Congressman Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN-03), joining other members of the House Appropriations Committee, sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The group demanded more information on reports that DHS has moved unaccompanied minors throughout the country – often, without permission from local leaders.
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President Biden’s proposed $2 trillion-plus Build Back Better Act failed to gain US Senate approval in 2021, but efforts remain to move forward with a revised version that would include universal government preschool programs and taxpayer-funded child care subsidies.
As US Congresswoman Katherine Clark (D-MA) said recently about taxpayer-backed daycare: “It is the issue that has survived all the iterations, and it is going to be the issue that we are able to get over the line with in the Build Back Better agenda.”
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a proclamation dedicating February 13-19, 2022 as “Adoption Is Love Week.”
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Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed former state representative Joe Carr to the newsmakers line to talk about recent polls showing him in the lead for Rutherford County mayoral race.
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) Commissioner Bob Rolfe announced Thursday that Chick-fil-A Supply® selected Antioch as the location for its fourth U.S. distribution center in the state. The facility will begin operations later this year, according to a press release by TNECD.
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Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Congressman Tim Burchett to the newsmakers line to talk reckless spending, Kevin McCarthy, and the Durham report.
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Several firearms-related bills that are pending before the Tennessee General Assembly are scheduled to be taken up for committee and subcommittee consideration in the coming days. These bills deal with firearm permitting, self-defense and justifiable force, vouchers for firearms training classes, carry by off-duty law enforcement officers, gun violence as a public health problem, and storing firearms in vehicles.
Four of the bills have action pending in the state House and another has action pending in the state Senate.
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Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
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Live from Nashville, Tennessee, Friday morning on The Dan Mandis Show – weekdays on Supertalk 99.7 WTN – weekdays 5 a.m. to 9 a.m.– host Mandis welcomed Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to discuss how he will reformulate the Basic Education Program from the ground up and hold underperforming schools accountable. Mandis: Governor Bill Lee joining us. And always appreciate having you on the radio program, sir. There’s been a lot of discussions going on Capitol Hill over the last few weeks about how we’re going to fund the schools. Now, Governor, you have said that you want the funding to follow the kids no matter where they go. During your State of the State speech, you said this: (Bill Lee clip plays) I am proposing an innovative approach that sets aside dollars for each student based on their individual needs. And these dollars will be used in whatever public school they attend. This is not just hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. This is our kids and their lives. So, Governor, a lot of folks said hallelujah. And for the last many weeks, we have been waiting, including folks in the state legislature, eagerly awaiting your proposal.…
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Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who led the state from 2011 to 2019, endorsed his former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch in the race for his former position.
Kleefisch, running for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, is viewed to be one of the front-runners, in addition to businessman Kevin Nicholson and State Representative Timothy Ramthun (R-Campbellsport).
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Dave McCormick and Mehmet Oz will skip a debate among candidates running for the Pennsylvania GOP nomination for U.S. Senate.
Oz’s campaign cited a “scheduling conflict” when informing the host of his intended absence. Initially, McCormick agreed to participate in the debate.
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Eight countries and hundreds of human rights organizations have condemned China for committing human rights violations against minorities.
Yet NBC’s coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics has minimized the Uyghur genocide, despite 200 human rights organizations and eight governmental bodies, including Canada, the U.S., Holland, the U.K., Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and France, declaring that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has committed atrocities against ethnic Uyghurs and other minority groups.
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On Tuesday, an equal rights group publicly called on investment bank Morgan Stanley to shut down an internship program that explicitly describes itself as only open to non-White applicants.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, a letter was sent to Morgan Stanley by the Project on Fair Representation, warning that the bank’s internship violated federal non-discrimination laws. The 2022 Freshman Enhancement Program is described on Morgan Stanley’s website as only available to “black, Hispanic, Native American, and/or LGBTQ+ freshman undergraduate student[s].” The internship has been promoted by several Ivy League schools, including Princeton University.
