March 21, 2019 - Tennessee Star

Speaker Glen Casada Helps Get Governor’s Charter School Commission Initiative Out of House Committee

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Laura Baigert

NASHVILLE, Tennessee – While the Education Committees of both the House and Senate heard Governor Lee’s bill on a new charter school commission initiative on the same day just hours apart, the process and outcomes were very different between the two bodies. In the House, in front of a standing room only House Hearing Room I the Education Committee had discussion on HB 0940 carried by Education Committee Chairman Mark White (R-Memphis), for a total of about one and three-quarter hours. With White being the House Education Committee Chair and carrying the bill, he turned the gavel over to freshman legislator and Education Committee Vice-Chair Kirk Haston (R-Lobelville) to run that part of the meeting. White started the process by introducing amendment 6140 which rewrites the bill presented to the subcommittee last week. The rewrite was an outcome of the administration listening to the concerns of the subcommittee, as reported by The Tennessee Star, and subsequently making major changes to the bill in response. Going on with the explanation, White said the 2002 Charter School Act accepted charter schools and in 2011 the cap on the number of charter schools was removed. White then reviewed the current flow chart of…

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Commentary: Why Postmoderns Train – Not Educate – Activists

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

by Stephan Hicks Here’s why indoctrinating children makes perfect sense to postmodernists. Postmodernism is a sprawling movement centered on the conviction that the modern world’s most distinctive achievements—among them the rise of science, technology, individualism, universal rights, democratic-republicanism, and liberal capitalism—should be treated with suspicion or outright contempt. Most of us encountered old-fashioned indoctrinators in our education. Indoctrinators think this way: There is the One Truth. I am in possession of it. So important is it that students must believe it. Alternative ideas are a waste of time—and a temptation to unformed minds—and should be shunned. So as a teacher I will use my authority and my power to instill only the correct ideas. Our modern ideal of liberal education fought a long battle against that view. Truth matters, yes, but it is often complex, and exposure to contending theories and their leading advocates is the best way for students to sort it out. Students also need to develop their own strength of mind to be able, independently and with confidence, to handle the new, complex issues they will encounter all their lives. John Stuart Mill’s now-classic statement of the liberal-education ideal argued passionately that students must learn not…

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State Rep. Cochran Votes Against Charter School Bill After Reportedly Pledging to Vote for It

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

A bill reforming the Charter school process emerged from the House Education Committee on Wednesday and will move forward to the Government Operations Committee after receiving a 13-9 vote for passage. The legislation was initiated by Governor Bill Lee and is intended to streamline the charter school approval process while also improving the quality of the state’s charter school options. Charter schools are public schools, though operated independently from local school districts. The charter school legislation creates a nine-member commission, appointed by the Governor, to review appeals of charter applications denied by local school districts. Governor Lee has indicated that providing more charter school options, along with Education Savings Accounts that will permit more choices for parents and students in the worst performing school districts in the state, are the best path to improving the quality of education for thousands of Tennessee students. Five Republicans, Jim Coley (Bartlett), Mark Cochran (Englewood), Kirk Haston (Lobelville), Chris Hurt (Halls) and Terry Lynn Weaver (Lancaster), joined with four Democrats in opposing the bill. Cochran explained that while he is not philosophically opposed to charter schools he felt “rushed” to vote for this bill. Cochran had reportedly pledged his vote for the bill before…

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Mark Levin’s TV Program Spends Full Half Hour on ‘White Privilege’ Videos from Williamson County Schools Obtained by The Tennessee Star

March 21, 2019June 5, 2019 Julie Carr

On Wednesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Gill and Leahy held a special discussion after Mark Levin featured the WCS boards in service training modules on the Mark Levin’s show BlazeTV Tuesday evening. Throughout the segment, Gill and Leahy discussed Mark Levin’s response to the videos and talked about how other counties might be putting this racist and biased agenda into their in-service teacher trainings. The men called for citizens to take control of their schools and to investigate whether or not their schools are taking part in this anti-American agenda. (BlazeTV Show audio plays) Gill: That’s Mark Levin on his show on The Blaze last night literally took an entire segment, thirty minutes of the show and dissected the Williamson County white privilege video as you heard it there. That’s just kind of the initial part where he was breaking it down. He literally went segment by segment tearing it apart as it went. And again in the way that the brilliant Mark Levin can do. He illustrates the idiocy of this whole thing including…

