A five-judge panel on Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court stopped a provision that allows mail-in voting throughout the state, ruling the measure unconstitutional.
Proponents of the lawsuit argued that any permanent change to the election code of the state must be performed through constitutional amendment. In order for a constitutional amendment to be enacted, the measure must pass the legislature during two consecutive sessions.
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Viral images are circulating of a bridge collapse outside of Pittsburgh, just before President Joe Biden is slated to visit the city.
Greg Barnhisel, a professor at Duquesne University, first posted images of the collapsed bridge over Frick Park in Point Breeze. He said several vehicles were still on the bridge after the collapse.
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Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has endorsed Robby Starbuck in the race for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District.
This comes after President Trump’s strong encouragement and offered endorsement for the potential candidacy of former State Department spokesman Morgan Ortagus.
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The second most senior Supreme Court associate justice decided to retire from the high court bench at the end of the court’s session in June, according to multiple media reports.
There was no official statement from the Supreme Court, but White House Press Secretary Jennifer R. “Jen” Psaki Wednesday confirmed the retirement of Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer on Twitter.
“It has always been the decision of any Supreme Court justice if and when they decide to retire, and how they want to announce it, and that remains the case today. We have no additional details or information to share from White House,” she said.
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Former Tennessee Titans head coach Jeff Fisher will have the opportunity to control a new football franchise, as he was named the coach and general manager of the Michigan Panthers in the United States Football League (USFL).
Fisher coached in the NFL for more than two decades for multiple teams. He made six playoff appearances, losing Super Bowl 34 as the leader of the Titans. Most recently, Fisher served as an advisor to Eddie George at Tennessee State for the 2021 season.
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The Metro Nashville Council has released their agenda for their February 1, 2022 meeting. $70 million dollars in taxpayer funds appropriations is on the agenda.
Other topics on the agenda include license plate readers, greenhouse gas reduction, zoning and more.
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Moms for Liberty Williamson County (ML-WC) President Robin Steenman said this week that she will refile a complaint that Tennessee Department Education (TDOE) Commissioner Penny Schwinn rejected last November. Steenman complained about the Williamson County School System’s Wit & Wisdom curriculum, which she said perpetuates the tenants of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
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Americans want an autonomous Ukraine to survive. They hope the West can stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strangulation of both Ukraine and NATO.
Yet Americans do not want their troops to venture across the world to Europe’s backyard to fight nuclear Russia to ensure that Ukraine stays independent.
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California-based financial company PennyMac will open a new location in Franklin, according to a release from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD).
The company will invest approximately $3.9 million in the new area and create roughly 325 new jobs in Williamson County.
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Legislation designed to make the U.S. more competitive with China includes millions in appropriations for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The America COMPETES Act, introduced by House Democrats late Tuesday, is a companion to a bipartisan bill that passed the Senate in June 2021, though the House version lacks Republican support. The bill is designed to increase domestic technological advancement and innovation in order to make the U.S. more competitive with China, and includes $45 billion to ease supply chain disruptions and $52 billion for domestic semiconductor fabrication.
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The Tennessee Department of Education announced the approval of all 147 school districts on their required ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) plans. Through ESSER, the schools have more than $3.5 billion through federal COVID-19 relief funding to benefit K-12 public school students in their districts. Following the U.S. Department of Education guidelines, all districts were “required to develop plans that outlined their local spending strategies for their portion of the historic amount of federal funding.”
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As indictments and new court filings indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI to incriminate Donald Trump and his advisers as Kremlin agents, Clinton’s role in the burgeoning scandal remains elusive. What did she know and when did she know it?
Top officials involved in her campaign have repeatedly claimed, some under oath, that they and the candidate were unaware of the foundation of their disinformation campaign: the 35-page collection of now debunked claims of Trump/Russia collusion known as the Steele dossier. Even though her campaign helped pay for the dossier, they claim she only read it after BuzzFeed News published it in 2017.
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The U.S. economy grew at a faster rate than was anticipated pace in the fourth quarter of 2021, benefiting from solid consumer demand before the slowdown caused by the Omicron coronavirus variant and supply chain disruptions.
