Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed State Rep. Chris Todd from Jackson, Tennessee in studio to discuss court-packing, Keepnine.org, and working with House members.
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The U.S. Capitol Police officer who fatally shot 35-year-old Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt on January 6 will not face federal charges, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
An investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section and the Civil Rights Division, along with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD) “determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.”
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The hymn “Amazing Grace” was approved as an official state song by the Tennessee General Assembly this week. On Thursday, House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) signed the bill.
The language of the bill itself explained the background and significance of the hymn. “Amazing Grace” was originally a poem penned by John Newton, an 18th century Christian minister who walked away from life as a slave ship captain. The poem, later set to music by American composer William Walker, was inspired by his newfound faith in God following his near-death experience while at sea.
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According to a new study conducted by the Democratically aligned research firm Equis Labs, former President Donald Trump succeeded in peeling away significant amounts of Latino support, and not just in conservative-leaning geographic areas.
The post-election analysis by Equis found that certain demographics within the Latino electorate had proved increasingly willing to embrace Mr. Trump as the 2020 campaign went on, including conservative Latinas and those with a relatively low level of political engagement.
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Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told lawmakers on Thursday that the intelligence community has seen “indications” that China is attempting to influence the World Health Organization’s assessment about the origins of the coronavirus.
“We’ve certainly seen indications that China is trying to influence the World Health Organization’s efforts in this area,” Haines told Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick during a House Intelligence Committee hearing.
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In dramatic final day of Derek Chauvin’s trial for second and third degree murder of George Floyd, Chauvin invoked his Fifth Amendment right remain silent during his own trial.
After a series of questions and answers between Chauvin and his attorney Eric Nelson, confirming for the court’s record that Chauvin understood his Fifth Amendment rights, and was exercising them on his own accord, the former Minneapolis Police officer decided he would not take the stand.
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Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed State Rep. Chris Todd in the studio to discuss his bill expected to reach the House floor on Monday addressing term limits for members of the U.S. Congress.
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As the country emerges from COVID-19 restrictions, small businesses are doing better, according to a March report from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). However, uncertainty about the next few months for business owners is still high, and businesses are having trouble finding qualified workers to fill positions.
“Virginia’s small businesses are working hard on their recovery but are struggling to find the right workers to fill open positions,” NFIB Virginia State Director Nicole Riley said in a Wednesday press release
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As Michigan enters its sixth straight week of rising COVID-19 cases, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer expanded the use of monoclonal antibody therapy to reduce COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths for high-risk patients.
“We are using every mitigation strategy, every medication, and every treatment option to fight the virus here in Michigan,” Whitmer said in a statement. “These antibody treatments could keep you out of the hospital and save your life, and my administration and I will continue working with the federal government to make sure we are using all the tools in our toolbox to keep you and your family safe and get back to normal sooner.”
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Members of the Washington, D.C.-based Citizens Against Government Waste this week released their 2021 Congressional Pig Book, citing examples of what they call government waste, including waste that affects Georgia. The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW’s annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget.
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LYNCHBURG, Virginia – The Equity for Africa Summit hosted by the Liberty University School of Business and the Freedom Center came to a close Thursday. On the final day, African business and African government representatives had the opportunity to sit one-on-one with over 30 American businesses and CEOs. The focus of the three-day summit has been to connect African businesses’ needs with American solutions and technology. Attendees have several take-aways from this summit that include international business and governmental contacts; opportunities to start or grow an African business designed to improve the quality of life for Africans; connection with a global network of ministries and faith based organizations that will support the spiritual growth of African nations; and a warning of the atheistic/communistic infringement on African liberties, religious expression, and human rights by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). According to a BRI backgrounder by the Counsel on Foreign Relations (CFR): China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived. Launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, the vast collection of development and investment initiatives would stretch from East Asia to Europe, significantly expanding…
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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Last week a Republican primary candidate for the 2022 Ohio gubernatorial race uncovered that his vote in the 2020 Presidential Election was not reflected in his voter history on the Franklin County Board of Elections (FCBOE) website.
Joe Blystone, a Canal Winchester rancher and first-time political candidate, requested FCBOE investigate the matter. FCBOE later determined that Blystone’s vote was cast but not recorded in his voter history.
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Per the Code of the Commonwealth of Virginia, all campaigns must have their Campaign Finance Report filed with the State Board of Elections by 11:59PM Thursday. These reports give voters a behind-the-scenes look on how candidates run their campaigns, who is giving them money, and how the candidates are spending their campaign cash.
