.” “Like its North Star name suggests, Minnesota is truly a stellar state for education innovation. It was the first state to pass a charter school law, and it is now at the forefront of digital and personalized learning. Minnesota also offers many choices for high school students to…

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Ohio School Voucher Program Doubles as More Public Schools Fail to Make The Grade

Andrew Shirley

After a staggering number of Ohio public schools failed to make the grade, the state’s voucher and charter school system is poised for tremendous expansion. In Ohio, if the public school test scores of a student’s home district fall below a certain level, calculated by the Ohio Department of Education, a number of the students are automatically granted vouchers to attend private school and charter schools are permitted to establish themselves. This is intended to both give children from every country access to quality schools and alleviate the student burden on the lagging school.  The public schools performed so poorly that charter schools will have 600 times more areas to expand into, and student access to vouchers will more than double. Teacher unions and many in the progressive activist community have aggressively opposed both school voucher programs and charter schools. They argue that these programs siphon off funding from the already financially strained school system. In addition, a number of private schools in Ohio were founded as religious institutions. While none can legally force children to engage in religious activity against their will, progressives maintain that as they are still religiously-oriented, it is a violation of the ‘separation church and state.’ Ironically, it was an…

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Minnesota Democrat Says Most People Calling His Office Support ‘The Wall’

Anthony Gockowski

Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN-07) told Fox News that the overwhelming majority of calls his office is receiving are from constituents who support President Donald Trump’s border wall. “From what I can tell, they’re still hanging with the president. Today, we got 67 calls for building the wall and five against. So, sounds to me like he’s still pretty popular,” Peterson said in an interview last week. This week, @collinpeterson admitted that both President @realDonaldTrump and the wall are popular in Minnesota. #BuildTheWall #mn07 pic.twitter.com/6xS9M7NKKr — Republican Party of Minnesota (@mngop) January 11, 2019 In another interview with Bloomberg, Peterson revealed that he’s not actually opposed to Trump’s wall, and said he believes Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “should negotiate.” During Trump’s Tuesday night Oval Office address, he urged every American citizen to “call Congress and tell them to finally, after all of these decades, secure our border.” “This is a choice between right and wrong. Justice and injustice. This is about whether we fulfill our sacred duty to the American citizens we serve,” Trump said. Vice President Mike Pence echoed those sentiments in an interview on The Rush Limbaugh Show, where he too pleaded…

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Veteran Says Mainstream Media Reports Claiming End to Border Wall Fundraiser are ‘Blatantly False,’ More Than $20 Million Raised

Jason M. Reynolds

Purple Heart veteran Brian Kolfage came out swinging against the mainstream news media over the weekend after multiple outlets falsely sounded the death knell of his border wall fundraiser and attacked his honesty. The triple amputee veteran took to Twitter and at least one other outlet to refute false reports that GoFundMe would refund $20 million collected for the wall because Kolfage’s goal had not been met or that he was funneling the money elsewhere. The media campaigns used half-truths to question the honesty of Kolfage, who has been transparent in changing his goal from giving the donations to the shut-down government to build the wall to instead planning to use the money in a nonprofit to buy land on the border and build the wall faster and more inexpensively. Kolfage said on a video on his website that to counter the Democrats – who do not want the wall – he changed his charity’s mission, and gave it the name “We Build the Wall.” The GoFundMe page is here, and shows donations of all amounts continuing to pour in at more than $20.4 million. Kolfage says people who donated before Jan. 11 can either receive a refund or opt-in…

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