U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew 6.9% on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter of 2021, a 2.3% increase from the third quarter figure, the Commerce Department announced Thursday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal estimated that U.S. GDP would grow at a just 5.5% annual rate.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed State Representative Mark White to the newsmakers line to discuss the importance of BEP and fixing CRT legislation in the state.
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Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt asked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to end certain immigration policies he believes have left the country less safe, suggesting the department should also consider a name change.
Schmitt urged Mayorkas to address the use of certain arrest warrants as identification for migrants going through airport security, according to a letter sent Tuesday and exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Clint Brewer in studio to explain the State Funding Board’s role and reasons for the new business swell to Tennessee.
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Numerous media outlets reported Thursday that a Tennessee school banned a famous graphic novel about the Holocaust.
The school voted to replace “Maus,” by Art Spiegelman, an illustrated book about a Holocaust survivor’s experience which was required reading for eighth-graders, with a different book that contains fewer obscenities such as foul language and sex, according to the minutes of a Jan. 10 McMinn County Board Of Education meeting.
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Conservative talk show host Dan Bongino had both of his YouTube accounts permanently banned Wednesday, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Bongino’s second channel, the Dan Bongino Show Clips, was initially suspended and demonetized for seven days after Bongino posted a video in which he said masks were “useless” in stopping the spread of the coronavirus, violating YouTube’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. Bongino then attempted to upload a video within the seven-day suspension period on his main channel, resulting in a permanent ban for both accounts, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed to the DCNF.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Roger Simon in studio to talk new book in progress and the Fifth Congressional District’s upcoming primary candidates.
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John Solomon, the award-winning journalist and editor-in-chief of “Just the News,” will host a new, nightly broadcast on Real America’s Voice.
The shows, entitled “News Not Noise,” will begin on Monday and air every weekday from 6-7 p.m. EST.
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On Wednesday, after a nearly two-month pause, another evacuation flight departed the country of Afghanistan en route for the United States.
According to CNN, the flight was a Qatar Airways flight that departed from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, paid for by the United States government, with an unknown number of American citizens on board. It is the first such flight since November.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Clint Brewer in studio to comment upon the recent nod to Nashville transplant Morgan Ortegas for Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District and those confirmed and considering a run.
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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will distribute approximately 2 million KN95 masks to residents of the state through schools and local health organizations.
The move follows an announcement from President Joe Biden that his administration will disperse 400 million masks across the country, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced certain types of masks are ineffective against preventing coronavirus transmission.
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The Michigan House approved a range of bills that aim to reform the embattled Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) that has mishandled at least $8.5 billion since March 2020.
When the UIA acknowledged losing $4 billion of taxpayer money, it admitted: “mistakes were made.”
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Ohio gubernatorial candidate Jim Renacci pledged to end mask mandates on his first day as governor, if he were to be elected.
In order to accomplish the goal, the Republican contender explained that he would sign an executive order to give parents the power to opt their students out of school mask mandates.
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According to a restaurant database called Open Table, seated dining in Minneapolis is down 76% since 2019. As of Monday, January 23, the database said dining rates were only down 67%, but it dropped another 9% on Tuesday.
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Yesterday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced that he held a roundtable discussion with doctors and patients who recently received monoclonal antibody treatments. The point of the roundtable was to highlight the treatment’s effectiveness after the federal government ended the treatment’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
DeSantis said that his view is that Floridians want the treatment to be available for doctors to have in the event that they would find it useful.
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Republican Kevin Nicholson, a businessman and former Marine, on Thursday launched his Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign.
Nicholson unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2018, being defeated by former state Sen. Leah Vukmir in the Republican primary.
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On Thursday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) vetoed a proposed new congressional-district map passed by the Republican-run state legislature.
The governor’s decision effectively turns over the selection of a new map to the state judiciary. The Republican-run Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has indicated it would intervene if Wolf and lawmakers failed to agree on how the new districts will be reshaped. But even if that court chooses the reapportionment plan passed by the General Assembly, Wolf’s party may ultimately get its way by appealing to the Democrat-controlled state Supreme Court.
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A bipartisan group of Georgia lawmakers is sponsoring a bill to create a new state-funded scholarship program that would allow parents to select education options for their children.