According to public reports available as of press time, former Carlyle Group CEO Glenn Youngkin has out-raised the Republican field for Governor. Youngkin filed a sizable return, reporting $7.6 million in raised funds. However, he did not post yet how much cash on hand (COH) he has. Former New Media Strategies CEO and Youngkin’s main opponent Pete Snyder, meanwhile, raised $6.4 million – but also with no report yet on his cash on hand.
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Bills revising Florida’s trade secret law and placing enhanced disclosure requirements on sources of foreign grants for university, medical and high-tech researchers are set for adoption by the House and Senate.
The bills are a response to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ call for lawmakers to adopt legislation to thwart attempts by foreign governments to infiltrate agencies and universities to steal trade secrets.
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The Ohio House of Representatives passed a bill on Thursday that would give grants to bars, restaurants and the lodging industry to offset the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
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During a Thursday House Intelligence Committee hearing regarding the federal government’s annual threat assessment result, an Ohio congressman held Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray’s feet to the fire over the threat posed by Antifa, a far-left group responsible for rioting, burning, and destruction in America’s cities over the past several years.
Top Department of Justice leaders, including Wray’s FBI, have concluded that far-right “white supremacy” is a major terror threat in the United States, citing the Jan. 6 Capitol protest as justification.
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Gubernatorial candidate Delegate Kirk Cox (R-Colonial Heights) agrees that schools need to be reopened immediately. But he says that’s not enough — policymakers need to address learning losses. Districts like Fairfax County have reported spikes in failing grades. Parents and medical studies have expressed concern over the long-term harms caused by a year of virtual learning. Cox is calling for tutoring programs to help students recover academically, and he says he is willing to be one of those tutors.
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The Tennessee House will determine Monday whether Tennessee abortion clinics must cremate or bury aborted fetal remains.
The sponsors on the bill are State Representative Tim Rudd (R-Murfreesboro) and State Senator Janice Bowling (R-Tullahoma). Bowling was the first to introduce the bill.
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Chattanooga’s new mayor-elect, Tim Kelly, was determined the winner of the runoff election on Tuesday evening. Kelly secured 60 percent of the votes over former River City Company President and CEO Kim White.
In his victory speech, Kelly stated that this election marked the beginning of achieving social justice. He said that his first actions would be to establish a COVID-19 response team and address racial disparities.
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We will never hear the last of these names. Eric Garner. Alton Sterling. Michael Brown. George Floyd. Rashad Brooks.
And now Daunte Wright.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Conservative Journalist and Author Andy Ngo on the newsmakers line to discuss his disinvitation from the upcoming Culture Summit Christian conference in Nashville and the trending critical race theory in the evangelical community.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Washington Correspondent for the Star News Network Neil W. McCabe to the newsmakers line to weigh in on democratic overspending in infrastructure and tax bills, the oncoming red wave of 2022, and Republican candidates for the House and Senate.
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Civil Rights library curator and social justice advocate Andrea Blackman will serve as Nashville’s new Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer.
Mayor John Cooper announced this latest appointment on Wednesday.
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Pro-life groups are accusing the Food and Drug Administration of “ignoring the science” by removing restrictions that prevented abortion drugs from being delivered by mail.
The national pro-life Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) and its research and education arm, the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), said Tuesday that the FDA’s decision to remove restrictions on abortion drugs “ignores the risk of increased mortality and morbidity for women taking the abortion pill,” according to an SBA List press release.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional Republican candidate Quincy McKnight to the newsmakers line to talks about what has motivated him to run for Congress and his top priorities if elected in 2022.
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Chattanooga is hosting migrant children for their schooling, although they are not attending the Hamilton County Public Schools. This, according to a spokesman for that school district.
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The FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday that they are recommending that the use of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine be halted after six cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot were reported in the United States.
The dangerous clots developed about two weeks after the vaccine was administered in these patients—all of them women between the ages of 18 and 48, according to ABC News.
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Ralph Nader made the chief executive officers of America’s largest corporations a proposition in 1996. Considering they had built their fortunes on generous tax benefits and subsidies—valued at an estimated $65 billion a year back then and footed by everyday Americans—would they consider opening their annual stockholder meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance? America had “bred them, built them, subsidized them, and defended them,” as Nader wrote, and as Obama would later more directly say: “You didn’t build that.”