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One of the largest teachers unions in the country donated $2 million to the left-wing Senate Majority Political Action Committee in 2021 after the Democratic Party voted against reopening public schools, according to data from the National Republican Senatorial Committee provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
On March 6, 2021, Senate Democrats unanimously voted against a Republican amendment to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that would have ensured school reopening dollars were allocated to education institutions prioritizing in-person learning. Schools that were working to provide in-person learning for students five days a week would have been given full funding under the bill, while those that were completely closed would only get 25% of its allocated funding.
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A former NFL sideline reporter for NBC has faced major criticism after leaving her job in sports to work in conservative politics.
Michele Tafoya left NBC after Sunday’s Super Bowl, and immediately took a job as the co-chair of Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Kendall Qualls’ campaign, as reported by The Minnesota Sun.
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The Virginia General Assembly is working on legislation that may bring the newly renamed Washington Commanders to Northern Virginia. The NFL team is currently based at the aging FedEx Field just outside Washington, D.C., in Maryland, and the team has approached Virginia legislators about potentially building a stadium in the commonwealth. Both the House of Delegates and the Senate have passed bills that would create a football stadium authority to finance construction of the stadium; now, the chambers are evaluating each other’s bills, which have significant differences in tax incentives offered to attract the team.
“I would love to have a professional sports team and a football team in Virginia,” Governor Glenn Youngkin told The Virginia Star on Thursday. “We’ve got a Senate group and a House group in discussions in order to bring a very thoughtful bill to me. I believe that my job is to represent Virginia taxpayers, and so we’ll do a good deal. I just want to make sure that what comes out of the House and Senate gives us the capability to do a good deal because I sure would like Virginia to be the best place to raise a family, live, work, and have a professional sports team.”
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People switching jobs during the Great Resignation contributed to rising inflation in 2021, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
“The idea is as follows: By applying for jobs in a different firm, employed workers can elicit wage competition between the current employer and the new candidate employer. The firm that intends to poach the worker from their current employer has to offer a sufficiently large wage to make the offer attractive. And if a worker is particularly valued by their own employer, they may be offered a pay raise that is necessary to retain them in their current job,” authors Renato Faccini, Leonardo Melosi and Russell Miles wrote in Chicago Fed Letter No. 465. “In this context, if employed workers search more, wage competition among employers increases, leading to an increase in inflationary pressures; if they search less, wage competition falls and inflationary pressures decrease.”
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Georgia officials recently announced that the company Rivian will construct a $5 billion Electric Vehicle (EV) manufacturing plant in Morgan and Walton counties, but no one knows how much money the company took in government incentives. This, according to a statement that the Washington, D.C.-based Good Jobs First issued this month. According to its website, Good Jobs First is a policy resource center that promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development.
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On Wednesday, the Biden Administration announced its intention to sue the state of Missouri over a law passed last year that protects residents’ Second Amendment rights from federal government overreach.
As reported by The Hill, the lawsuit was announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland, targeting Missouri’s House Bill 85 as an alleged violation of the “Supremacy Clause,” which “is preempted by federal law and violates the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity.” Garland’s Department of Justice (DOJ) will argue that the law harms cooperative efforts between the federal government, state governments, and local jurisdictions.
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The embattled chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, Robert A. Paduchik, successfully oversaw a contentious 3.5-hour meeting Friday of the state party’s central committee held at the Nationwide Hotel and Conference Center here, culminating in the committee voting 36-26 in a secret ballot to endorse Gov. R. Michael DeWine, along with the other statewide Republicans incumbents as a slate.
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Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner is making an unorthodox bid to avoid prison time for fleecing an Indian tribe, portraying himself to the sentencing judge as a victim of the Biden family’s “vitriolic media coverage” while using the presidential son’s Chinese business partner to make a case for leniency.
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Within hours of taking office on January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order cancelling the cross-border permit for the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a plan to phase out natural gas and oil, eliminating thousands of family-sustaining jobs. At the same time, the Biden administration promised plenty of “good-paying” positions would be available in the renewable energy sector.
