MLB Says It’s Pulling 2021 All-Star Game Out of Georgia over Voting Law

Major League Baseball on Friday announced that it would be pulling its 2021 All-Star game out of Georgia due to concerns over the state’s new voting law passed and signed last month.

“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” Commissioner Robert Manfred said in a statement on Friday. “Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.”

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New Social Media Platform Rescues Donald Trump Interview after Facebook Removes It

Trump Interview

When Facebook and Instagram threatened to impose “additional limitations” on Lara Trump for posting her interview with her father-in-law, the former president, she didn’t back down.

The Fox News contributor and former producer for Inside Edition jumped ship for an alternative platform that only left beta testing in November.

Lara Trump’s podcast “The Right View” debuted on Clouthub soon after Facebook and Instagram removed her Donald Trump interview, Clouthub CEO Jeff Brain told Just the News.

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‘You Are on Our List’: Professors Put Up Campus Fliers Threatening Professor and Students over Accused Racism, Hate Group Activity for Turning Point USA Affiliation

Tennessee Tech (TTU) is investigating after two professors targeted and threatened another professor and students over their Turning Point USA (TPUSA) involvement.

The professor featured on the flier, navy veteran A.J. Donadio, is a nursing professor that advises the TPUSA chapter at TTU. The incident occurred back in early February; the two suspects are associate professor Julia Gruber and English instructor Andrew Smith. The contents of the poster are reproduced below:

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Commentary: Radical New Rules for Post-America

Crowd with woman covered by the American Flag

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.  

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. 

Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits. But at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. 

Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution. 

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Analysis: Progressive Myths About Mass Shootings and Weapons of War

Within a week of blaming “white supremacy” for the murder of six Asian and two white women by a white man in Georgia, progressives are now blaming “assault weapons” for a mass shooting in which a Trump-hating Muslim immigrant with a history of violence, mental illness, and racial animus gunned down 10 white people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket.

Beyond the duplicity of highlighting race only when the killer is white and the victims are not, progressive lawmakers, activists, and journalists are using a litany of falsehoods in an attempt to ban common semi-automatic guns used for home defense and hunting.

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Chauvin Attorney Destroys Narrative That Floyd Called for Mother Before His Death, Media Ignores

Towards the end of his questioning of George Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross, Eric Nelson, the attorney for former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, uncovered a bombshell that has been left out of mainstream media coverage. 

“You and Floyd – Mr. Floyd, excuse me – I’m assuming, like most couples, had pet names for each other?” Nelson asked Ross. 

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Commentary: Conflict with China Could Mean Nuclear War

Radioactive Caution Signs on fence

China is not our friend. Since the Clinton Administration, and through the Bush and Obama years, American policy proceeded as if trade and cultural ties would work automatically to liberalize the Chinese. Instead, these ties have enriched and strengthened China, allowing it to build first-class infrastructure, a robust economy, and a substantially more capable military in a mere 30 years’ time. 

Simultaneously, these policies have hollowed out our own industrial base, rendering most of our industries, including the tech sector, dependent on Chinese inputs. In the name of efficiency, we have lost resilience, jobs, and independence. 

The prospect of a military confrontation with China is now closer than it was at the beginning of this process. Along with its rising confidence and capability, China has advanced a self-serving and novel view of its authority, asserting sovereignty and rights of exclusion deep into the South China Sea. 

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Jobless Claims Increase to 719,000 as Recovery Continues

Unemployment sign

The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims increased to 719,000 last week, even as the economy continues to slowly recover from the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Department of Labor.

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics figure released Thursday represented an increase in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending March 20, when 658,000 new jobless claims were reported. That number was revised down from the 684,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.

Roughly 18.2 million Americans continue to collect unemployment benefits, according to the report.

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GOP Senators Demand Intelligence Records on Hunter Biden’s Dealings with Chinese Energy Conglomerate

Hunter Biden

Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson called on the Biden administration Wednesday to turn over intelligence records regarding Hunter Biden’s work with a Chinese energy company with suspected ties to the Chinese military.

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, Grassley and Johnson said that it is “imperative” for Congress to understand the relationship between the Biden family and CEFC China Energy, the now-defunct energy conglomerate.

CEFC China Energy paid Biden approximately $6 million from August 2017 to September 2018 for consulting and legal services, according to a report that Grassley and Johnson released last year.

