Day: June 9, 2019

Pilots Honor Military and First Responders at Great Tennessee Air Show

Zachery Schmidt

  Tennesseans showed up in large numbers at the “Great Tennessee Air Show” at the Smyrna Airway to see the Blue Angels take the sky this weekend. People’s anticipation for the flying halted momentarily as it started to rain right before the airshow festivities. However, the weather cleared up to allow for flying to commence. Blue Angels were not the only aerial displays people got to see. In total, 12 different types of flight teams and skydivers performed at the airshow this weekend. The crowd gave a roaring shout when the Blue Angels started their boisterous engines up and took off. Once the Angels were in the air people were amazed at the deafening aerial displays being put on by these pilots. A common theme of all the pilots this year was honoring military men and women. Before almost every routine, pilots did a gesture to pay tribute to the people who protect our country. Honoring the military was a common theme throughout the airshow. Mission BBQ, one of the vendors at the airshow, has a noon tradition of stopping everything while its workers say the national anthem every single day. “Our two founders wanted to come up with an…

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Todd Starnes Commentary: Lawmaker Says Chick-fil-A Logo Might as Well Say ‘We Hate Gay People’

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  A war on the U.S. Constitution and chicken is being waged in San Mateo County, California where an elected leader is trying to stop Chick-fil-A from opening a restaurant. David Canepa, a county supervisor wants to stop the Georgia-based company from establishing an outpost in Redwood City. “Hell no,” the leftist lawmaker told the local NBC television station. “Chick-fil-A’s values don’t represent our values,” Canepa said. “The logo might as well say ‘We hate gay people.’” For the record, the Chick-fil-A logo does not say, “We hate gay people.” It says eat more chicken. “When people think of the Chick-fil-A logo — what they think of is anti-LGBTQ,” he said. Now, that’s a lie and the supervisor knows it’s a lie. Chick-fil-A has never discriminated against gay people. They serve everyone — regardless of sexual orientation. These kinds of hateful attacks against Chick-fil-A is why I wrote “Culture Jihad: How to Stop the Left From Killing a Nation.” Supervisor Canepa told the CBS television station in San Francisco he wants to pressure the nation’s third-largest restaurant chain into canceling their plans. “What we are trying to do is to make sure Chick-fil-A–if they want to do business here–that there…

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Commentary: The Astonishing Mess of Academic Publishing

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by Phillip W. Magness   Scholarly publishing is a world of maddening inefficiencies. It’s also an unavoidable part of scientific discussion, and it remains one of the only features of academic life that offers some semblance of a meritocratic measure of a scholar’s contributions to the field. “Publish or perish,” as the adage goes, and publishing means dealing with publishers. Yet every step of the typical academic publication process is fraught with practices that would quickly drive away the customer base of almost any other industry. For the uninitiated, the step toward publication usually begins by selecting a prospective venue. For scholarly articles, this means one of the thousands of academic journals that curate research on highly specialized subject areas. For books, it usually means a university press or one of the major commercial presses that specializes in scholarly works. Once you select a suitable option and send out your paper (for journals) or proposal (for books) for review by the venue of choice, you then wait. And wait. And wait some more. In fact, waiting is by far the most common feature of publishing, and it can take months or even years to hear back from anyone. There are a…

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Two Men Allegedly Commit Fraud on Bledsoe County and the Tennessee Government

Chris Butler

  Two men took government money and promised to bring 1,000 jobs to Pikeville in Bledsoe County, but they ended up not fulfilling their end of the agreement, according to various news outlets. They ended up taking a sizable amount of money from the government they weren’t entitled to, according to news reports. “A federal seizure warrant says around June 2017, Karim Sadruddin and Rahim Sadruddin acted through one of their businesses, Textile Corporation of America, Inc. (TCA), to receive a $3 million economic development grant from Tennessee’s Department of Economic and Community Development (ECD),” according to the Chattanooga-based WTVC. “The plan was for the Sadruddins to purchase and renovate a textile manufacturing facility in Pikeville, Bledsoe County, Tennessee. They joined then-governor Bill Haslam for a ribbon-cutting ceremony in July 2017.” According to The Daily Beast, TCA “fabricated evidence of work performed” in order to draw grants from the federally-owed Tennessee Valley Authority and the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development. “The FBI alleges that the company’s owners pocketed much of that money for personal use,” according to The Daily Beast. The Sadruddins provided fake invoices and fake wire transfer records as proof that they had already paid for the…

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House Intelligence Committee to Hold Hearing on Mueller Probe

