The principal of Madison East High School has been reassigned to a different position within the Madison Metropolitan School District, according to a release from the school district on Wednesday.
Sean Leavy, the former principal, will serve as the Director of Secondary Multi-Tiered Support and Scheduling, after numerous protests regarding his handling of sexual assault allegations.
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Tennessee State Representative Scott Cepicky (R-Culleoka) has filed legislation that would, if enacted into law, permit school board candidates in the state to campaign as the nominee or representative of a political party. Cepicky filed the bill for the Tennessee General Assembly’s current special session. The Tennessee Star’s attempts to reach Cepicky on Thursday were unsuccessful.
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Arizona Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) sent a letter to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich requesting a legal opinion on whether the Biden administration has failed its obligations at the U.S. border with Mexico. He is concerned there is an “invasion” taking place due to the vast numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country, the increase in crime, and the control the drug cartels have over areas along the border.
He wrote, “In light of the efforts by the new federal administration of President Joe Biden to encourage, rather than discourage, illegal aliens coming to our country, including by crossing the Arizona border illegally, I am writing to ask for your formal legal opinion of whether or not the federal government has failed — intentionally or unintentionally — to uphold its obligations to protect our state from invasion under Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.”
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Members of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce said they are displeased with the Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), so much so the schools might require a dramatic restructuring — at least at the school board level. Axios reported this week that chamber members might prefer to do away with electing school board members. Instead, local government officials could appoint them.
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After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
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A new construction vocational facility for high school students and adults broke ground in Hamilton County on Thursday. Next week, workers will officially begin the building process of the Construction Career Center in Chattanooga’s Avondale neighborhood.
The old, vacant Mary Ann Garber School at 2225 Roanoke Avenue in Chattanooga is being renovated in order to house the new college-level vocational training center for 11th and 12th-grade students as well as adults in the community.
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Tennessee Representative Diana Harshbarger (R-TN-01) and 17 of her fellow representatives introduced the Treatment Restoration for Emergency Antibody Therapeutics (TREAT) Act, according to a Thursday press release.
The congress member’s statement notes the measure intends to end President Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) policy that limits access to monoclonal antibody (mAb) treatments for the treatments of COVID-19.
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West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin came out against his party’s plan to tax billionaires in order to finance their social-spending package just hours after it was first released.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people,” Manchin told reporters Tuesday morning, describing billionaires as people who “contributed to society and create a lot of jobs and a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.”
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As U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sat down for his first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, denying a conflict of interest in his decision to investigate parents for “domestic terrorism,” there is a mother in the quiet suburb of Annandale, N.J., who found his answers lacking. And she has questions she wants asked at Garland’s hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee this Wednesday.
On a recent Saturday night, Caroline Licwinko, a mother of three, a law school student and the coach to her daughter’s cheerleading squad, sat in front of her laptop and tapped three words into an internet search engine: “Panorama. Survey. Results.”
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Policy and politics often collide at the intersection of geography and demographics. The non-urban, non-college-educated white voter causing concern among Democrats these days, the suburban voter of 2018, and the heartland voter of 2016 are all profiles built on the common interests of certain people in certain types of places.
After 18 months of domestic migration prompted by a pandemic, another interest in addition to where people live has emerged in this equation: where people wish they lived.
Americans of all stripes, including young people, have long preferred suburban to urban living despite the prevailing (mis)conception in the media, but the twin crises of Covid and urban unrest in 2020 have clearly accentuated Americans’ desire to leave denser places. Not only have Americans continued apace in their usual migration from cities to suburbs, they also now aspire to live in towns and hinterlands more than one might expect.
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In one year, Customs and Border Protection agents encountered triple the number of people entering the U.S. illegally compared to the previous year. From October 2020 to September 2021, 1,734,686 people were encountered at the U.S. southern border.
From October 2019 to September 2020, that number was 458,088.
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An Afghan refugee in Montana who faces a felony rape charge will not have his work permit revoked, according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
Robert Law, who is CIS’ director of regulatory affairs and policy, said his Department of Homeland Security sources told him that the Biden administration will not remove Zabihullah Mohmand’s employment authorization document (EAD) at this time.
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Nearly 450 American citizens are estimated to remain in Afghanistan almost two months after U.S. troops withdrew from the country, according to the Pentagon.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken originally said the Biden administration believed there to be “under 200, and likely closer to 100, who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave,” on Aug. 30, the day before the last Anerican troops left Afghanistan.