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Former DOJ Attorney Claims Ambassadors Worked with Feds to Take Down Trump

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

by Nick Givas Former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams claimed U.S. ambassadors are working to sabotage President Donald Trump from within on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. Adams was commenting on Republican North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows’s point — he previously said “there was a coordinated effort to take this president down,” and that even ambassadors were involved. “It’s important to understand something, that a lot of these ambassadors are either Obama leftovers, or they come from something called the foreign service. This is the swampiest part of the swamp,” Adams said. “It’s career people who almost think they’re some kind of hereditary elite whose role in the world is to preserve the world order — not to serve the United States. And these people despise President Trump, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all that some of these ambassadors who are career foreign service officers are engaging in exactly what Congressman Meadows says.” Adams cited Meadows, who has been an outspoken critic of deep state bureaucrats. Adams said Meadows will likely continue to be the main source of information on bureaucratic abuse going forward. “Look, you need to understand something. Congressman [Mark] Meadows is very close to these…

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Remittances to Countries Sending Many Illegal Immigrants Hit a Record $120 Billion

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

by Jason Hopkins Foreign nationals from three Central American countries that send some of the highest numbers of illegal immigrants into the U.S. are sending back a record amount of money into their home countries. Immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras sent back a record $120 billion in remittances this decade, according to an immigration expert who spoke to the Washington Examiner. The numbers are expected to keep rising, with immigrants from these three nations having sent $17 billion in 2018 alone, and Central American bank data indicates that the trend will keeping going. “The sums of money involved are huge, particularly as a share of GDP and personal income in the Central American countries,” Jessica Vaughan, an immigration expert with the Center for Immigration Studies, said to the Examiner. “It offers a big clue as to why these countries are giving only token efforts to stem the tide of migrants to the United States, especially El Salvador and Honduras.” The issue of remittances — money sent to the home countries of immigrants living and working in the U.S. — has remained a hot topic of debate. U.S. lawmakers have, in the past, proposed legislation that would tax…

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Trump’s New EPA Chief Says He Won’t Make the Same Mistakes Obama Did in Flint

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

by Chris White Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler criticized the Obama administration’s handling of Flint’s lead water problems and promised Wednesday he is going to avoid making the same mistakes. “Part of the problem with Flint was there was a breakdown in once they got the data, once the city of Flint, the state of Michigan, the Obama EPA – they sat on it,” Wheeler told CBS News in an exclusive interview. Scott Pruitt made similar remarks during his short stint as President Donald Trump’s EPA head, telling reporters in 2017 that former President Barack Obama’s environmental record was miserable in Flint, Michigan. “Well, he left us with more Superfund sites than when he came in,” Pruitt said at the time. “He had Gold King [the 2015 mine wastewater spill] and Flint, Michigan [drinking water crisis]. He tried to regulate CO2 twice and flunked twice. Struck out. So what’s so great about that record? I don’t know.” Wheeler, who was confirmed in February, is taking a note out of his predecessor’s playbook. “We’re not doing that. As soon as we get information that there’s a problem, we’re stepping in, we’re helping the local community get that water system…

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Second Amendment Groups Stunned After Court Allows Sandy Hook Families to Sue Gun Makers

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

by Kevin Daley The Connecticut Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling allowing victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre to sue gun manufacturer Bushmaster Firearms left Second Amendment groups bewildered. The 4-3 decision found that the plaintiffs — the families of nine victims — can sue Bushmaster under state unfair trade practices law, despite a federal statute that protects the gun industry from most lawsuits. “This is like suing Ford or General Motors because a car they sold was stolen and used to run over a pedestrian all because the car manufacturers advertised that their car had better acceleration and performance than other vehicles,” said the Second Amendment Foundation’s Alan Gottlieb. “This ruling strains logic, if not common sense,” Gottlieb added. “The court dismissed the bulk of the lawsuit’s allegations, but appears to have grasped at this single straw by deciding that the advertising is somehow at fault for what Adam Lanza did that day in December more than six years ago.” The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), which filed an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief sporting Bushmaster, said the court was exploiting a narrow exception to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) that…

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Commentary: America’s Defense Establishment Appears Too Big to Succeed

