There are more questions than answers about the likely thousands of Afghans who are coming to Wisconsin.
The Pentagon on Tuesday said 22,000 Afghan refugees will be sent to military bases in Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The Wisconsin base is Fort McCoy.
Read the full story
Lawmakers heard testimony on House Bill 4471, which aims to ban employers from requiring certain vaccines and wearing masks.
The bill aims to ban employers from firing or discriminating against employees who choose not to get certain vaccinations, including tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, or COVID-19, or making them wear masks or disclosing vaccination status.
Read the full story
A screenshot allegedly taken inside a Sumner County classroom shows a lesson plan that disparages supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump. The screenshot recently appeared on Facebook.
Read the full story
President Biden attacked Tennessee parents who protested mask mandates for the second time in less than a week in an address delivered at the White House on Wednesday afternoon.
Biden also threatened Republican governors around the country who have banned school board mask mandates, at the press conference, during which he took no questions. He did not address the unfolding military debacle in Afghanistan caused by his reckless decision to remove all American troops before American citizens in the country were evacuated. At present the Biden administration has abandoned thousands of Americans left behind enemy lines in the country which the Taliban overran earlier this month in a matter of days.
Read the full story
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed political strategist Steve Bannon, who was the White House’s chief strategist during President Donald Trump’s administration, to the newsmaker line to discuss his new idea, announced on The War Room yesterday, regarding Trump being voted in as Speaker of the House.
Read the full story
Nashville Mayor John Cooper backs school defiance of Governor Lee’s (R) executive order allowing parents to opt their kids out of mask mandates. Cooper called the order “disappointing.” The order follows the Nashville Metro Public Schools (MNPS) board voting to mandate masks in classrooms less than two weeks ago. As reported by The Tennessee Star, over 1,000 individuals signed a letter asking the Nashville Metro Public Schools to instate a mask mandate for the 2021 school year.
Read the full story
“Our military mission in Afghanistan will conclude on August 31st. The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way, prioritizing the safety of our troops as they depart… And thanks to the way in which we have managed our withdrawal, no one — no one U.S. forces or any forces have — have been lost. Conducting our drawdown differently would have certainly come with a increased risk of safety to our personnel.”
That was President Joe Biden as recently as July 8 justifying not just a drawdown, but a rapid drawdown of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, trying to reach an arbitrary goal of zero troops in the country by the end of this month.
Read the full story
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that “certainly a fair amount” of U.S. weaponry that was in the possession of Afghan Security Forces has now fallen in the hands of the Taliban.
Sullivan spoke at a White House press briefing two days after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and was asked whether the Biden administration knows where the billions of dollars in weaponry that the U.S. supplied the Afghan government will ultimately end up.
Read the full story
Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, admitted to having spoken directly with faculty members from school districts that are defying the law and forcing mask mandates on their students, even if their states have banned such mandates, ABC News reports.
Cardona said that some such schools fear repercussions from the state governments if they continue defying the bans, including in Texas and Florida. “I have had the conversations with superintendents,” Cardona said in an interview on Tuesday. “And they have asked, if this goes in that direction, how do we get support? My message is, open the schools safely; we got your back.”
Cardona had previously sent a letter to several school districts in Florida promising that the federal government would fund the schools directly in the event that Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) follows through on his promise to suspend the salaries of all superintendents who force such mandates onto their students in defiance of state law.
Read the full story
Vanderbilt University officials have announced their COVID-19 masking requirements for the new 2021-2022 school year. Vanderbilt officials said in a Health and Safety Protocols memo that the Nashville-based school has a high vaccination rate of about 94 percent.
Read the full story
The sudden collapse of American power in Afghanistan has triggered the usual partisan blamestorming in Washington. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has blamed the Biden Administration. How clueless does a member of the Cheney family have to be to go around assigning blame for Afghanistan? Talking points from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office show that their plan was to blame Donald Trump for everything. Biden went on TV and blamed Trump for the plan Biden abandoned, the Afghan people for being unwilling to fight, and the Good Humor Man for running out of chocolate chocolate chip.
