State Representative Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe) called for a forensic audit of the 2020 election results in Minnesota. In the video, Gruenhagen referenced two organizations, Midwest Swamp Watch and the Minnesota Voters Alliance, that have been doing research into the Minnesota elections.
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The House of Representatives passed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Thursday, including an amendment protecting three Virginia-based guided missile cruisers from decommissioning.
“Countering China’s expansionist ambitions starts at sea,” Congressman Rob Wittman (R-VA-01) said in a press release Friday.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the appointment of Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s new Surgeon General earlier this week and made waves in his first few days as Florida’s top doctor.
Ladapo announced Florida is “done with fear” and signed off on new health department COVID rules for students in Florida’s public schools. Among the new rules is allowing parents to decide of their child should stay home from school if exposed to COVID and show no symptoms.
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The Wisconsin Office of Special Council, one of the state’s 2020 election auditors, is inviting county clerks to meet with them and share election information and concerns. “I would like to formally invite you to meet with me personally – in person or by phone or video call – to discuss these concerns, as well as any other thoughts of any nature that you might have about the State’s investigation,” the letter states.
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A Georgia agency kept millions of dollars in seized funds, spending some of it on Fitbit devices, fitness equipment and vehicles, according to a recent Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report.
The OIG report revealed the former head of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), a division of the Georgia Department of Revenue (GDOR), held on to more than $5.3 million that was supposed to be returned to the state treasury.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he is no longer waiting on the federal government to move take action on a “deplorable” subsidized housing complex in Jacksonville. DeSantis slammed the “lack of interest” from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for allowing the living conditions to become so run down that rats have infested the complex.
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A mother of a student at Fairfax County Public Schools called out the school board for indirectly making accessible to students two books featuring child pornography and pedophilia in school libraries at Thursday night’s school board meeting.
Stacy Langton opened by explaining that she watched what had happened at a Texas school board meeting after parents discovered two books accessible to their children, Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. Langton looked for and found the books at her own child’s school, Fairfax High School, as well as other places in the county, including Robinson Secondary School where students as young as 12 could access the books.
Parents Defending Education’s VP for Strategy & Investigations Asra Q. Nomani captured Langton’s comments to the school board on video and reported the exchange on her Substack, Asra Investigates.
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Calling Ohio’s new state legislative district maps a flagrant violation of the Ohio Constitution and extreme partisan gerrymandering, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit challenging maps it says give Republicans an unfair advantage.
The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU of Ohio, the ACLU and Burling LLP, was brought on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, the Ohio chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and several individuals.
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On Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s executive order allowing parents to opt their kids out of wearing face coverings at school. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw ruled Williamson County Schools and the Franklin Special School District can enforce mask mandates in their school systems despite Governor Lee’s executive order.
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According to the Tennessee Department of Labor & Workforce Development, unemployment rates in nearly all of Tennessee’s counties decreased in August. This marks the second consecutive month the jobless situation has improved in 93 or more of the state’s 95 counties.
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U.S. Representative Mark Green (R-TN-07) on Friday condemned a new abortion bill that Democrats in the House of Representatives passed.
Green denounced the Women’s Health Protection Act, crafted by Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA-27), as “abortion-on-demand legislation.”
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Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Cornelia A. Clark passed away on Thursday after a short battle with cancer. She was 71.
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As the first year of a Biden presidency that has felt like a decade nears its end, only the most ardent Democratic partisans still insist that the country is on the right track. The rest of us are left to debate whether the rancid fruit of this regime is a result of incompetence or design. By analysis of this administration’s immigration agenda alone, the inescapable conclusion is that it is indeed the latter. The macabre consequences of this fact threaten to take America into one of the darkest chapters in its history.
These kinds of conclusions run contrary to the traditional American ethos. Those who grew up with Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” imagery or John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier vision experienced leadership that sought the best for America and its citizenry. In those eras, politicians from both major parties seemed to prioritize the good of the country; they only disagreed on the means to get us there.
Such notions seem quaint given today’s realities. Beneath the surface of Biden’s genial Uncle Joe schtick is an executive branch controlled by some of the most dogmatic left-wing apparatchiks ever seen in American politics. Among their witch’s brew of radical ideas, they have seized upon immigration as one of the quickest and most effective ways to transform the country to their vision.
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The Metro Nashville government has formed a COVID-19 Financial Oversight Committee in order to help decide where COVID relief funds are spent. Nashville has received $260 million in American Rescue Plan funding that is supposed to be used to help with COVID response, mitigation, and prevention.
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Friday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Actor and Producer David A.R. White to the newsmakers line to talk about his upcoming movie, Gods Not Dead: We the People.
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The efforts to disseminate a now-discredited theory that the Trump campaign had secret computer communications with the Kremlin extended beyond the FBI, CIA, and State Department to the U.S. Senate.
