Petition Launched to Nominate Dr. Carol Swain to Supreme Court

Carol Swain

In response to President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a Monday petition was launched urging Biden to nominate legal expert and professor Dr. Carol Swain, PhD. 

“We, the undersigned, respectfully suggest – and fully support – Carol M. Swain, PhD as your nominee to serve as the next Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court,” the petition says. 

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Tennessee Democratic Lawmakers Send Letter to Governor Lee, Urge Him to Reject Redistricting Maps

Multiple Democratic lawmakers in the Tennessee Legislature sent a letter on Friday to Governor Bill Lee, asking him to veto proposed changes to state and federal district lines.

The General Assembly has approved three maps that will alter the representation carried out by state senators, state representatives, and U.S. Representatives.

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Tennessee Secretary of State Hargett: Watch Out for Mailers Claiming Business Owners Must Obtain a ‘Tennessee Certificate of Existence’

The Tennessee Secretary of State, Tre Hargett, warned businesses about a recently surfaced scam. Businesses have begun receiving ‘deceptive mailers’ from a company under two names: Tennessee Certificate Service and TN Certificate of Existence Filing Company.

“Our Division of Business and Charitable Organizations and I personally have heard of multiple complaints from business owners across Tennessee about these misleading mailers. We have seen scams like this before, with similar deceptive language that implies that businesses must have a Certificate of Existence to complete its formation or to fully operate in the state,” said Secretary Hargett. “This is not the case. Unfortunately, businesses who order a Certificate of Existence through these scammers may be paying an exorbitant amount for something that is totally unnecessary or would only cost $20 through our office.”

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Tennessee Senate Approves Balanced Billing Legislation

Members of the Tennessee State Senate this week unanimously passed legislation that ends the practice of surprise or unexpected medical billing in Tennessee, also called balanced billing. Surprise Medical Billing happens when a patient receives out-of-network care without his or her knowledge – either in an emergency or during a visit to an in-network facility. Weeks later, insurance companies send bills demanding patients pay money for services they assumed insurance would cover.

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Commentary: It’s an Unraveling, Not a Reset

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that a shortage of fertilizer is causing farms in the developing world to fail, threatening food shortages and hunger. Ironically, the lead photo is of mounds of phosphate fertilizer in a Russian warehouse.

Modern synthetic fertilizers are typically made using natural gas or from phosphorous-bearing ores. The former provides the nitrogen that is critical to re-use of fields in commercial agriculture. They constitute more than half of all synthetic fertilizer production. 

So what happens when oil and natural gas extraction are crippled in industrialized nations? One likely outcome is that the fertilizer manufacturing industry is also crippled, leaving both large commercial growers and smaller farms around the world starved of a key substance they need to grow food for hungry populations.

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Amid Pro-Police Messaging Pivot, Biden Planning Woke Criminal Justice Push: GOP Senators

Even as President Biden strives to project a more police-friendly posture in public amid a historic surge in urban violence, his administration is quietly planning sweeping, unilateral executive action, GOP senators suspect, that is “tantamount to defunding the police” and “would only further demoralize law enforcement.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki acknowledged this week that there’s been “a surge [in] crime over the last two years,” adding that the “underfunding” of police departments is partially to blame.

“The Department of Justice has announced $139 million in grants to cities for community policing, which will put 1,000 more officers on the streets,” Psaki said. “[Biden has] also proposed doubling those grants, and he’s called for an additional $750 million for federal law enforcement.”

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NCAA Officer Resigns amid Transgender Policy Controversy as Reports of Lia Thomas’ ‘Entitlement’ Surface

Dorian Rhea Debussy

Dorian Rhea Debussy, a member of the NCAA Division III LGBTQ OneTeam program, recently resigned over the organization’s updated policy on transgender athletes. 

“I’m deeply troubled by what appears to be a devolving level of active, effective, committed, and equitable support for gender diverse student-athletes within the NCAA’s leadership,” Debussy said, according to Fox News, after the national organization adopted a “sport-by-sport” approach to determining transgender athlete’s eligibility to compete on opposite-gender teams. 

According to Fox News, Debussy said, “As a non-binary, trans-feminine person, I can no longer, in good conscience, maintain my affiliation with the NCAA.”

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Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson Shuts Down ‘Sold by Amazon’ Program Nationwide

Amazon has agreed to shut down its third-party seller program nationwide and pay a fine of $2.25 million after Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson investigated the company for price fixing.