House Bill 999, dubbed the Georgia Educational Freedom Act, would provide $6,000 for Georgia students each year in scholarship accounts to attend approved private schools of their choice.
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A source inside the Virginia Capitol Thursday spoke exclusively to The Virginia Star about Wednesday’s tiff between Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Del. Don Scott (D-Portsmouth), who claimed in an interview with the Washington Post that the Governor was not comporting himself in a manner consistent with his Christian faith.
At the time of Washington Post’s publication, Scott was expecting the governor to meet with him in his office.
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Several groups filed objections to the Ohio Redistricting Commission’s second attempt at redrawing state legislative maps, saying the commission failed to live up to reforms passed in 2018 and orders from the Ohio Supreme Court.
An 11:59 p.m. Tuesday deadline was in place to file legal claims with the Ohio Supreme Court, which declared the state’s first legislative district maps unconstitutional Jan. 12 and gave the commission 10 days to submit new ones.
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Florida State Rep. Bryan Avila’s (R-FL-111) HB 7, which is part of the legislature’s effort to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT), got approval from the House Judiciary Committee this week. The bill was supported entirely by Republicans and opposed by Democrats with a vote of 14-7. The bill is part of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) “anti-woke” legislative effort and will likely lead to some of the most notable debate in the legislature during this session.
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Wisconsin is the latest state to go on the record in asking for a convention to change the U.S. Constitution.
The Wisconsin Senate on Tuesday approved a resolution calling for a Convention of the States.
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One of the biggest priorities in the Arizona Legislature this year is election integrity, due to concerns about fraud in the 2020 Arizona presidential election. Legislators have dropped many bills to combat voter fraud, with seven passing out of the Senate Government Committee on Monday.
Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward, who has been one of the strongest proponents of cleaning up election fraud, including helping get an audit launched into the Maricopa County 2020 election, told The Arizona Sun Times, “It is encouraging to see our state legislators taking action and focusing on election integrity. The objective information from the Arizona Audit — America’s Audit — is showing us the way to make voting more secure. These bills are yet another reason why the full forensic audit was justified.”
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Attorney General Jason Miyares announced a new policy to cut attorneys’ fees for debt collection on student loan debt at Virginia’s public colleges. Under Virginia law, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is responsible to provide debt collection services on behalf of state agencies, and can retain as revenue up to 30 percent. Miyares’ internal policy limits that to 15 percent on new claims referred to the OAG, where possible.
“As someone who worked to put themself through college and still has their own student loans, I understand the strain student loans can put on working families. By working to reduce the attorney collection fee from 30 percent to 15 percent on accounts deemed delinquent by the respective universities, we are making immediate, internal procedural improvements that will help Virginians,” Miyares said in a Wednesday press release.
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A militia member who is described as a leader of a surveillance operation in the plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) is a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to several reports.
In September 2020, 12 men involved in the alleged plot traveled to Whitmer’s vacation cottage on Birch Lake in Antrim County. Their goal was to surveil the property, and figure out whether they could blow it up or kidnap the governor.
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RICHMOND, Virginia — The Senate Education and Health Public Education Subcommittee recommended killing two bills from Senator Jen Kiggans (R-Virginia Beach): SB 766 which would ban transgender girls from playing girls’ sports, and SB 570, which would codify Governor Glenn Youngkin’s “inherently divisive concept” ban. In its Thursday afternoon meeting the subcommittee also recommended killing Senator Travis Hackworth’s (R-Tazewell) SB 20 to eliminate a requirement that school boards adopt policies for the treatment of transgender students.
Kiggans, who is running for Congress, told the subcommittee that she was carrying SB 570 on behalf of the Youngkin administration.
“I said yes to carry this bill because I heard the voices of parents that spoke in November. You know, I was one of those parents as well,” Kiggans said, noting that Youngkin frequently talked about teaching kids how to think, not what to think.
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Nine law enforcement officers shot and killed a 37-year-old man Thursday afternoon on I-65 northbound, near Harding Place. Members of the Nashville Metro Police Department (MNPD) did not release the man’s name Thursday, pending next of kin notification.
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