Under the late Sen. John McCain, the Armed Services Committee engaged a former FBI official and his progressive-funded nonprofit to produce a report on the matter, according to court records obtained by Just the News.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is recommending that medical professionals and clinicians be on alert for infectious diseases among Afghan nationals recently brought into the country, including measles, mumps and rubella, diseases for which Americans have already been vaccinated.
After the CDC announcement, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said Afghan evacuees were required to get the MMR vaccine and then be quarantined for 21 days.
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Border Patrol agents requested additional federal aid in Del Rio, Texas, months before thousands of migrants set up a temporary camp under an international bridge and overwhelmed immigration officials, CNN Politics reported Thursday.
Border officials reported an increase in migrants crossing the Rio Grande River earlier in the summer but didn’t know more than 14,000 migrants would end up setting up camp under the bridge, according to CNN Politics. On June 1, the union representing Del Rio Border Patrol agents asked for additional technology resources to help agents quickly process large groups of migrants in the field before sending them to a station.
“This way, we can at least get part of the process finished before they even get to the station instead of wasting that time,” said Jon Afinsen, president of the National Border Patrol Council in Del Rio, in an email exchange with regional Border Patrol management, CNN Politics reported.
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Friday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to discuss the lack of federal institutional constraints related to fiscal spending.
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Arizona Senate Republicans issued the results of the independent ballot audit they conducted of the 2020 presidential and U.S. Senate election in Maricopa County on September 24 during a presentation, revealing findings that numerous election laws were broken and security measures breached.
The most startling finding came from Ben Cotton, the founder of CyFIR. He said hundreds of thousands of election files — which the Maricopa County Supervisors refused to allow the auditors to examine — were deleted the day before the audit began, a violation of federal law which requires federal election records to be retained for 22 months. Although the name of the account that deleted them was not tied to a specific election worker, Cotton said there is video of the person who accessed those servers at that time.
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Friday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Metro City Council Member-At-Large, Steve Glover to the newsmakers line to discuss the unintended consequences of a never-ending mask mandate in Davidson County.
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Two Democratic donors purportedly considered paying Hunter Biden $2 million to help unfreeze Libyan government assets in 2015 that had been targeted by the Obama administration, but had second thoughts due to his various personal struggles, according to emails obtained by Business Insider.
The donors were hopeful Biden’s influence could help unlock $15 billion in foreign assets that were frozen by former President Barack Obama during the Qaddafi regime, but had second thoughts because of his struggles with “drug addiction,” chasing of “low class hookers” and “money-liquidity problems,” according to emails obtained by Business Insider.
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Thomas Caldwell’s wife awakened him in a panic at 5:30 a.m. on January 19.
“The FBI is at the door and I’m not kidding,” Sharon Caldwell told her husband.
Caldwell, 66, clad only in his underwear, went to see what was happening outside his Virginia farm. “There was a full SWAT team, armored vehicles with a battering ram, and people screaming at me,” Caldwell told me during a lengthy phone interview on September 21. “People who looked like stormtroopers were pointing M4 weapons at me, covering me with red [laser] dots.”
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An internal memo published by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Thursday detailed Chairwoman Lina Khan’s vision for antitrust enforcement, including plans to target several of Big Tech’s business practices.
The memo, sent to FTC commissioners and staff, titled “Vision and Priorities for the FTC,” outlined several key antitrust enforcement areas Khan sought to prioritize, including addressing “root causes” of monopolies, considering the harm of anticompetitive conduct on workers and other businesses, and focusing on “next-generation technologies.” Although Khan did not identify any of the major tech companies by name, she highlighted several allegedly anti-competitive business practices that have been the subject of tech antitrust litigation.
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Guidance reportedly crafted by military attorneys urged Coast Guard chaplains to grill service members on their religious beliefs in attempts to discover whether a service member’s religious exemption is a “ruse,” draft documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.
“It is important to provide context in the memo discussing the member’s belief,” the draft documents said. “If they come to the meeting and begin by discussing concerns about safety, politics, etc., note that in the memo. Even if the member eventually states that it is a belief based on religion, note their first expression and how they moved from non-religious beliefs to religious ones.”
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The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation partnered with Bursch Law to file a lawsuit alleging Michigan’s restriction on the use of public funds to pay for private education is unconstitutional.
Five Michigan families and the Parent Advocates for Choice in Education (PACE) Foundation, a nonprofit supporting the rights of Michigan parents to provide educational opportunities for their children, joined the lawsuit after conventional public schools frustrated them after the COVID-19 pandemic. Plaintiff Jessie Bagos’s school only provided virtual school for her young children for much of the last school year. She wanted other options for her twin boys starting kindergarten instead of sitting in front of a screen.