There’s going to be a lot to sort out in the weeks and months to come regarding this catastrophe, and all the questions that have been asked are legitimate. Should we have been there in the first place? What was our mission? What does the outcome say about the competence of our military?
Read the full story
Twitter announced Tuesday it will test a feature allowing users to report tweets they believe are misleading, as the company cracks down on alleged misinformation.
Users in the U.S., South Korea, and Australia will be able to select the “It’s Misleading” option when reporting a tweet, the company announced Tuesday. The social media platform said it may not take direct action on each flagged tweet, but will use the reports to identify misinformation trends.
Twitter staff will review certain reported tweets depending on the topic or level of exposure and determine if they violate the company’s misinformation policies, a Twitter spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Read the full story
Georgia’s Election Board moved Wednesday toward an eventual takeover of elections in the state’s most populous county, reacting to mounting evidence of incompetance and irregularities in the Atlanta area last November.
The board’s unanimous vote was made possible by provisions in the state’s sweeping new voting law passed earlier this year.
Read the full story
While schools like the University of Wisconsin Madison have considered canceling President Abraham Lincoln, one Princeton professor wants to preserve his legacy and help students learn more about the nation’s 16th president.
The Ivy League university will offer a course called “Abraham Lincoln’s Politics: Concepts, Conflict and Context” this semester taught by Professor Allen Guelzo, a Civil War historian and author. He also serves on the board of the Abraham Lincoln Association.
Read the full story
Multiple watchdog groups said Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar may have violated federal law for failing to mention any income received from her critically-acclaimed 2020 memoir in her latest financial disclosure report filed on Friday.
Omar reportedly signed a deal worth up to $250,000 for her memoir, “This Is What America Looks Like,” in January 2019, around the same time she was sworn into Congress. Omar’s communications director said the House Ethics committee approved the book deal, but the Democratic lawmaker’s financial disclosures covering the calendar years 2018 and 2019 contain no mention of the book or any advance income received upon signing a deal.
The book was published in May 2020 to rave reviews by the press and Omar’s Democratic colleagues. The Atlantic dubbed it one of the best political books of the year, and numerous high profile Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, praised on the book.
Read the full story
Representative Mark Green (R-TN) joined the lawsuit over the suspension of the service academy Boards of Visitors. The boards were suspended by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which Green calls “unacceptable.” Green, a member of the United States Military Academy Board of Visitors and an alumnus from the Military Academy, said that “Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has no authority to suspend the Board of Visitors, and he is violating federal law by doing so.”
Read the full story
In Alan Parker’s 1982 film, “Pink Floyd—The Wall,” a young boy’s reality turns into a nightmare. It’s post-war England, and the boy—now in his teens and fatherless—sits in a classroom tuning out his bland math lesson and composing poems instead. The teacher—a pedagogical sadist—mocks the boy, and then proceeds to mete out some good, old-fashioned corporal punishment. The boy winces, and overwhelmed with anxiety begins to see his world as an unbearable nightmare of human oppression.
Read the full story
One of the five Taliban commanders who was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2014 by former president Barack Obama in exchange for Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, is emerging as a key figure who helped the insurgents seize power in Afghanistan.
Khairullah Khairkhwa, along with the other freed detainees, used Qatar as a base to form a Taliban regime in exile, and eventually became an official negotiator for peace talks with the Biden regime, the New York Post reported.
Khairkhwa previously served as Spokesperson of the Taliban regime, Governor of the Kabul Province of the Taliban regime, and Minister of Internal Affairs of the Taliban regime, according to the United Nations National Security Council.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden’s average approval rating has dipped below 50% for the first time since taking office.
His approval stands at 49.8% in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker and 49.4% in RealClearPolitics’ average. While Biden’s approval rating still is higher than the 44% and 46.8% who disapprove in each average, it has steadily declined since May 25.
