Former Tennessee State Senator Katrina Robinson was sentenced to time served and one year of supervised release after she was convicted of wire fraud charges.
Robinson’s legal woes have dragged on for more than a year, as she was charged with multiple offenses relating to the health care school that she operated.
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The Nashville Soccer Club announced Wednesday in a press release that the club has reached 20,000 season-ticket memberships for the 2022 Major League Soccer season at GEODIS Park, the largest soccer-specific stadium in the United States and Canada.
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I sense a disturbance in the force. In fact, I’ve been feeling the tremors for a while. Back in January, I wrote a column for American Greatness called “The Coming Dethronement of Joe Biden.” In it, I noted that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the ostentatious nature of his multifaceted failure—lead to his removal as president.
I should have added that it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall. The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky, community organizer to the stars, noted, the “issue is never the issue.” Accordingly, the people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. I am quite certain, in fact, that the word “voters” brings a vaguely contemptuous smile to their faces.
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Vulnerable New Jersey Democrat U.S. Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ-7) is under fire for an anti-parent rant.
At a town hall, Malinowski referred to parents’ concerns about their kids’ education as “made-up cultural bulls**t because they want power. Not because they actually care about us.”
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Metro Nashville public school students and staff are no longer required to wear masks following a February school board vote that took effect Monday.
Students and staff have the option to continue wearing masks as they please, however, face coverings will not be mandated for the first time this school year.
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A Connecticut mom who has helped organize mothers who support Republican Bob Stefanowski for governor emphasized to The Connecticut Star her group is composed of moms of all political views who have felt ignored by the Democrats in Hartford ruling their state.
While Sarah Matthews is chairman of the Republican Town Committee in Fairfield, she said her informal organization of mothers supporting Stefanowski in his bid to block Democrat Governor Ned Lamont from another term is “not just Republicans.”
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Fallout is continuing after a multimillion dollar jury verdict was awarded to a former staffer of Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs due to Hobbs’ racist and sexist treatment of her. Hobbs admitted, “I participated in furthering systemic racism.” Democrats immediately started dropping their support of her candidacy for Arizona governor, with most recently State Rep. Richard Andrade (D-Glendale) announcing his decision to switch his endorsement to former Nogales Mayor Marco Lopez.
The Arizona Sun Times asked Kari Lake, the leading gubernatorial candidate on the Republican side who recently joined a lawsuit against Hobbs, what she thought of this latest development. She responded, “The movement we are experiencing is so strong I don’t care who the Democrats put up against me, I will crush them in November.”
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The City of St. Paul will use a $3.75 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to hire additional police officers to increase public safety.
In addition to the DOJ money, St. Paul officials will also rely on funding from the American Rescue Plan and other city revenue to fully finance the added positions.
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Jianjie Liu, a Chinese national arrested in Georgia in 2019, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering, amid an indictment that included money laundering conspiracy, nine counts of money laundering, and access device fraud charges
According to a release from the Department of Justice (DOJ), Liu targeted victims in several states, raking in more than $150,000 in various schemes.
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Drug users in Wisconsin can get a test to see if their pills or powders contain fentanyl.
Gov. Tony Evers on Wednesday signed a new law that legalizes fentanyl test strips.
“Tragically, fentanyl has played a serious role in overdose deaths across the country,” the governor said. “[This law] is an important step toward reducing substance misuse and overdose deaths here in our state.”
Fentanyl strips are small strips of treated paper that change color if a drug contains fentanyl. Up until Wednesday, they were classified as drug paraphernalia in Wisconsin.
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State Sen. David Argall (R-Mahanoy City) last week proposed two constitutional amendments that would affect state-legislative redistricting in Pennsylvania.
The first reform the senator wants to make would change the process for choosing the chair of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission (LRC), which oversees remapping of the General Assembly’s districts every 10 years. Current law directs the state Supreme Court to pick a chairperson, effectively deciding which party controls the five-member commission on which the Republican and Democratic leaders of the state House and state Senate sit.