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Glenn Youngkin’s tightrope walk between suburban moderates and hard-right Republicans seems to be paying off — on Friday the Cook Political Report (CPR) announced a rating shift in the gubernatorial contest from Lean Democratic to Toss Up. That matches with polling from a variety of sources that show an increasingly close race.
“We can no longer say this is a contest where the Democrat has the advantage. While many of the fundamentals favor [Terry] McAuliffe — and we expect he still has a slight edge — it’s Youngkin who seems to have the enthusiasm on his side,” CPR reported.
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While DeKalb County officials have refused to indicate whether the extended leave of absence of Elections Director Erica Hamilton is job related, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said during a CNN interview that the leave was an outcome of an investigation related to the violation of absentee ballot chain of custody rules during the November 2020 election.
A joint statement issued by DeKalb Board of Registration and Elections Chair Dele Lowman Smith and Vice-Chair Nancy Jester announced that effective September 9, Erica Hamilton was on an extended leave of absence from her role as director of DeKalb County Registration and Elections.
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Georgia has a lower percentage of unemployed residents now than it did immediately before COVID-19 arrived, with some locales, like Warner Robins, experiencing their lowest jobless rates ever.
In Sept. 2020, around six months after the pandemic hit, the small city just south of Macon had a 5.3-percent jobless rate. Two months ago, Warner Robins’s rate fell to 2.9 percent, the city never before having seen such a small fraction of its residents out of work.
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School board members in Alachua County, who saw their salaries cut due to mandating masks in their schools against Governor DeSantis’ Executive Order 21-175, were repaid Thursday by the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE).
Funding for the payment comes from a new program established by the Biden Administration known as the Project to Support America’s Families and Educators grant program, or “Project SAFE.”
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Members of the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR) abused their powers and violated ethical and regulatory policies, according to a report that the Office of the State Inspector General (OIG) published this week. Georgia officials are supposed to distribute civil asset forfeiture funds to the state treasury. Officials with the DOR’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) broke state law when they didn’t remit state asset forfeiture funds to the state general fund. Former OSI Director Joshua Waites failed to properly remit $5.3 million collected via state asset forfeiture between July 1, 2015 to March 11, 2020, the date of Waites’ termination from his position, the report said.
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Florida’s new Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, signed off on new COVID rules for students in Florida’s public schools. Among the new rules is a provision that students will no longer have to quarantine if they are exposed to COVID and remain asymptomatic.
Previously, based on contact tracing, the rules stated that Florida’s students would be required to stay home for at least four days if they were exposed to COVID. Now, the decision is entirely up to the parents.
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The office of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has frozen more than $3 million in assets of former Public Utilities Commission of Ohio Chairman Sam Randazzo as part of a state civil lawsuit tied to the ongoing federal criminal probe of a Statehouse corruption scheme.
Yost’s office also has sought a court order to appoint a receiver to go after another $3 million in assets Randazzo allegedly had transferred to accounts his attorneys control immediately after Yost had announced he had a court order to seize up to $8 million in assets in a mid-August.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis named a new chief of staff on Thursday. James Utheimer, of Destin, will take over the position after current Chief of Staff Adrian Lukis resigns on October 1.
The DeSantis administration thanked Lukis for his work and leadership.
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Concerned about the lack of testing of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent a letter to Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services, demanding to know what the Biden administration is doing to ensure that migrants apprehended crossing the border who are infected with COVID-19 or who have been exposed to it are not coming into contact with Americans. He gave Becerra until October 1 to respond. Considering Brnovich has sued the Biden administration multiple times, it appeared to be a threat that he would file another lawsuit if nothing was done.
Brnovich said in his letter, “The Biden administration has chosen the path of increasing government regulation at opposing individual liberties when it comes to handling COVID-19 in the midst of American communities. Yet this same administration has been nothing short of laissez-faire in dealing with tens of thousands of migrants that are pouring across our open border and being ferried across our nation during the same world-wide pandemic. This hypocrisy is stunning and fundamentally unfair to American citizens.”
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that a southern Arizona county has reached 99.9 percent vaccination of its eligible population, apparently the first county in America to reach that benchmark since the COVID-19 vaccine became available earlier this year.
Santa Cruz County, which includes the city of Nogales, is almost completely vaccinated, though the county’s Heath and Human Services (HHS) Director says the numbers may be a bit inflated.
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There could be two different court-drawn political maps in Wisconsin. The state’s Supreme Court late Wednesday agreed to take up a redistricting case that could result in the court drawing the state’s new boundaries for Congress and the state legislature.
The decision comes just one day after a federal court in Madison essentially said it would draw the new political map if lawmakers and Gov. Tony Evers can’t agree.