Biden has been plagued with multiple challenges since late May, including the resurgence of coronavirus cases driven by the Delta variant and the sudden fall of the Afghan government to the Taliban. He has also been met with rising crime, growing concerns over inflation and a decades-high surge of migrants at the southern border.
Read the full story
Deborah Ball, a mathematics professor at the University of Michigan, argued in a podcast that the discipline inflicts racism against Black and Latino students.
On Jul 21, Ball appeared on an episode of the Ed Fix Podcast titled “Fighting Racism with Mathematics” to make her case.
Read the full story
The lawyer representing students challenging Indiana University’s COVID vaccine mandate has been “retained by students in other states to bring similar claims,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
Veteran litigator James Bopp told the John Solomon Reports podcast that he expects to file suit in another “four or five states in the next couple of weeks.”
Read the full story
The Texas Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Texas Constitution authorizes the state’s House of Representatives to arrest members who flee in order to break the quorum required to vote.
The opinion states that “just as” Texas’ Constitution enables “‘quorum-breaking’ by a minority faction of the legislature, it likewise authorizes ‘quorum-forcing’ by the remaining members,” including by “arrest.”
“The legal question before this Court concerns only whether the Texas Constitution gives the House of Representatives the authority to physically compel the attendance of absent members. We conclude that it does, and we therefore direct the district court to withdraw the TRO,” wrote Justice Jimmy Blacklock on behalf of the state’s Supreme Court.
Read the full story
Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white-supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.
At a time when governments, sports teams, schools and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution” — and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.
Read the full story
Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed (TN-2) Congressman Tim Burchett to the newsmakers line to get his reaction and predictions on the destructive withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Read the full story
A federal judge has ruled the Biden administration must resume allowing oil and gas leasing on federal land and waters, but the administration is saying it will not go down without a fight.
The Biden administration said it will appeal a court ruling allowing the leases, the latest development in a months-long battle between President Joe Biden and the oil and gas industry, even as gas prices continue to rise.
Read the full story
Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed The Star News Network’s Washington Correspondent Neil McCabe to the newsmakers line to discuss how Afghanistan is worse than Saigon.
Read the full story
Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to discuss the sudden Afghanistan withdrawal of US military troops and how it could benefit the Biden family.
Read the full story
The Craig County School Board decided Tuesday to provide medical mask mandate exemption forms that don’t require a physician’s signature and religious exemption forms, although the medical exemption form requires an explanation.
“I do not think the physician should have to sign off, no physician is going to sign off on any of these forms,” Vice Chair Gina Smith said. “I think as parents we are responsible for our kids and it should be enough just to have a diagnosis or a medical reason that your child doesn’t need to wear a mask.”
Read the full story
Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Vernon Jones announced Wednesday that former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn will accompany him at various rallies later this month. Jones emailed supporters and said Flynn will appear with him at the following Take Back Georgia rallies:
Read the full story
A Detroit firearms instructor is planning this weekend the largest gun training for women ever in the state.
Rick Ector, who runs Legally Armed in Detroit — or LAID — has held similar events in the past, including one last year that attracted 1,938 participants, but nothing this ambitious.
The two-day mass training will be held Saturday and Sunday, August 21-22 at two gun ranges in Taylor, Michigan: Top Gun Shooting Sports and Recoil Firearms from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. This is the tenth annual event, with Ector seeing growth each year. The press release stated that the first year of training in 2011 had only 50 participants, which grew to nearly two thousand at the 2020 training.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden called the head of Phoenix Union High School District after the district implemented mask requirements that may be contrary to state law, praising Superintendent Chad Geston for the move. In a statement, Biden said he told Geston during his Friday phone call that he “did the right thing.”
The issue is currently under litigation in Maricopa County Superior Court. Numerous state legislators asked Governor Doug Ducey a few days ago to take action against the school districts in violation, and Ducey responded on Tuesday with a directive financially penalizing the districts. They will not receive any of the $163 million that the state got through the American Rescue Plan to boost per-pupil funding. Students in those districts will receive vouchers to attend schools elsewhere.