But the reality is that natural gas and oil jobs don’t easily transfer to the renewables sector, as a new analysis by Cicero, in coordination with North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) and American Petroleum Institute (API), shows.
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President Joe Biden has tapped former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins to serve as his top science advisor, several months after allegations that Collins and White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci were untruthful in their assertions that NIH did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China.
Biden announced Wednesday Collins will serve as Science Advisor to the President and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology “until permanent leadership is nominated and confirmed.”
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The Biden administration altered the official federal policy on approving new interstate natural gas facilities and pipelines, requiring a climate consideration.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced that it will begin to “undertake a robust consideration” of the environmental justice impacts of such fossil fuel projects before granting approval, according to a fact sheet published Thursday. The agency, which is the top regulator of domestic natural gas infrastructure, said its new policy will presume projects that cause 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year will have a significant impact on the environment.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday called on President Joe Biden and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to change their decision to deny the state’s Individual Assistance request.
The governor’s comments followed meetings with Florida Division of Emergency Management Director (FDEM) Kevin Guthrie and victims of tornadoes that impacted the state.
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Arizona State Representative Walt Blackman (R) hammered proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) Thursday for their hypocrisy in ignoring the “racism” and “oppression” experienced by the hundreds of black babies who are aborted each day.
In a floor speech prior to his vote of approval for a measure that would place on the ballot an amendment to the state constitution to prohibit the teaching of the concepts of CRT and ban any preferential treatment based upon race, Blackman asserted the “whole truth doesn’t come out” when the arguments about CRT are made.
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Arizona Republicans, stressing the value of local representation and denying retaliation over the 2020 general election controversy, have given early approval to legislation that would split Maricopa County into four counties.
Should Gov. Doug Ducey sign House Bill 2787, it would take the nation’s fourth-largest county and split it into four counties by June 15, 2023. Maricopa County would remain but would be much smaller and centralized around metropolitan Phoenix.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the GOP-dominated Legislature will soon battle over spending a $6 billion budget surplus.
Whitmer wants targeted tax breaks for retired Michiganders; family tax credits; and, perhaps most controversial, has announced a plan that would give private auto manufacturers more than a billion dollars, which many Republicans also support.
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A candidate for North Carolina’s State House of Representatives blasted the Cabarrus County School Board (CCSB) for its support of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools.
“As a parent, and I speak to other parents, and there’s a few things we don’t want,” Brian Echevarria said at a CCSB meeting Monday. “I’m biracial, I’m bilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is, in America, in North Carolina, I can do anything I want, and I teach that to my children. And the person that tells my little pecan-colored kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee- When I went to the Project K-9 Hero fundraiser at the Nashville Palace, besides meeting some precious canines, I got to see some of the artists I had previously interviewed and learn about some new singers/songwriters who also performed in the famed songwriters’ rounds. One who particularly stood out to me was Josh Kiser. Even at his young age, he had that traditional country vibe that I favor, and the songs he sang had clever lyrics, like they were written by a veteran songwriter.
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The number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims increased to 248,000 in the week ending Feb. 12, the Labor Department announced Thursday.
The Labor Department’s figure showed an increase of 23,000 compared to the week ending on Feb. 5, when claims decreased to 225,000.
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Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) is participating in the Munich Security Conference amid a tense moment between Russia and Ukraine. On Thursday, Warner said on a call with reporters that the situation would be one of the main topics at the annual conference, which wasn’t held during the past two years due to COVID-19.
“The challenging thing is that we have seen no real de-escalation efforts by Putin and the Russian forces. There may have been some forces that have moved around a bit, but no indications of de-escalation,” said Warner, who is chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
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The Michigan Senate approved a bipartisan plan to reduce prescription drug prices in the state.
House Bill 4348 aims to save patients money by regulating pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) who serve as facilitators between health plans, drug manufacturers and pharmacists.
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Tennessee Titans officials want to renovate Nissan Stadium, but those renovations would likely cost $600 million, and now people are talking about simply constructing another stadium altogether — possibly with money from taxpayers. Nashville’s finances aren’t in the greatest shape.
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