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We are now in a crisis of American civilization fully as dangerous and real as the crisis of the US Civil War or World War II.
During both those crises, if America had lost, it would have ceased to be America – and the cause of freedom around the world would have been dramatically weakened.
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U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a member of the far left “Squad,” called for the end of policing in the United States Monday night.
In a vicious tweet, the Michigan radical called policing “government funded murder” and ended with “no more policing, incarceration, and militarization.”
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Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation co-founder and executive director Patrisse Cullors, a self-identified “trained Marxist,” raked in upwards of $20,000 a month serving as the chairwoman of a Los Angeles jail reform group in 2019, according to campaign finance records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Reform LA Jails disbursed a total of $191,000 to Cullors in 2019 through her consulting firm, Janaya and Patrisse Consulting, according to financial records submitted to the California Fair Political Practices Commission. The description for each of the seven reported payments to the Cullors’ firm that year read: “P. Cullors, Principal Officer, Business Owner.”
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As facts about the deadly shooting of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center come to light, the original narrative about the pretext for his encounter with police officers has been proven false.
Immediately after body camera footage surfaced online showing former Brooklyn Center Police officer Kimberly Potter shooting Wright, rumors swirled online that Wright was pulled over because he had an air freshener hanging from his rear view mirror.
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Washington County Attorney Pete Orput announced Wednesday that the police officer who shot and killed Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center will be charged with second degree manslaughter.
Kimberly Potter resigned from her post Tuesday after she shot and killed Wright during a struggle Sunday. She worked as a police officer for 26 years.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics released data Tuesday showing a sharp increase in consumer prices, especially gasoline, as many Americans struggle to make ends meet.
March saw a 0.6% increase in consumer prices, the largest spike in nearly a decade. That increase can be attributed in large part to a rise in inflation.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to discuss the United State’s foreign economic development policy, cronyism, and lobbyists of Washington and speculates the Republican candidate for 2022.
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While more than three dozen people charged with various offenses related to the January 6 protest on Capitol Hill now rot in solitary confinement in a D.C. jail, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is letting off the hook violent protestors involved in the ongoing siege of Portland.
Politico today reported federal prosecutors are seeking “deferred prosecution” for at least six people charged with disorderly conduct, attacking police officers, and interfering with law enforcement in that city last year. “Some lawyers attribute the government’s newfound willingness to resolve the Portland protest cases without criminal convictions to the arrival of President Joe Biden’s administration in January and to policy and personnel changes at the Justice Department,” Josh Gerstein wrote April 14. “Some of the assaults described in the Portland cases bear similarities to the Capitol violence.”
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After Major League Baseball (MLB) pulled its All-Star Game out of Georgia over new voter laws, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) proposed a bill Wednesday to subject the organization to antitrust laws. The “Competition in Professional Baseball Act” would repeal Section 27 of the Clayton Act.
MLB parroted the outcry over Georgia’s new voter ID laws. The organization claimed that voter ID requirements disproportionately disenfranchise Black individuals, and therefore are inherently racist policies.
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Republican officials in two Georgia counties this week formally censured Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on the grounds that they betrayed former U.S. President Donald Trump last November. Conservative activist Debbie Dooley told The Georgia Star News Wednesday that the GOP pushback against those three Georgia officials has only just begun.
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New polling data shows former Governor Terry McAuliffe in the lead with 42 percent, while his closest opponents, Jennifer Carroll Foy and Senator Jennifer McClellan (D-Richmond) both had 8 percent support, while 29 percent of voters remain undecided. Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax and Delegate Lee Carter (D-Manasses) came in with seven percent and four percent respectively, placing all the candidates except McAuliffe within range of each other, given the 4.3 percent margin of error. Public Policy Polling conducted the interviews of 526 likely Democratic primary voters on April 12 and 13.
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The Virginia Department of Education announced a new set of guidelines for school reopening, the result of a workgroup created in February. The guidelines include recommendations for remediating learning loss, note that virtual learning doesn’t work for every students, calls for special attention for vulnerable populations, and say that more staff may be needed to keep student-teacher ratios low.
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With the 2021 Republican Party of Virginia Unassembled State Convention creeping closer and closer, Republican candidate for Governor Pete Snyder made his way to the Star City on Tuesday night to feed convention-goers and engage in a little retail politics.