Read the full story
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and her health department are leaving the door open to new coronavirus orders as school districts are defying their demands to mandate universal mask wearing in schools this fall.
Read the full story
The Biden administration announced Wednesday that federal health experts now recommend vaccinated Americans receive a COVID booster shot.
The boosters will be widely distributed to the public after research indicated that the vaccine’s effectiveness declines over time.
Read the full story
A judge ordered an Ohio felon to get the COVID vaccine within 60 days of his court date or face additional jail time. Obtaining the vaccination was the condition of his probation. He was sentenced to two years of probation for possession of fentanyl.
Read the full story
The Minnesota State Fair announced Wednesday that they will not be requiring masks. Their statement reads that, “Mandating masks fairgrounds-wide would be extremely difficult for our organization to enforce, so we are urging you to pitch in and do what’s right.”
Read the full story
Several people on Wednesday urged members of the Fulton County Commission not to approve a nearly $600,000 contract with an Illinois-based group to review and assess the county’s voter registration and elections operations. County commissioners had not approved or rejected the proposed contract with this organization, The Elections Group, as of Wednesday evening.
Read the full story
A majority of New York lawmakers were ready to remove Gov. Andrew Cuomo from office over misconduct allegations, a removal that was only averted by his resignation. But despite the near-universal condemnation of his actions as governor, Cuomo still stands to earn a substantial pension from taxpayers for his time in office.
News reports this week indicate that Cuomo has filed for his pension as the date when he has promised to resign, Aug, 24, draws near.
Read the full story
As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is threatening to withhold funding from Alachua and Broward County school districts for imposing a district wide school mask mandate, other school districts are considering defying the state as well.
DeSantis previously signed an executive order banning mask mandates in Florida’s school, much to the ire of Alachua and Broward, but now Hillsborough and Miami-Dade counties are planning on addressing masking issues in upcoming school board meetings.
Read the full story
Less than 24 hours after the U.S. Census Bureau delivered Wisconsin’s 2020 Census numbers, a handful of voters have filed a lawsuit to toss out the state’s current political map, and have judges skip the legislature and draw new maps on their own.
The lawsuit will be heard in federal court in Madison. It argues that because of the Census data, the state’s current congressional and legislative maps are out of date, and cannot be used in any upcoming elections.
Read the full story
When a local school district decided not to require masks for students and staff, a small north central Ohio village decided to take matters into its own hands.
Gambier, a town of about 2,500 people about 60 miles northeast of Columbus, enacted a mask mandate during an emergency village council meeting Monday, encompassing nearly all public buildings, including an elementary school.
Read the full story
The Florida Board of Education (BOE) is ramping up pressure toward Florida’s two defiant school districts, Alachua and Broward, over their insistence on imposing a district-wide school mask mandate despite Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mask mandate ban.
The BOE met on Tuesday night where they voted to direct Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran to investigate the school districts and their elected officials, saying the school districts broke the law. Board member Tom Grady said the investigation could “involve withholding salaries, it may involve removing officers, it may involve reviewing district conduct.”
Read the full story
Madison and Dane County residents will have to wear their masks once again.
The city and county’s joint public health office, Public Health Madison & Dane County, on Tuesday reinstated its indoor mask mandate.
Read the full story
Congresswoman and “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib, D-MI, is under fire for pushing to cancel rent during the COVID-19 pandemic while at the same time raking in up to $50,000 in rental income. Fox reported Tlaib’s 2020 financial disclosure.
Tlaib has built her brand as a fighter for the people, advocating for eviction moratoriums, saying landlords “prey on single moms” and insinuating landlords unfairly take money from vulnerable people.
Read the full story
Progressive political activist and consumer protection attorney Morgan Harper will take a second shot at challenging a veteran Democrat with her announcement Wednesday she will compete for the Democratic nomination to replace retiring U.S. Senator Rob Portman.