The Republicans said in the report that banking regulators flagged some of the wire payments from CEFC to Biden for “potential criminal financial activity.” Grassley and Johnson also noted that CEFC’s founder, Ye Jianming, was an official in the mid-2000s for a front group of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Landlords Struggle Under Extended CDC Eviction Ban, Class-Action Lawsuit Argues

John Vecchione

Landlords are struggling after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) extended a national ban on certain evictions apparently to slow the spread of COVID-19.

The CDC extended the moratorium, first enacted in Sept. 2020, through June 30.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa on behalf of Asa Mossman of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and other housing providers. 

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Factory Mixup Ruins 15 Million Johnson & Johnson Coronavirus Vaccines

COVID-19 Vaccinations

Workers at a Baltimore plant responsible for producing two separate coronavirus vaccines mistakenly mixed up their respective ingredients, ruining approximately 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and pausing all production at the plant, the company confirmed Wednesday.

The facility, run by Emergent BioSolutions, had partnered with both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca to produce vaccines. Federal officials said that the mistake was a result of human error, according to The New York Times, which first reported the mix up that reportedly occurred several weeks ago.

A quality control review “identified one batch of drug substance that did not meet quality standards at Emergent BioSolutions, a site not yet authorized to manufacture drug substance for our COVID-19 vaccine,” Johnson & Johnson said in a statement. “This batch was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process.”

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Chase Says Convention Rigged, Will Run as Independent if Snyder Wins Nomination

Senator Amanda Chase, candidate for the GOP nomination for governor, says she will run as an independent if Pete Snyder is nominated. Chase appeared on The Jeff Katz Show on Tuesday, where she said that the convention process selected by the Republican Party of Virginia is rigged.

“After all the conventions that I participated in for over a decade, I can tell you, that these conventions are rigged. It’s voter suppression,” Chase said.

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Hollywood Goes to Bat Against Ohio Constitutional Carry Bill

george takei sulu

A Hollywood actor and internet activist has vowed to fight against Ohio’s HB 227, a constitutional carry bill that would allow residents of the state to exercise their Second Amendment rights more freely. 

“House Bill 227 in Ohio would ‘allow a licensee to carry concealed all deadly weapons that would otherwise be legal to possess, remove the requirement of a licensed gun owner to ‘promptly’ notify police of a gun in their car and allow anyone 21 and older to carry a concealed deadly weapon without a license,’” Goerge Takei said on his Facebook page. 

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Georgia Legislature Approves $27B Budget for New Fiscal Year

Blake Tillery

The Georgia General Assembly has approved a $27.2 billion spending plan for the 2022 fiscal year, which starts July 1.

The Senate and House agreed to spend more money on health care, education, transportation, state positions, internet access and economic initiatives.

The House approved the measure, 148-21, late Wednesday night after it cleared the Senate unanimously, 52-0. Lawmakers now must send the proposal for state spending through June 30, 2022, to Gov. Brian Kemp for consideration.

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Michigan Think Tank Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Union Agency Fee Case

The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation submitted a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court Monday for Rizzo-Rupon v. International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

The Midland-based foundation seeks to extend First Amendment protections to employees who have been unionized under the Railway Labor Act, which covers railway and airline employees.

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Ohio to Pay Google $1.4M to Help Identify Unemployment Fraud

Gov. Mike DeWine

Ohio continues to add resources to a public-private partnership to combat unemployment fraud, which the state says has cost taxpayers more than $200 million, and the newest additions are a pair of big names.

Gov. Mike DeWine announced recently a new agreement between the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and Google to conduct data analytics on all outstanding claims. The state will pay the tech company $1.4 million to use Google Analytics to help discover fraud.

“This is one of the first things the private sector group told me when they came in is drilling down on this data and doing it in a very sophisticated way,” DeWine said.

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Knoxville Marks One Year of ‘Safer-at-Home’ Order; Other Tennessee Counties Allow Mask Mandates to Expire

April Fool’s Day marks one year since Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon issued the “safer-at-home” order, after three counties dropped their mask mandates. The counties of Hamblen, Roane, and Claiborn allowed their mandates to expire on Wednesday. Similar “15 days to slow the spread” practices turned into weeks, then months, and now, for many across Tennessee and the country.

Kincannon’s Safer at Home order lasted for nearly a month. It prohibited gatherings over 10 and forced closure of all “nonessential” businesses. The order empowered city officials with regulatory authority to take action against anyone who violated the order. The city even made available a non-compliance reporting process to enforce the order – which is still active.

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