Ferguson simultaneously filed a lawsuit and a legally binding resolution Wednesday in King County Superior Court. The consent decree order means that the Seattle-based company will end its “Sold by Amazon” program and provide the attorney general’s office with annual updates on its efforts to avoid violating antitrust laws.

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Zelensky Slams Biden: ‘I Think I Know the Details Deeper Than Any Other President’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday took a thinly veiled shot at Joe Biden, saying “I am the President of Ukraine. I am based here. I think I know the details deeper than any other president,” after Biden had warned him in a phone call that a Russian invasion was “imminent.”

According to a CNN report, which is disputed by the White House, Biden told Zelensky during an hour and 20 minutes long conversation on Thursday that the Capital city of Kyiv could be “sacked” by Russian forces, and to “prepare for impact.” Biden also reportedly said an invasion was “virtually certain” in February when the ground will be more frozen in Ukraine.

In response, Zelensky urged Biden to tone down his rhetoric about a potential invasion, citing concerns that it could cause panic or a run on supplies, CNN reported.

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Rental Assistance Program Still Lacks Uniform Federal Requirements to Verify Income, Identity

A federal rental assistance program still lacks uniform federal requirements that states must follow to verify the income and identity of recipients, despite the findings and warnings in a Government Accountability Office report.

In a February 2021 report, the GAO found that 13 agencies administering the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program “reported using no electronic data to verify beneficiaries’ income, verifying income in other ways, such as checking beneficiaries’ documents.”

According to the GAO, the Department of Health and Human Services has “encouraged LIHEAP agencies to use electronic data to improve program integrity, but has not taken recent steps to share information that could facilitate its use.”

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Law Profs: Most States May Recognize ‘Multiparent Families’ in the Near Future

Two law professors this week argued that the U.S. is on the verge of seeing most states recognize “multiparent families,” a novel familial arrangement that the instructors nevertheless claimed was “hardly new.”

Professors Courtney Joslin and Douglas NeJaime of UC Davis School of Law and Yale Law School, respectively, argued in the Washington Post this week that it “soon could be unremarkable for a child to have three or more legal parents,” with that legal concession “fast becoming reality” throughout the country.

“These new laws have been spurred, in part, by the rising numbers and public profile of LGBTQ families and others with children conceived through assisted reproduction,” they write. “In many of these families, one or more parents are not genetically related to their children, and many states now legally recognize these ‘intended parents.'”

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Chicago Schools Tells Teachers Sex Is ‘Socially Constructed,’ Tells Them to Hide Students’ Gender Pronouns From Parents

A Chicago Public Schools (CPS) training program tells teachers that sex is a “socially constructed” phenomenon and instructs them to hide students’ gender pronouns from their parents, Fox News reported.

CPS told teachers that “gender and sex” are social constructs that have been “created and enforced” by society and threatened retaliatory measures if they didn’t use students’ preferred pronouns during a required teacher training program, Fox News reported.

A 104-slide PowerPoint titled “Supporting Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming Students” asserted that “everyone has multiple, overlapping identities” and that “gender & sex are socially constructed, meaning they’ve been created and enforced by the people in a society,” Fox News reported.

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25 States Urge Supreme Court to Hear Case Challenging Maryland’s Strict Firearm Laws

Twenty-five states, led by Arizona and West Virginia, are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Bianchi v. Frosh, which challenges Maryland’s restrictive Firearms Safety Act of 2013.

They’re asking the court to ultimately strike down the law, which the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld last September, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court in support of the petitioners.

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Commentary: We Can’t Split the Difference on Culture

The United States is an outlier among established democracies in two respects: We face both falling social trust and rising polarization. I have argued that the two dynamics connect in a doom loop. Trust in others and institutions falls, leading to greater polarization, which drives trust down even more. That is why the two processes are getting worse at the same time. A nasty dynamic has taken hold in the country, and it regularly affects all of us.

Many issues polarize us, but we should prefer polarization on economics to polarization on culture. Polarization is least damaging on issues most amenable to “splitting the difference”—as many economic issues are.

Consider taxes. Progressives want higher taxes on the rich, while conservatives want lower taxes. The possibility of compromise always exists—and even if it is obscured beneath the surface of our political tempers, uncovering it is not hard. For example, we could average our preferred tax rates, and no one would come away emptyhanded. Granted, that’s not how we have handled this issue in the past, but it’s at least conceivable.