Read the full story
Based on population shifts reflected in 2020 Census Data, southwestern Virginia is likely to lose a House of Delegates district, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. On top of that, HB 1255, a 2020 bill passed by the General Assembly now requires incarcerated people to be counted at the address where they were living prior to their incarceration. That’s a problem for some districts with a significant number of prisons, including Senate District 38, where Senator Travis Hackworth (R-Tazewell) was recently elected. Hackworth is part of a group of Southwestern Virginians suing the Virginia Redistricting Commission, the State Board of Elections, and the Virginia Department of Elections to block the change in where incarcerated people are counted.
“Virginia prisons are typically located in rural districts with greater Republican voting strength, particularly in the Southside and Southwest regions of the Commonwealth in which Petitioners are voting permanent residents (and, in Petitioner Hackworth’s case, an elected state senator,)” court documents state, noting that incarcerated people do use local infrastructure.
Read the full story
Arizona’s water supply is going to take a hit in 2022 because of falling levels behind the Hoover Dam.
The U.S. Secretary of the Interior announced Monday that, based on projected water levels at Lake Mead, an unprecedented Tier I shortage emergency would be enacted Jan. 1 for the Colorado River and its basins.
Read the full story
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday the launch of three new proposals being put forth to the Florida Legislature to recruit new and out-of-state law enforcement officers. DeSantis said it is an effort for Florida to acquire valued men and women of our nation’s law enforcement community amid controversy surround police, particularly the “Abolish the Police” movement.
“As so many cities and states choose to disrespect, degrade and defund the honorable work of law enforcement, we want Florida to continue valuing our men and women of law enforcement today, tomorrow and for generations to come,” said DeSantis. “That’s why today, I am proud to announce new initiatives to recruit and reward brave, high quality law enforcement officers in Florida that I will be including in my legislative priorities for our upcoming legislative session, including $5,000 signing bonuses.”
Read the full story
On Tuesday, Twitter admitted in a statement that they have no plans to ban the official accounts of the Taliban and its spokesmen, even after the radical Islamist group had seized control of the nation of Afghanistan over the weekend, as reported by the New York Post.
When asked about maintaining such accounts, the statement released by Twitter mostly dodged the issue and deferred to basic platitudes about how the social media giant would “continue to proactively enforce” its rules, and would only ban tweets that include “glorification of violence, platform manipulation, and spam.”
Read the full story
On Tuesday Governor Bill Lee told Clay Travis and Buck Sexton on their nationally syndicated radio program, “our executive order actually gives the school district the authority to impose a mandate, but it gives the parent the ability to opt out of that if they choose it.” “I have always been a really strong believer that parents know best what their children need. So I’m a parent. I raised four kids, got eight grandkids. No one knows their kid like the parent. No one cares about their children more than their parents, and so in the middle of all of this covid world that we’re living in, which is people,” Lee told Travis when asked about Executive Order No. 84, signed by the governor on Monday.
Read the full story
Polling ahead of the 2021 NFL season indicates that, despite an increasingly political landscape for the sport and its fans, Americans overwhelmingly would prefer that the National Anthem continue to be the sole anthem played prior to games.
According to a recent poll conducted by Newt Gingrich’s American Majority Project in conjunction with McLaughlin & Associates, a total of 61% of Americans believe that “only” the American National Anthem should be played at NFL Games. That figure ticks up slightly to 64% among Republicans, and falls to 58% among Independents, while 11% of those polled said they don’t know.
File
National Gingrich 360 Anthem X-tabs 8-3-21 .pdf
The poll was conducted in the wake of the NFL’s recent decision to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing” – often referred to as the black national anthem – before all games during the upcoming season, ahead of the playing of the American National Anthem. The song was initially introduced by the NFL when it was sung by Alicia Keys at the Super Bowl for the 2020-2021 season. The decision to play the song before each game is reportedly part of the league’s quarter-billion dollar investment in social justice messaging and initiatives.