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

by Brandon J. Weichert The United States has a problem: It has a military-industrial complex built on assumptions about international security dating from the last century. Despite maintaining a larger defense budget than the next 10 countries behind it, the United States has been painfully slow to respond to the new, relatively cheap, threats of the 21st century. Our foreign-policy establishment continues to view today’s asymmetrical threats in 20th-century terms. Doing so allows the defense establishment to remain within its proverbial comfort zone of large budgets, even larger bureaucracy, and highly-centralized authority in Washington, D.C. America’s defense establishment today is a microcosm of the entropy befalling Western political institutions in general. The longer we fail to adapt to today’s various threats, the more unsafe we are. What’s more, the standard operating procedures that have defined American military policy are no longer applicable today. Like the defense establishments of Europe in 1914, our modes of deterrence are ill-suited for the new century. Unlearning Lessons of the Past As military historian Hew Strachan describes in his excellent 2003 book, The First World War, the way that European leaders in the run-up to that conflict conceptualized the “Balkan Crisis,” and the way…

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In Middle East, Pompeo Seeks Regional Support Against Iran

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the Middle East for regional security talks as Washington looks to draw new support in its opposition to Iranian aggression. Pompeo began is trip in Kuwait late Tuesday and headed to Israel Wednesday. His trip will also take him to Lebanon. In Israel, Pompeo is due to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government is headed to a tough April 9 re-election contest as Netanyahu is embroiled in a corruption investigation and facing allegations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Pompeo, in comments to reporters en route to the Middle East, dismissed the suggestion that his meeting with Netanyahu could be seen as the U.S. intruding in the Israeli election in support of Netanyahu. A senior State Department official said last week that Pompeo would not be meeting with Netanyahu’s opponents, but Netanyahu alone as the current head of the Israeli government. Netanyahu is visiting Washington next week for the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful Jewish lobbying group in the United States, and also could meet with President Donald Trump. Pompeo said the recent U.S. shift away from terminology describing the West Bank and…

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Jeff Hartline Commentary: Legislative ‘Hide the Ball’

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

by Jeff Hartline Today, while millions of Tennessee voters are busy at work taking care of their families and contributing to the vibrant economy of the Great State of Tennessee, their elected Representatives and Senators are huddled in various offices and in their respective Chambers doing the business of the State itself. This business involves listening to various entities and citizens and pursuing legislative remedies designed to make Tennessee a better, safer state. Bills are filed, co-sponsored, verified through legal departments, and started through the various sub-committees and committees for consideration prior to going to the Floor for a vote. These processes are intended to be transparent, as evidenced by the requirements to place legislation on the General Assembly website and track the process of various legislative initiatives, to the point of televising live the video proceedings of the committee process and debates on the Chamber Floor. For the most part, bills are filed with a clear statement of what the legislation is about, with a brief explanation of what the bill is designed to do. This is often referred to as the “caption” of the bill. The legal text of the bill then follows, usually in a linked…

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Border Agents Nabbed Over 400 Illegals in Just Five Minutes

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Admin

Border Patrol arrest illegal aliens

by Jason Hopkins U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas apprehended more than 430 illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border in just five minutes. At approximately 2:45 a.m. on Tuesday, Border Patrol agents working near El Paso apprehended a group of 194 migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a press release from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). At 2:50 a.m., agents working near Downtown El Paso encountered a second group consisting of 252 illegal migrants. In total, border enforcement officials took more than 430 illegal migrants into custody within the first three hours of that day. The two groups comprised mostly of Central American families and unaccompanied children. “In the last 30 days, the U.S. Border Patrol El Paso Sector is averaging 570 apprehensions a day, with 90 percent of those being in the El Paso Metropolitan Area,” CBP said in a Tuesday statement. “These numbers continue to stretch the resources available to the U.S. Border Patrol to deal with this influx and the challenges that come with it.” The huge number of apprehensions in the short span of time comes as the U.S. government is expecting March to be a recording-setting month…

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Minnesota’s Mainstream Media Received $330,000 Grant for Two-Day Conference on Racial Bias in Reporting