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A Louisiana mother is threatening to sue, claiming that her 16-year-old son was vaccinated for COVID-19 while at his Jefferson Parish high school without her consent.
Jennifer Ravain alleged that during a visit by an Oschner Health System mobile vaccination clinic to East Jefferson High School, her son was allowed to sign a consent form and receive a COVID-19 vaccination despite the Louisiana Department of Health requirement of a parent’s signature for persons under 18 being vaccinated, WWL-TV reported.
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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 for another profound edition of Crom’s Commentary.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday faced a litany of hard-edged Senate questions about agreeing to allow federal law enforcement to investigate alleged incidents of outspoken parents at school board meetings.
Garland, in a memo, agreed to responded to a Sept. 29 letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking that the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies to investigate potential acts of domestic terrorism at the meetings. Parents across the nation have been voicing their concerns about the curricula being taught to their children, in addition to instances like the one currently playing out in northern Virginia, in which there was an apparent coverup of the sexual assault of a female student in a bathroom.
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Facebook is being investigated over leaked company documents and allegations by a former employee, according to financial filings.
The company’s 10-Q form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday mentions that Facebook is “subject to government investigations and requests” seemingly related to documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen that detail tech giant’s business practices and internal research.
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Diversity, equity and inclusion consultants are getting paid millions of dollars by public schools “to push divisive ideologies” to transform American schools “from institutions of education to places of woke indoctrination,” according to a conservative education advocacy group.
Parents Defending Education (PDE) spent four months compiling data for its “Consultant Report Card” released Thursday, which investigates 543 public school districts and agencies across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
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The Democrats’ reconciliation package will likely include more than $500 billion worth of climate provisions, more than the entire Department of Energy budget, the White House said, according to The Hill.
The budget represents an opportunity for “historic investment in climate change,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said during an event hosted by The Hill on Tuesday evening. The likely price tag for climate programs included in the bill is likely to fall somewhere between $500 billion and $555 billion, Axios previously reported.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee to the newsmakers line to discuss his comedic request that Bernie Sanders leave out green card gifts to illegals.
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The number of Americans who want to see an increase in funding for local police has risen to nearly half since June 2020, according to a Tuesday Pew Research poll.
Forty-seven percent of Americans say spending on policing should increase in their community, up from 31% in June 2020, according to the poll. The poll found that 21% of respondents felt police funding should be increased by “a lot,” marking an 11% increase from the same period.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Tennessee State Representative Terri Lynn Weaver to the newsmakers line to explain her no vote on the Blue Oval City project and what her constituents want.
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Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and other state attorneys general this week repudiated the Biden administration as well as the National School Boards Association (NSBA) for colluding with one another to threaten parents nationwide. Carr announced the news Wednesday in an emailed press release.
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The school board in Rochester, Minnesota, followed through on its commitment to ban parents who don’t wear masks in the name of COVID-19 prevention at its last meeting.
The man, who remains unnamed according to local media, was escorted from the board room where a police officer was waiting to give him a citation. At the end of last month, Rochester Public Schools (RPS) unveiled a mask policy that forces everyone at school board meetings to wear an “effective” face mask. What makes a face mask effective is not defined.
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When speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) detailed that an ongoing investigation into the 2020 election may need more subpoenas.
Vos, who launched the investigation by retired Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman, added that the work may extend into 2022.
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Recent news in the energy world has not been encouraging. Prices are rising rapidly due to a supply crunch coupled with blistering, post-pandemic demand. Renewables like wind and solar are faltering in an unprepared electrical grid. Coal burning is set to spike to make up for energy supply shortfalls at a time when the world needs to aggressively decarbonize.
Some of this hardship might have been avoided if, over the past couple of decades, policy makers had the guts to support the safest, most reliable form of energy, which also happens to be carbon-free: nuclear. Instead, Germany is taking its nuclear fleet offline and replacing it with fossil fuels, as the country’s already exorbitant electricity prices soar. California is shutting down its last nuclear plant, further imperiling its notoriously fragile grid. All the while, Americans remain divided on nuclear power.
Again, the data is clear: despite nuclear’s damaged reputation, clouded by a few high-profile accidents, nuclear power kills fewer people per electricity produced than any other energy source. It is also the most reliable. Nuclear’s capacity factor, a measure of how often a power plant is producing energy at full capacity over a certain period of time, is the highest by far – almost double that of coal and more than triple that of solar. And nuclear is clean, producing no carbon emissions. Though its radioactive waste often attracts negative press, coal plants actually create more. Moreover, all of the waste that America’s nuclear power plants have collectively produced in a half-century could fit on one football field. This is because nuclear is incredibly efficient. In the U.S., just 55 nuclear power plants produce 20% of the country’s electricity! It takes nearly 2,000 natural gas plants to produce 40 percent.