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Trump Raises Possibility of Pardons for January 6 Defendants, Slams Biden on Border

Former President Donald Trump vowed Saturday night to ensure fairness for the Jan. 6 defendants if he is voted back into office, including possible pardons for some.

“If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” Trump told a raucous rally in Conroe, Tex.

“And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons,” he added. “Because they are being treated so unfairly.”

Trump also dismissed Democrats in Washington as “raving lunatics” who put “America last” and suggested President Biden was more concerned about protecting Ukraine’s border from Russia than America’s border from illegal migrants.

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Biden-Buttigieg DOT to Tap Infrastructure Spending to Promote Speed Cameras Nationwide

Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s “National Roadway Safety Strategy” includes promoting the use of speed cameras in cities and towns as a “proven safety countermeasure.”

DOT received $6 billion to issue grants to “help cities and towns” with road safety, which was part of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress passed.

“That law creates a new Safe Streets and Roads for All program, providing $6 billion to help cities and towns deliver new, comprehensive safety strategies, as well as accelerate existing, successful safety initiatives,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg during a speech on Thursday about the launch of DOT’s National Roadway Safety Strategy.

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Commentary: Be Grateful for Global Warming

"It's not easy being green" sign in the middle of a crowd

Present-day warming has been termed a crisis, and modern economic development a cancer. But what if I told you that much of the recent advancement in human prosperity would have been impossible without the temperature increases of the last several hundred years?

A key to the sustenance of any society is food security. Today’s world should be grateful for today’s relative warmth as well as higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels because both have been instrumental in propelling plant growth globally.

A review of human and climate history reveals a strong link between the rise and fall of temperature and the rise and fall of civilization—just opposite of what the climate doomsayers are telling you.

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Previously Deported Illegal Immigrant Arrested for $2 Million in Pandemic Unemployment Fraud

A woman arrested in New York along with an unnamed “coconspirator” for allegedly perpetrating $1.9 million of pandemic unemployment fraud was a previously deported illegal immigrant, Just the News has learned.

Yohauris Rodriguez Hernandez, a citizen of the Dominican Republic, was convicted for running a tax fraud scheme in 2014. She was deported upon her release from prison in 2017. Together, Hernandez and Gerardo Enmanuel Luna Marmolejos stole more than 40,000 identities to file fraudulent income tax returns and collect refunds from the IRS.

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Wisconsin Officials Seek Dismissal of Lawsuit over Alleged Illegal Grant from Zuckerberg-Funded Group

Officials with the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) are seeking to dismiss a lawsuit from residents of Green Bay who claim the city and the WEC violated laws when accepting a grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

The suit will appeal a decision handed down from the WEC, after the original complaint contended that the laws were broken when the city agreed to terms that were required to receive the funds.

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Florida Joins Multi-State Lawsuit Against Biden Admin’s ‘Illegal’ Immigration Program

Florida joined a multi-state coalition led by Texas suing the Biden administration for reinstating an Obama-era program that allows illegal immigrants to enter and remain in the U.S., bypassing laws established by Congress.

In addition to Texas and Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Alaska joined the lawsuit over the Biden administration’s reinstating a 2014-era Central America Minors (CAM) Program that was halted by the Trump administration in 2017.

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Minnesota Judge Who Went Easy on Violent Arsonist Is on Biden’s SCOTUS Shortlist

Judge Wilhelmina Wright

A U.S. district judge serving the District of Minnesota is said to be on President Joe Biden’s “shortlist” to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

But Minnesotans might remember her for her leniency in the sentencing of a violent arsonist.

Judge Wilhelmina Wright is one of several top candidates for the soon-to-be vacant Supreme Court seat, as outlets like The Hill and Forbes have reported.

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Georgia’s December Net Tax Revenues Up 24.3 Percent

Georgia’s net tax collections in December totaled $2.98 billion, for an increase of $582.9 million, or 24.3 percent, compared to December 2020 when net tax collections totaled $2.40 billion, state officials announced this month. “Year-to-date, net tax revenue collections totaled $14.85 billion, for an increase of $2.28 billion, or 18.1 percent, over FY 2021 after six months,” according to Governor Brian Kemp’s office.

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Virginia Mom Rips Into School Board over Hypocritical Mask Rules

A Virginia mother addressed her children’s school board Thursday night regarding the district’s mask mandate, which subverts Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order allowing parents to choose whether or not to mask their children in school.

A Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) mother, Carrie Lukas, condemned the school board for requiring children to mask up for school while “across Virginia, right now, adults are gathering in gyms, bars and clubs and laughing together maskless.”

“Yet my five kids spent all day today, eight hours, in masks in Fairfax County Public Schools,” she said. “My first grader has never been inside his school without a mask. He’s never had a chance to smile at his friends or hear his teachers’ unmuffled voice, and it is outrageous and ridiculous.”

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Adjustments Allowed to Ohio Primary Procedures After Legislative Map Challenges

The Ohio General Assembly has agreed to give Secretary of State Frank LaRose some authority to make administrative changes regarding the upcoming primary election while challenges to the state’s new legislative districts continue to play out in court.

LaRose asked for the power a little more than a week ago when the Ohio Redistricting Commission returned to work in an effort to meet a court order to redraw previously approved districts. The House and Senate approved the changes Wednesday, sending the legislation to Gov. Mike DeWine.

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JD Vance’s Campaign Relocates Event with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene After Pushback

Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance moved his campaign stop with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) from its original location after pushback against the venue for hosting the event.

The stop, which is a portion of Vance’s statewide bus campaign, was scheduled to host an event at The Landing Event Center in Loveland. However, after it was announced, critics of Vance and Greene lashed out at the venue.

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USDA Report Details More Violations at Beagle Breeder-For-Research Envigo; General Assembly Legislators Introduce 11 Bills to Regulate or Ban Practices at the Facility

Seven legislators have introduced 11 animal welfare bills in the Virginia General Assembly after investigations by PETA and the USDA found troubling conditions at a Cumberland beagle breeder-for-research. A newly-published report of an October 2021 site visit to the Envigo facility lists violations including staff providing medication without veterinarian approval, dangerous kennels blamed for deaths of multiple puppies, and buildup of grime and feces. Poor record-keeping was blamed for untreated medical conditions, unrecorded deaths, and an inability to determine cause of death in other cases.

“There continue to be severe staffing shortages and currently there are approximately 32 employees at the facility, with only 17 staff members directly responsible for all husbandry, daily observations, and medical treatments for almost 5000 dogs,” the report states.

“Mortality records show that from 2 Aug 2021 to 3 Oct 2021, nine dogs […] were injured from having a body part (such as a limb or tail) pulled through the wall of the kennel by a dog in an adjacent kennel and bitten. The exact injuries varied in each case, however regardless of whether it was a minor or substantial injury, these nine dogs were subsequently euthanized. Dogs sustaining injuries from being pulled through the enclosure wall have experienced physical harm and unnecessary pain,” the report states.

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Volkswagen Settles Lawsuit with Ohio over Environmental Claims

Volkswagen will pay the state of Ohio $3.5 million in a lawsuit settlement over claims the company violated state environmental laws by manipulating computer software in its cars to hide carbon dioxide emissions, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced.

The settlement ends a lawsuit filed in 2016 by the attorney general’s office. It is separate from a lawsuit filed the same year by the attorney general’s office on behalf of consumers who claim they were misled by Volkswagen’s assertions of vehicle performance.

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Ruling Against No-Excuse Mail-In Voting in Pennsylvania Appealed

Although Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court on Friday invalidated the law that has allowed no-excuse mail-in voting since 2020, the state’s appeal of the ruling means the decision is not yet in effect.

State officials, represented by Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro, will likely face a much friendlier forum in the state Supreme Court, which is controlled by Democrats in contrast to the Republican-majority Commonwealth Court. Democrats denounced the latter court’s ruling and pointed out that Republican legislators overwhelmingly voted for Act 77, which allowed Pennsylvanian’s who were not sick, injured or out of town to vote via absentee ballot.

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Rep. Gosar Calls on American University to Handle ‘Harassment’ Against His Student Employee

Faith Graham is a first-semester student at American University, located in Washington, D.C. Since the beginning of her college career, Graham has reportedly received a notable amount of backlash from peers and professors due to her conservative views and positions.

In the past, Graham has spoken at rallies in support of President Donald J. Trump. She also currently works for Republican Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona, helping to produce his ‘Gosar Minute’ segments.

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TN-5 Congressional Candidate Robby Starbuck Posts Profanity-Laced Video After The Tennessee Star Questioned Him About His Primary Voting Record

Less than 24 hours after The Tennessee Star asked TN-5 Congressional candidate Robby Starbuck to address questions about his voting record raised by documents obtained from Williamson County election officials, Starbuck released a video taken from a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street where the criminal defends himself before his employees.