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Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN-03) says he is “incredulous” over the Democrats failure to protect Israel. In a tweet sent after the Tuesday vote, Phillips said it is terrible that Democrats are failing to “defend one of our most important allies and only Jewish nation in the world from indiscriminate rockets fired by terrorists who refuse to even recognize their right to exist.”
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Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) is not backing down Friday after it turned out that the viral narrative that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was “whipping” Haitian migrants at the border to turned out to be false.
“These are human rights abuses, plain and simple. Cruel, inhumane, and a violation of domestic and international law. This needs a course correction and the issuance of a clear directive on how to humanely process asylums seekers at our border,” Omar said on Twitter when the scandal first emerged.
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Staff for Tennessee Governor Bill Lee on Friday would not say whether he will follow the lead of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and purchase thousands of monoclonal antibody treatments directly from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). GlaxoSmithKiline manufactures the monoclonal antibody treatments.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich declared Friday he would take “all necessary actions” to investigate any irregularities uncovered by a state Senate-order audit of the November 2020 election in his state.
His comments on Twitter came as leaked copies of the draft audit flagged tens of thousands of ballots cast in the last election as suspect and requiring more investigation.
The drafts recommended the Republican attorney general take the lead investigating many of the issues, including a possible canvas of voters flagged as having problems.
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Governor Bill Lee announced on Wednesday that results from policies passed during the January 2021 special legislative session have provided “encouraging data.”
According to Lee and Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, the Tennessee Learning Loss Remediation and Student Acceleration Act allowed students across the state to attend summer programs with the goal of mitigating the setbacks produced during remote learning.
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Metro Nashville Council Member Dave Rosenberg is allegedly trying to change the zoning of a property to hurt the property owners, with whom he allegedly has stark political differences. One of the property owners, Nashville businessman Crom Carmichael, said the property involves an abandoned rock quarry on McCrory Lane. Carmichael said he and Nashville investor Townes Duncan have owned the property for roughly 15 years.
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From covering displaced refugees around the globe to the obstacles faced by protesters seeking change in America, freelance photojournalist Maranie Staab believes her camera can be a force for truth and social justice. The work of a “conflict photographer” often requires physical courage in places she has reported from, such as Africa and the Middle East. It certainly did so on Aug. 22, while Staab was covering demonstrations in Portland, Ore.
Members of the left-wing group antifa called her a “slut” and then demanded that journalists assembled to cover the protests “get the f— out.” Staab, a 2020 reporting fellow for the liberal Pulitzer Center, tried to calm the situation. She was assaulted. She told the Willamette Week that they grabbed her phone and smashed it. Then they threw her to the pavement and sprayed her with mace. The ugly assault on Staab (below) was filmed and distributed quickly online, resulting in widespread condemnation. “If we’re on a public street and a newsworthy event is occurring, you’re not going to tell me what I can and cannot film,” Staab told the weekly newspaper.
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New street signs have been spotted around Mount Juliet urging people to “Say No to Panhandling”. The sign offers an alternative suggestion which is “Contribute to the Solution – Give to Local Charities”.
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Representative Scott DesJarlais (R-TN-04) led an effort by 55 Republican lawmakers to demand answers on why the Biden administration moved to limit potentially life-saving coronavirus antibody treatments.
The letter, also signed by Reps. Mark Green (R-TN-07) and Diana Harshbarger (R-TN-01), specifically asks why the action by the Department of Health and Human Services targets Republican-led states.
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Tennessee Comptrollers released a report Thursday that addressed what they said was the rising costs of college textbooks in the state. “Although the cost of course materials is only one component of the cost of a postsecondary education, by the time a student obtains a degree, the total spent on course materials can equal the cost of an additional semester of tuition at some four-year institutions. The report discusses initiatives among the state’s higher education institutions to make college course materials more affordable,” according to a press release that the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office of Research and Education Accountability emailed Thursday.
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The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims increased to 351,000 last week as the economy continues to slowly recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics figure released Thursday represents an increase in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending Sept. 11, when 335,000 new jobless claims were reported. That figure was revised up from the 332,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
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The latest lawsuit over Wisconsin’s wolf hunt is coming from the state’s Native American tribes.
Six communities in the Ojibwe tribe filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday to try and stop the hunt, which is scheduled for November.
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The federal government has “no authority” to tell Americans “what they can or cannot believe” when it comes to religious exemptions to vaccinations, the president of non-profit political advocacy group CatholicVote.org told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Thousands of Americans are seeking religious exemptions to vaccine mandates, citing reports that some of the vaccines were developed using aborted fetal cell lines, but pressure from activists, commentators and mandate-minded lawmakers suggests that the religious objections may face more serious inquisition in the coming weeks.
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