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Virginia’s gubernatorial candidates together raised $28.3 million in the first three weeks of October. Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe raised $12.9 million, with $1.9 million cash on hand. GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin raised $15.4 million, with nearly $7.9 million cash on hand at the end of the reporting period, according to The Virginia Public Access Project. Youngkin’s fundraising includes another $3.5 million in self-loans, for a total $20 million that he has loaned himself throughout the campaign.
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The U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday passed a bill that Representative Lucy McBath (D-GA-06) filed that, if enacted into law, would deny firearms to individuals under certain circumstances. McBath said in an emailed press release Wednesday that her bill, H.R. 2377, would allow family members and law enforcement to obtain an extreme risk protection order. That order would temporarily remove access to firearms for people deemed a danger to themselves or to others by a federal court.
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Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday highlighted an opinion piece from Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon.
Encouraging individuals to read the piece, Trump linked Dixon’s piece that called for action based on a report from The Michigan Star.
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The Ohio Republican Party has asked three Columbus television stations to take down a Allison Russo for Congress television attack ad against GOP opponent Mike Carey, alleging the ad violates Federal Election Commission and Federal Communications Commission rules.
The GOP party’s defense of rookie candidate Mike Carey comes just a few days before the special election in Ohio’s 15th congressional district determines who finishes out the term of Republican Steve Stivers, a 10-term congressman who resigned in May.
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When asked about former Georgia Bulldog, Herschel Walker, running for U.S. Senate in 2022, Florida Senator Rick Scott was reluctant to express support for Walker or any other candidate for the upcoming cycle of Republican Senate primaries.
Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), stood by their decision to stay out of the upcoming primary even with situations like Walker who has gained a magnitude of support, including an endorsement from former President Donald Trump in March.
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Virginia is now tenth among U.S. states for percentage of population fully-vaccinated against COVID-19, Governor Ralph Northam announced Wednesday.
“We’ve reached the top ten because so many Virginians have worked so hard for so long,” Northam said in a press release. “It’s something we can all be proud of. Vaccines will soon be available for children, and thousands of adults are getting boosters. This is all great news.”
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In America, we tend to structure our political conversations in the framework of Republicans versus Democrats. That is a false dichotomy. Most believe in limiting government to some extent, often disagreeing on the proper role of government, especially economically. Working-class citizens, including public servants like educators, feel politically isolated.
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The Broward County School District voted to remove their mask mandate for high schools and will go into effect on Monday, November 1. The mandate will be maintained in elementary and middle schools, but high school students will still be encouraged to wear masks.
“I’m proud of the School Board of Broward County for standing firm on keeping mask mandates in place for Broward County Public Schools’ elementary and middle school students, and strongly encouraging high school students to wear masks,” said Broward Teachers Union President Anna Fusco.
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Once upon a time, Republicans were rocked to sleep with notions of momentum and enthusiasm in the closing weeks and days of a campaign.
In 2006, George Allen was thought to have sufficiently recovered from a 20+ point slide in order to eke out a 2-3 point win — only to lose by 0.4% (just 11,000 votes) after 30,000 votes were found in Hampton Roads.
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Sales tax would no longer be collected on guns, ammunition and knives in Ohio if a bill planned for introduction in the state House of Representatives becomes law.
State GOP Rep. Al Cutrona recently announced he will introduce legislation that would exempt those items from sales tax, saying the move would help make gun, ammunition and knife retailers and manufacturers more competitive with neighboring states.
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The Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball (MLB), who recently caved to pressure from woke leftists and decided to change their name, are already facing difficulties.
In July, the team announced that it would ditch the “insensitive” Indians nickname for something more politically correct. They chose the Guardians as an alternative.
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The two chambers of the Tennessee General Assembly met Wednesday in floor session for less than an hour to organize for the Third Extraordinary Session of the 112th General Assembly, which will focus on COVID-related issues.
Special Session III was called on October 19 by Tennessee’s Lt. Governor and Speaker of the Senate Randy McNally and Speaker of the House of Representatives Cameron Sexton in response to the written request of two-thirds of the members of each house, even as legislators were engaged in the Second Extraordinary Session called by Governor Bill Lee taking up $884 million in taxpayer giveaways for Ford Motor Company’s $5.6 billion electric vehicle project to be located on the Memphis Regional Megasite known as “Blue Oval City.”
