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 U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) released the names of the 39 outstanding Tennesseans he has nominated this year for admittance to the U.S. Service Academies, his office told The Tennessee Star in an exclusive announcement.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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China replaced the ending to the 1999 cult classic film “Fight Club” with a message saying the authorities won, BBC News reported.
The true ending of the film depicts the narrator, portrayed by Edward Norton, killing his imaginary alter ego, played by Brad Pitt, before bombs exploded, destroying buildings in the climax of a plot to change society.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Former Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) blasted President Joe Biden this week for showing weakness on the world stage, warning that Americans won’t tolerate it.
Americans “should be horrified” by the White House response to Russia’s potential invasion of Ukraine, Collins told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Tuesday’s episode.
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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 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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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 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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Florida Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez on Friday held a roundtable discussion to highlight the dangers of human trafficking in the state.
The discussion, which included multiple government officials and experts on the issue, detailed that 40 percent of victims in Miami-Dade County are minors.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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Congressman Madison Cawthorn (R-NC-11) on Friday endorsed Blake Masters, who is running in the Republican primary to represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate.
Cawthorn, while highlighting the viewpoints of Masters, slammed other election officials, saying the “days of America Last politicians are over.”
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