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by Chuck Ross   The House Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing next Wednesday about the “counterintelligence implications” of the special counsel’s investigation. Two former FBI national security officials, Stephanie Douglas and Robert Anderson, will testify at the hearing, which is entitled “Lessons from the Mueller Report: Counterintelligence Implications of Volume 1.” Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff, who chairs the committee, will focus on dozens of contacts between Russian government officials and operatives discussed in the special counsel’s report. Republicans could use the hearing to raise questions of their own about the partially-discredited Steele dossier, as well as about the role played by Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who had contact with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Schiff, who was a leading proponent of the collusion conspiracy theory, has had to refocus his line of attack on Trump in the wake of the special counsel’s report. The report said that prosecutors were unable to establish that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election. It also said that investigators did not establish that Trump associates acted as agents of the Russian government. Schiff has said that the report does not shed light on what information the FBI…

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California Lawmakers Move to Expand Medicaid for Illegal Immigrants

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by Kaylee Greene   The California Assembly voted 44-11 in favor of a bill last week that broadens state Medicaid coverage to include illegal immigrants to the tune of more than $3 billion annually. Under federal law, Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, provides health care to low-income citizens. Assembly Bill 4, if passed, would eliminate the existing citizenship requirements to receive benefits. The bill would “extend eligibility for full-scope Medi-Cal benefits to individuals of all ages, if otherwise eligible for those benefits, but for their immigration status, and would delete provisions delaying eligibility and enrollment.” In other words, under AB 4, illegal immigrants over 19 years old would receive the same full scope Medi-Cal benefits as taxpaying citizens, including keeping their chosen primary care provider. Though the proposal now travels to the state Senate, there is still debate among Democrats about which illegal immigrants should qualify for these benefits. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, concerned over the $3.4 billion yearly increase from the bill, has advocated extending coverage for illegal aliens who are between 19 and 25 years old, costing about $98 million annually. His 2019-2020 budget already proposes $22.9 billion for Medi-Cal from the general fund of $100.7 billion. The…

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Six Things to Know About the Hyde Amendment

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by Rachel del Guidice   Former Vice President Joe Biden came out Thursday against the Hyde Amendment, after previously supporting it. “If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code,” Biden said at a gala hosted by the Democratic National Committee in Atlanta. For decades, Congress has kept taxpayer funds from paying for abortions due to the leadership of an Illinois congressman. Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., was behind the amendment, first passed in 1976, that prohibits use of federal funds for most elective abortions. Melanie Israel, a research associate in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that the Hyde Amendment is one of the most significant legacies of the pro-life movement. “One of the pro-life movement’s first victories following the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions in 1973, which effectively legalized abortion-on-demand across the country, came about thanks to Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois in 1976,” Israel said. “He championed an amendment to the annual [Health and Human Services] appropriations bill which prohibited the department from expending…

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With Mexico Deal Done, US Urges China to Resume Trade Talks

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  One down, still others to go. President Donald Trump claimed a victory after Washington and Mexico agreed on measures to stem the flow of Central American migrants into the United States. Trump called off plans to impose a 5% tax on Mexican exports, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, speaking to reporters Saturday in Fukuoka on the sidelines of a meeting of financial leaders of the Group of 20 major economies, urged China to follow suit and return to stalled negotiations. Mnuchin said he planned to have a private conversation with the head of China’s central bank, Yi Gang. In a G-20 group meeting later in the day, the two were seen exchanging friendly remarks, but there were no fresh signs Beijing is ready to compromise in the dispute over trade and technology. “From our perspective of where we are now, it is a result of them backtracking on significant commitments,” Mnuchin said. “I don’t think it’s a breakdown in trust or good or bad faith. … If they want to come back and complete the deal on the terms we were negotiating, that would be great.” Mnuchin said he had no direct message to give to Yi, who has…

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Pete Buttigieg Says ‘the Black Church’ Is ‘Still Coming to Terms with LGBTQ Inclusion’

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by Evie Fordham   Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said the black church is “still coming to terms with LGBTQ inclusion” during an interview with BET published Friday. “I’ve had the opportunity to meet with black queer faith leaders and found there is a much more rich and diverse dialogue going on in activist communities of faith. Especially when you think about how the black church has been an original template for what I would call the religious left on civil rights but still coming to terms with LGBTQ inclusion,” Buttigieg told BET. Buttigieg, who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has attracted media attention in the 2020 presidential race for his thoughtful approach to issues but seems to be just as far-left as many other candidates. His interview with BET focused on issues of race and equity, and he discussed the importance of civil rights training and implicit bias training “in any workforce but certainly in a police department” in the BET interview. Buttigieg was forced in April to walk back comments he made in 2015 when he said “all lives matter.” “So at that time, I was talking about a lot of issues around racial reconciliation and…