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Anthony Gockowski

Minnesota’s “mainstream media professionals” gathered for a two-day conference this week at Hamline University to discuss the “impact that racial narratives have on individuals, communities, and trust in media—and how they can collaborate to change it.” The conference, called “Truth and Transformation: Changing Racial Narratives in Media,” was made possible by a $332,000 grant from the Saint Paul and Minnesota Foundations that was awarded to a “community-media partnership.” According to the conference website, this partnership includes Minnesota Public Radio, Hamline University, ThreeSixty Journalism at the University of St. Thomas, the Minnesota Humanities Center, Pillsbury United Communities, and KMOJ Radio. The conference ran from March 19 to March 20 and helped “participants deepen their understanding of narratives that are absented from dominant culture discourse and engage with one another through the power of story, setting the foundation for deepened relationships across organizations, generations and geographic locations.” “On day two, participants will challenge their own assumptions and practice strategies for telling more accurate racial narratives, placing value on the strength of different worldviews. They will hear first-hand accounts of Minnesotans impacted by racial narratives, and work collaboratively to identify systemic barriers and to amplify community solutions to narrative change,” the conference website…

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Columbus Civil Servant Sues Union Over Forced Payments

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Andrew Shirley

A city employee of Columbus, Ohio has filed a class action lawsuit against her local labor union for forcing her to pay union fees, despite the practice being ruled unconstitutional. Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) was one of the most impactful Supreme Court rulings in recent history. As reported: The landmark court case Janus V. AFSCME, ruled on last year, made it illegal for unions to compel non-union employees to pay “agency fees,” overturning a 1977 decision that affirmed this right. The decision, despite being met with resounding condemnation by national unions, was celebrated by many workers. In addition, Janus ruled that a union can’t deduct any fee from a public employee without their “affirmative consent.” Shortly after this ruling, Columbus city employee Connie Pennington, a dues-paying member of Communication Workers of America (CW) Local 4502, her formerly mandated union representation, decided that she would not continue her involvement with the organization. She resigned her union membership and revoked the forms authorizing her union to deduct their dues from her paycheck. According to a press release provided by her legal defense: …CWA union officials refused to honor her revocation, instead claiming that she could only stop union dues payments at the…

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Trump Touts Economic Success in Visit to Last Manufacturer of M1 Abrams Tank in Ohio

March 21, 2019March 21, 2019 Anthony Gockowski

President Donald Trump spoke Wednesday to a crowd gathered at Ohio’s Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, the last remaining manufacturer of the U.S. Army’s main battle tank. The facility, based in Lima, Ohio, nearly shut its doors five years ago, but was saved in January when the Trump administration reinvigorated the plant with a $714 million order for 174 M1 Abrams tanks. “Well, you better love me. I kept this place open,” Trump began his address Wednesday to chants of “USA” from the audience. “And now, you’re doing record business. The job you do is incredible and I’m thrilled to be here in Ohio.” “This is some tank plant. There’s nothing like it in the world. You make the finest equipment in the world. You really know what you’re doing,” he continued, joking that he wanted to get into one of the tanks, but then “remembered when a man named Dukakis got into a tank.” According to the White House, the Lima plant has added more than 150 workers since the last year of President Barack Obama’s second term, and plans to hire 400 more workers over the next year and a half. “We’re here today to celebrate a resounding victory…

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Congressman Ryan Makes Surprise Visit to Canton to Attack Trump Ahead of Fundraiser

March 21, 2019March 20, 2019 Anthony Gockowski

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH-13) made a surprise appearance Wednesday at an Ohio Democratic Party event organized in response to President Donald Trump’s visits to Lima and Canton. Trump spoke Wednesday afternoon to a crowd gathered at Lima’s Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, which nearly closed down five years ago but turned around in January after the Trump administration ordered 174 M1 Abrams tanks at a cost of $714 million. The president then flew to Canton, Ohio for a closed-door fundraising event at Brookside Country Club. Prior to his stops in Canton and Lima, the state Democratic Party hosted two “We Stand With Ohio Workers” events in response to what it called “an attack on those fighting to save thousands of Ohio jobs.” As The Ohio Star reported, Trump tore into United Auto Workers Local 1112 President David Green in a recent tweet, saying he “ought to get his act together and produce” to save the General Motors plant in Lordstown. During Wednesday’s rally in Canton, Congressman Ryan called the criticisms “shameful,” “mean-spirited,” and “one more opportunity for him to distract from what’s going on.” “The man in the middle of this entire sh– storm, and I intentionally said that,” Ryan said.…

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