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A state grand jury has indicted a 46-year-old felon for illegally voting while in jail. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced that Manuel Aguirre of Sahuarita was indicted on one count of false registration and one count of illegal voting, both felonies. He voted during the 2020 election from the Pima County Jail.
Aguirre falsely stated on his voter registration form that he had no felonies or that his rights had been restored. He has five felony convictions, including vehicular theft, criminal trespassing and weapons misconduct.
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A local sheriff has responded to President Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees. Sheriff Tom Spangler, of Knoxville, Tennessee sent Biden a letter telling the President that he would not be enforcing the mandate on his staff.
Spangler said in his letter that enforcing the mandate was unconstitutional and was putting the lives of the people of Knoxville at risk.
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Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Tuesday introduced legislation to prevent essential workers from being fired because of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate.
The Keeping Our COVID-19 Heroes Employed Act would provide an exemption from the federal mandate that requires companies with more than 100 employees to mandate the vaccine or weekly testing.
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For five years, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) insisted, without evidence, that the Russians helped Donald Trump win the White House in 2016. Schiff, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), first seeded the collusion narrative in July 2016—the same month James Comey’s FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane—by falsely claiming Kremlin hackers confiscated thousands of emails off the Democratic National Committee’s server, correspondence damaging to Hillary Clinton.
From that point forward, Schiff leveraged his political power and newfound cable news stardom to perpetuate the lie that the 2016 presidential election was illegitimate.
So it’s beyond ironic that Schiff now sits on the January 6 select committee, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s latest weapon to annihilate TrumpWorld. After spending every waking minute during Trump’s presidency to conduct what author Lee Smith called The Permanent Coup, Schiff is flipping his coup-plotting script on anyone who questions the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency.
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On Monday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee awarded Tennessee Department of Correction Special Agent Joe Frye with the U.S. Marshals Service Purple Heart. On November 2, 2020, Frye was shot multiple times on duty in an attempt to capture fugitive Bobby Joe Claybrook. Once Joe was shot, he was immobile, but now has fully recovered from the incident.
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In a press release on Tuesday, Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) announced that he and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) led 35 Republican senators to introduce the Upholding the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Law Act of 2021, a bill to protect the full and faithful implementation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 and block the Biden Administration’s efforts to subvert the law.
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More details emerged Tuesday about the circumstances that led to the federal indictment of Tennessee State Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) as well as details about a federal prosecutor — a former Obama appointee — involved with the case. ABC News reported that the allegations against Kelsey “resemble a complaint against Kelsey’s campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice in 2017 by the Campaign Legal Center.”
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A U.S. Senate committee investigating the promotion of material harmful to young people on social media expanded beyond Facebook and Instagram Tuesday to include the video-sharing sites YouTube and TikTok as well as the Snapchat messaging application.
Therein, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) deplored the health-threatening viral challenges (e.g. binge drinking, the infamous “cinnamon challenge”), enticements toward illegal drugs, encouragements to engage in drastic dieting and presentations of child-sex abuse that she said have been purveyed to children and teens via these websites. She raised particular alarm regarding minors she said have been led into illicit sexual relationships on Snapchat.
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Nashville will be hosting the immersive exhibit of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Tickets are available now, with prices starting at $17.50. The exhibit will be in Nashville from November 12 through January 16.
The walk through exhibit averages 60 – 90 minutes, with benches along the paintings for those who would like to sit and relax.
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Two U.S. Border Patrol agents have been fired in connection with a probe that found roughly 60 of them committed misconduct while participating in a private Facebook group that mocked migrants and lawmakers, investigators said Monday.
Most agents’ penalties were significantly reduced from those recommended by an internal agency review board, according to a House Oversight and Reform committee staff report obtained by the Associated Press.
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The Chicago City Council is expected to pass a measure this week that would results in one of the largest guaranteed basic measures in the country, amid that if pass would be one of the largest in the county, amid calls from black lawmakers to put the money toward the city’s violent crime problem.
The Chicago police department as of last week reported 649 murders this year, compared to 634 for all of 2020.
The program, if passed, would give 5,000 low-income households $500 a month, using funding from the federal stimulus package that was rolled out earlier this year to address economic hardship as a result of the pandemic.
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The Treasury Department announced Monday it hired its first every Counselor for Racial Equity to support President Biden’s push for economic opportunities for people of color.
Janis Bowdler, former president of the JPMorgan Chase & Co. Foundation, will serve as the first “Counselor for Racial Equity,” the Treasury Department said.
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