Snyder, the former New Media Strategies CEO and longtime leader in the Republican Party of Virginia, bounced out of the car at Starkey Park to greet attendees. Syder’s Communications Director Lenze Morris – an alumnus of Governor Kay Ivey (R-Alabama) – and Republican Party of Virginia Western Regional Vice Chairman and Snyder’s Political Director Daniel Webb quietly watched as the candidate made his rounds.
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Eight Ohio vaccine clinics will be suspending distribution after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended a pause on administering the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine.
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Believing the state’s economy continues to move in a positive direction, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine thinks it’s time for payback.
DeWine recently recommended the General Assembly use nearly a quarter of the expected $5 billion in federal stimulus money on its way to Ohio to repay loans the state needed to balance its unemployment compensation fund as jobless claims skyrocketed during the pandemic.
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A big name actor-turned-producer says he will not film his upcoming movie in Georgia after the state passed a voter integrity law requiring identification to vote with an absentee ballot.
“Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith will move production on their big-budget, runaway slave thriller ‘Emancipation’ out of Georgia in protest over the state’s controversial new voting restrictions,” NBC reported.
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The Equity for Africa Summit continued today at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. The summit is hosted by the LU School of Business and the Freedom Center. The purpose for the summit is to connect African heads of state, African businesses and officials with American business leaders.
The bulk of the summit today were breakout sessions where African leaders and African businesses pitched their projects to American businesses, private financial institutions, and the US Government. There are 10 African nations and over 30 American businesses, mostly represented by CEOs, attending the Equity for Africa Summit.
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Wednesday morning, the Tennessee Senate passed a bill to regulate funding for conducting local and state elections. SB 1534/HB 966 would require funds from private individuals, businesses, and corporations to receive approval from various elected state officials.
State Representative Michele Carringer (R-Knoxville) and State Senator Kerry Roberts (R-Springfield) are the sponsors on the legislation.
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Tuesday, Governor Bill Lee announced that Tennessee will have an additional $580 million invested into various budget initiatives. The amended budget will cover investments in K-12 and higher education, rural communities, safety initiatives, economic development, transportation, and additional tax cuts.
In a press release, the governor’s office shared that this was made possible through “fiscal prudence.” The Tennessee Star inquired with Lee’s office as to what those measures were that allowed these available funds to accrue. Their spokespersons didn’t respond to request for comment by press time.
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The Wall Street Journal on Friday published an editorial headlined “The GOP’s Trump Problem.” It gets things terribly wrong. The GOP is Trump’s party and it is the Wall Street Journal that has the Trump problem.
Having been commendably supportive of the former president through most of his term, the Journal joined in the general embarkation of NeverTrumpers over the ostensible election results. The theory that inspired this headline is Trump had his chance but lost the election in a manner practically indistinguishable from defeated incumbents Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992 (when there were no suggestions of questionable results). The editors suggest further that Trump had exhausted any grounds he had for contesting the fairness of the counting of ballots, and that it was his duty to go quietly into that good night and do everything that he could to elect Republican senators in Georgia to preserve the Republican majority in the Senate and to enhance the likelihood of the reelection next year of Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.
These state officials were to be embraced even though they had capitulated to the leader of the Georgia Democrats, Stacey Abrams, permitting the critical electoral votes of their state to be wrongfully cast for Joe Biden. They assumed Trump had to do all he could to keep those in his own party who had betrayed him in place. That is not normally how the system, or human nature, works.
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The NCAA signaled that it may pull championship games from places that stop biological males from competing in women’s sports.
The collegiate sports league released a statement on Monday reaffirming that it supports “the opportunity for transgender student-athletes to compete in college sports,” which is grounded in the value of “fair competition.”
“The NCAA has a long-standing policy that provides a more inclusive path for transgender participation in college sports,” continues the statement. “Our approach — which requires testosterone suppression treatment for transgender women to compete in women’s sports — embraces the evolving science on this issue and is anchored in participation policies of both the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.”
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CNN’s technical director was caught on video admitting that the cable “news” network traffics in propaganda under the guise of journalism in order achieve a desired political outcome.
The director, Charlie Chester, described in Part One of Project Veritas’ “CNN Exposed” series how the network used propaganda to benefit Joe Biden and get former President Trump voted out of office.
During a conversation with an undercover Project Veritas reporter, Chester also divulged that CNN plans to start hyping the climate change agenda as soon as the Covid-19 hysteria dies down, per CEO Jeff Zucker’s orders.
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