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Commentary: How the Left Embraced Globalization

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by Edward Ring   On November 30, 1999, the largely theoretical question of globalism exploded into reality with the spectacle of 50,000 demonstrators shutting down a major meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. News coverage of this unexpected sensation, with expertly rendered video montages of police phalanxes, black-clad anarchists, smashed glass, snarled traffic, accompanied by animated commentary, provided American television media with a daily potboiler for a few days. Then globalism was again forgotten. In 1999, America’s progressive Left viewed globalism as the root cause of poverty, environmental destruction, and the disintegration of ancient cultures. They perceived globalism as the movement by multinational corporations, and their client organizations, the supranational World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to control the development and growth of supposedly sovereign nations. Instead of allowing developing countries the opportunity to grow diverse, self-sufficient economies, in the hallowed name of “free trade,” they were force-fed loans that required them to spend on mega-projects, cash crops, mines, dams, low-wage manufacturing plants—all built by multinationals that destroy the economic independence of the countries they enter. In 1999, Americans who bought running shoes produced by slave labor overseas, ate hamburgers made from cattle…

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Oberlin College Ordered to Pay $11 Million to Bakery it Wrongly Accused of Racism

Anthony Gockowski

  A jury has ordered Oberlin College to pay $11 million in damages to a family bakery on its campus that was falsely accused of racial profiling and faced months of student protests. The bakery, called Gibson’s Bakery, has operated on campus since 1885 and had a business relationship with the school until November 2017, when the bakery sued the school for numerous offenses, including libel, slander, and interference with business relationships. The conflict started in November 2016, the day after President Donald Trump’s election, after a black male student was stopped for shoplifting. He and two of his female peers eventually pleaded guilty to shoplifting and aggravated trespassing, but the damage to Gibson’s Bakery was already done. Students accused the business of racial profiling, organized protests outside of its storefront, and distributed flyers on campus that accused the bakery of having “a long account of racial profiling and discrimination.” On Friday, an Ohio jury ordered the college to pay $11 million in damages to the bakery for siding with the student protesters. “The verdict sends a strong message that colleges and universities cannot simply wind up and let loose student social justice warriors and then wash their hands of…

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Businessman Who Owns Private Border Wall Property Disputes ACLU Claim That Wall Blocks Access to Historic Border Monument

Jason M. Reynolds

  The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico is trying to claim that the construction of the private border wall blocks access to a “historical monument.” The ACLU of New Mexico says the Sunland Park, New Mexico private wall blocks access to Monument One, a border monument dating to 1855 that’s on the National Register of Historic Places, according to a story by KOAT. The ACLU is calling on the International Boundary and Water Commission, who manages the monument’s land, to intervene. The border wall is on private land, but it was built across from Monument One, which is on federal land but accessed from a road and a gate. The commission told KOAT that it has not given We Build the Wall a permit but their application is being reviewed. However, Brian Kolfage, founder of We Build the Wall, says the ACLU is lying and that it is trying to help the drug cartels that are being blocked by the new wall. Kolfage tweeted, “The ACLU is acting like this alleged monument is Yellowstone Natl. Park. The only people coming here are drug smugglers, it’s a dangerous area. Stop LYING TO Americans @ACLU it’s on private property too! Here’s…

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Nashville Mayoral Candidate Swain Points Out Contradictions in Briley’s Proposed Budget

Jason M. Reynolds

  Metro Nashville Mayoral candidate Dr. Carol Swain is calling for answers following Mayor David Briley’s contradictory statements and budgetary moves on his controversial parking meter plan. “How can Mayor Briley promise voters he’ll hold off on his widely opposed parking meter plan, at the same time his administration is quietly planning to spend the up-front $30 million it would bring in if passed? Which one is it—the bill is on hold so the public can weigh in, or the mayor will ram it down our throats as soon as he no longer needs our votes? The public deserves honest answers,” Swain said in a press release. Just two weeks ago, Briley said he was “hitting the pause button” on his plan to privatize parking meters, The Tennessee Star reported. “It is clear to me that residents still have questions about the merits of this proposal. Residents need more time – and it is unfair to the public and to Council to rush this process,” Briley wrote. Worse yet, others are using misinformation to further confuse and scare people. It’s politics at its worst. For these reasons, I am hitting the pause button on this proposal.” However, Swain said that last Tuesday,…

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