In his version, Starbuck superimposed his own face on the face of Jordan Belfort, played Leonardo DiCaprio, using the audio from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. In 1999, Belfort pled guilt to fraud and other crimes in connection to stock market manipulation and a penny stock scam. He spent 22 months in prison as part of a plea agreement where he testified against partners and subordinates. The Wolf of Wall Street also depicted numerous incidents of drug use, sex, and an instance where a male high on drugs sexually gratified himself.

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Records Show Robby Starbuck Has Never Voted in a Tennessee GOP Primary, Making TN-5 Candidate Vulnerable to Ballot Challenge

Robby Starbuck, who formally declared his run for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District in June 2021, just two years after moving to Tennessee from California, told The Tennessee Star on Saturday “I don’t feel it’s necessary” to explain why he claimed in a January 21 radio interview with The Tennessee Star Report that he voted in two Tennessee GOP primaries in 2020, when voting records provided to The Tennessee Star by Williamson County officials show that he did not vote in either 2020 Tennessee GOP primary.

Tennessee Republican Party bylaws require active Republicans to have either (1) voted in three of the last four GOP primaries or (2) to have their “bona fide” status vouched for by Republicans in the district they seek to represent and then approved in a majority vote by a specially assembled committee of the Tennessee Republican Party State Executive Committee in order qualify to be on the August 2022 GOP primary ballot.

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Congressman Mark Green Urges Diplomatic Solution to Ukraine-Russia Conflict, Issues Stark Warning to Putin

Congressman Mark Green, who traveled to Ukraine with other members of Congress, urged a diplomatic resolution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict that has included Russia threatening an invasion.

While speaking at a meeting in Kyiv, the Tennessee lawmaker issued a stark warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin, if he opts to engage in military action.

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Commentary: Woke Capital Won’t Save the Planet – but It Will Crash the Economy

Judged by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s latest letter, January 2022 might turn out to be the highwater mark of woke capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is not “woke,” Fink says, because capitalism is driven by mutually beneficial relationships between businesses and their stakeholders. He’s right. What Fink describes is capitalism pure and simple, the stakeholder modifier adding nothing to the uniqueness of capitalism in harnessing competition and innovation for the benefit of all.

Fink’s shift is more than rhetorical. Just three years ago, in his 2019 “Profit and Purpose” letter, Fink told CEOs that the $24 trillion of wealth Millennials expect to inherit from their Boomer parents meant that ESG (environment, social, governance) issues “will be increasingly material to corporate valuations.” Now Fink tells them that “long-term profitability” is the measure by which markets will determine their companies’ success, dumping the ESG valuation metrics he’d previously championed.

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Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance Warns Tennesseans of Identity Theft

silhouette of person with hoodie on

The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance (TDCI) warned Tennesseans of identity theft during their Identity Theft Awareness Week. The week (Jan. 31 – Feb. 4, 2022) will include events to help spread awareness on the various forms of online theft, and how to protect personal information. 

According to the statement, the Federal Trade Commission’s Sentinel Network identified over 15,000 instances of identity theft across Tennessee in 2021.

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Eight States Sue Biden Administration over Reinstated Obama-Era Immigration Policy

Eight states are suing the Biden administration claiming it is abusing an Obama-era immigration program that allows minors who entered the U.S. illegally to seek to bring in family members from their home countries.

The lawsuit alleges President Joe Biden challenging the Central American Minors (CAM) Refugee and Parole Program was filed by the state of Texas and includes as plaintiffs the states of Arkansas, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma.

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Ortagus Wrote in September 2016 ‘Marie Claire’ Article Trump ‘Has Demeaning Words for Women He Doesn’t Like’

  The former spokeswoman for Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, who President Donald J. Trump endorsed for her possible run for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, co-wrote  a September 7, 2016 “Marie Claire” article, “In Defense of Melania Trump,” that criticized how Trump treats women and referred to Melania Trump’s nude modeling. “And good old-fashioned slut shaming is alive and well: Mrs. Trump was also subject to scrutiny for past nude modeling photos, despite that she was a reputable model,” wrote Samantha E. Vinogard and Ortagus, who was a media surrogate for one of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination that year, John E. “Jeb” Bush. Ortagus gave Jeb Bush’s campaign and his Right to Rise PAC $3,200 that cycle, and wrote other articles for the magazine with Vinogard, a CNN national security analyst and former Obama administration official. Vinogard is now a senior counselor for national security at the Department of Homeland Security and acting Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention. The two women also worked in the article that the future First Lady was a plagiarist: It’s true: Melania Trump has been a somewhat easy target this presidential election, between cribbing parts of her RNC speech from Michelle…

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Commentary: The Road to Vengeance

In Fall 2017, the president of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth, invited me to speak as part of a “difficult conversations” initiative. Wesleyan is a determinedly left-wing campus, and Roth saw the occasional conservative visitor as good for the intellectual climate. We were eight months into the Trump Administration, and I’d written pieces for Vox, CNN, the New York Times, and other liberal outlets that suggested I might praise President Trump in a way that would rise above naked partisanship.

I decided on a presentation of Donald Trump as a traditional American rogue figure, a model of Emersonian nonconformity, an outlandish character in a lineage of comic renegades. No other individual in my lifetime mobilized the entirety of respectable opinion in America against himself, I would tell them, and that very fact deserved analysis. Everybody in the elite denounced him—a strange uniformity for a social group that professes its admiration for thinking outside the box. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the swamp, the art world, the media, academia . . . they hated him with a passion that revealed more about themselves than it did about the object of their enmity. He had to have something going for him to evoke such a monolithic pageant of slurs.

I laid this out before an audience of 200, and the faculty in the room more or less got the tongue-in-cheek element (though they asked some tough questions about Trump’s sexism).

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Special Counsel Durham Says Just Learning About Justice Watchdog Horowitz, Sussmann’s 2017 Meeting

Special counsel John Durham and his legal team say they’re just learning about a March 2017 meeting between Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz and former Hillary Clinton campaign Michael Sussmann – indicted last year for allegedly lying to the FBI while pushing now-discredited claims about the Trump Organization.

Durham’s team said Tuesday in a court filing they learned only a week ago about the meeting between Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Sussmann, who made the claims in 2016 about communications between a Russia bank and the Trump organization.

“The OIG had not previously informed the Special Counsel’s Office of this meeting with the defendant,” the filing by Durham’s legal team states.

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Federal Judge Blocks Oil and Gas Leases in Gulf of Mexico

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled against a planned sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming, without evidence, that the leases would be damaging to the environment.

As reported by CNN, the Biden Administration made an effort to shut down all oil and gas leases across the country shortly after Biden came to power, with an executive order on January 27th indefinitely halting all new permits for such leases, pending a “rigorous review” of fossil fuel development programs. However, a lawsuit filed by 13 states ultimately led to a federal court in Louisiana blocking Biden’s order, allowing the sale of 80 million acres to move forward in November.

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Ukraine Warns West’s ‘Panic’ over Russian Invasion Could Sink Its Economy

Volodymyr Zelensky

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the West that its “panic” over Russia potentially invading his country risked hurting its economy, BBC News reported.

“There are signals even from respected leaders of states, they just say that tomorrow there will be war,” Zelensky told reporters at a press conference, BBC News reported. “This is panic – how much does it cost for our state?”

The Ukrainian criticized Western countries choosing to withdraw diplomats from Ukraine, calling the move a mistake, BBC News reported. “The destabilisation of the situation inside the country” is the biggest threat to Ukraine, he said.

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Jobless Claims Decrease as Labor Market Recovers Despite Surging COVID-19 Cases

Photo “Unemployment Insurance Claims Office” by Bytemarks. CC BY 2.0.

The number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims decreased to 260,000 in the week ending Jan. 22 as the tight labor market continues to show signs of strength despite surging cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant.

The Labor Department figure shows a 30,000 claim decrease compared to the week ending. Jan 15 when claims increased to 286,000. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal estimated that new jobless claims would fall by just 21,000 to 265,000.

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Google Kicks Dan Bongino Off Ads Platform Days After YouTube Ban

Google temporarily suspended conservative talk show host Dan Bongino’s website, Bongino.com, from its ads service, a company spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Friday.

“We have strict publisher policies in place that explicitly prohibit misleading and harmful content around the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrably false claims about our elections,” the spokesperson said. “When publishers persistently breach our policies we stop serving Google ads on their sites. Publishers can always appeal a decision once they have addressed any violating content.”

The spokesperson added that while Google would not disclose the specific offending content on Bongino.com, the website had been subject to frequent reviews and Google had flagged content in violation of its policies.

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