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Governor Ron DeSantis is in a standoff with Republican legislators over congressional redistricting plans that many think is headed to the courts. The controversy comes after a successful legislative session which rewarded DeSantis with a number of victories he can use in his campaign for reelection.
Back in January, DeSantis took the unusual step of submitting his own redistricting plan. Governors have the authority to veto district map proposals but do not typically submit map proposals of their own.
At the time, DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, issued a statement saying their office has “legal concerns” with the current maps under consideration at the legislature.
DeSantis has proposed a more Republican-leaning plan that would eliminate two districts held by African American Democratic representatives. DeSantis believes that one of the districts, which stretches from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, is unconstitutional and should be consolidated to only include Jacksonville.
Florida State Representative Tom Leek (R-Ormond Beach) has previously noted that there is a possibility that a legal challenge could void the maps if a court finds a change in the Jacksonville -Tallahassee district has “diminished” minority voters.
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Virginia’s parole board votes will be subject to Freedom of Information Act ( (FOIA) requests when State Senator David Suetterlein’s (R-Roanoke) SB 5 and Delegate Wren Williams’ (R-Patrick) HB 1303 take effect this summer.
“What it seeks to do is make parole board votes public. When someone in Virginia is charged with a crime, they know who accused them of committing that crime. When they’re arrested, they know who arrested them. When it goes to trial, they know who prosecutes them, and they know the judge that oversees that. If it stays on appeal and they’re unsuccessful, they know who was on the appellate court. Only when that person may be up for parole and that vote is not made public, that’s the first step in the entire process that lacks that sunshine,” Suetterlein told the Senate on February 14.
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The Democratic Party of Virginia (DPVA) re-elected Chair Susan Swecker for a four-year term with 80 percent of the vote on Saturday.
“I am incredibly grateful to Virginia Democrats for putting their faith in me to continue to lead the Party as we move forward. We have made so much progress as a Party and Commonwealth over the last seven years, and now is the time to protect and build upon that progress,” Swecker said in a press release.
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According to a brochure distributed by Connecticut’s public-sector-labor coalition, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) and the state’s unionized employees have negotiated contracts that will cost taxpayers plenty if ratified.
Wins for each unionized worker would include $3,500 in bonuses and and three yearly wage hikes of 2.5 percent, which would be made retroactive to summer of 2021. About two-thirds of union-affiliated employees would also get “step” raises; i.e., elevation to the next pay rate. These bonuses and salary gains would also factor into future pension payments.
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Almost exactly 76 years ago, on March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, the former prime minister of Great Britain, delivered one of the most important speeches of the century. Surveying the increasing despotic rule by the Soviet Russians over Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of World War Two, Churchill declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
That phrase, “iron curtain,” stuck, helping to define the Cold War for the next five decades. In such a chilled environment, significant trade and normal exchange of any kind between the Free World and the Communist Bloc was unthinkable.
So now today, we can see that an iron curtain is once again descending; only time will tell if brave Ukraine will be held, once again, as a captive nation on the wrong side of this terrible barrier.
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Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, interviewed former Georgia state representative Vernon Jones, who is running in the GOP primary to replace Rep. Jody B. Hice (R.-Ga.) for Georgia’s 10th Congressional District.
Jones, who is endorsed by President Donald J. Trump, said Americans cannot wait until 2024 for Trump to be returned to the White House, so he has another plan.
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Last year, Arizona enacted historic tax cuts, changing the state’s tax code law to mostly a 2.5% flat tax rate. But opponents collected enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot this fall, Prop. 307, that would reverse the legislation. In response, Republican state legislators are working with Gov. Doug Ducey to pass legislation that would make the initiative null and void — and maybe implement even more striking tax cuts.
State Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek), who sponsored legislation last year that would have repealed and replaced the historic tax cuts with an even more far reaching 1.5% tax rate, told The Arizona Sun Times, “I told the Governor’s office that the 2.5% tax rate he’s pushing for can only be the starting point. With yet another year of record budget surpluses of nearly $4 billion, the people of Arizona are being overtaxed. We must cut taxes even more during the budget process.”
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An Ohio policy group is continuing its fight against cities in the state collecting income taxes from people who do not work in those cities.
The Buckeye Institute filed an appeal with Ohio’s Sixth District Court of Appeals in a case challenging the authority of the cities of Toledo and Oregon to tax nonresidents who do not work within those cities because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Alabama officials reversed a decision to revoke a license plate belonging to Nathan Kirk, referring to the slogan criticizing President Joe Biden — “Let’s go, Brandon” — according to The Washington Post.
The state previously demanded that Kirk surrender his license plate within 10 days in a Feb. 17 letter that called the plate an affront to the “peace and dignity of the State of Alabama,” according to the Post.
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A member of parliament in the U.K. said Wednesday that a hospital told police an alleged rape could not have really occurred because the attacker was transgender, according to The Telegraph.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, a member of parliament, told the House of Lords that it took a year for the hospital to acknowledge there was a male in the ward where the rape allegedly occurred. The victim reported the alleged rape more than a year ago, but hospital staff told police officers “that there was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened,” the Telegraph reported.
Her comments came during a debate on a policy called Annex B, which allows patients to be placed in single-sex hospital wards based on self-identification of gender, according to the Telegraph.
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The dodo bird may make a comeback in the near future after recent confirmation from one scientist that the extinct animal’s genome has been fully sequenced.
The dodo was first noted by Dutch sailors on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in the late 1590s. By the middle of the next century it had vanished from the island, having been hunted to extinction by humans and dogs; it also suffered a loss of its natural habitat due to travelers coming to the island.
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Mortgage rates surpassed 4% for the first time since 2019 and the Federal Reserve announced a series of new rate hikes this week, two major shifts that mark the economic response to months of elevated inflation.
The Federal Reserve announced a 0.25% interest rate hike and said six more increases are on the way. Last week’s increase is meant to rein in inflation, but can have negative effects on economic growth. Meanwhile, mortgage rates are expected to increase along with the Federal Reserve rate.
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The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that cities and counties can conduct statewide elections without a strict party balance on absentee ballot boards.
Upholding a previous decision by the state’s court of appeals, Justice Barry Anderson published a 25-page ruling Wednesday dismissing the Minnesota Voters Alliance’s lawsuit against Ramsey and Olmsted counties and the city of Duluth, with the Republican Party of Minnesota listed as a co-plaintiff.
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Public university officials can be held personally liable for dumping an adjunct professor based on his anonymous criticism of the concept of microaggressions, a federal court has concluded.
University of North Texas officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan wrote in a 69-page memorandum and order Friday.
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The Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) failed to screen 5,508 workers before giving them access to software that disbursed $39 billion of taxpayer money since March 2020.
An audit released Friday from the Office of Auditor (OAG) General Doug Ringler marked four “material conditions” – the most severe rating – asserting the UIA failed to take multiple safeguards to prevent employees from looting taxpayer money.
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College students would learn the estimated total interest they would pay on a education loan before they take it out if a law proposed by Iowa’s U.S. senators becomes law.
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, joined Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, in proposing the measure to address student loan debt.
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The nation’s largest private employer announced plans to hire tens of thousands of workers before the end of the quarter to help expand its business amid a tightening labor market.
Walmart announced Wednesday a plan to hire more than 50,000 workers in the U.S. by the end of April, the time of year when many companies decrease hiring following the busy holiday shopping season, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The new hires will reportedly fill positions in stores but also add staff in areas such as health, wellness and advertising.
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An elite K-12 day and boarding school in Massachusetts separated students into race-based “affinity groups,” according to a report from Parents Defending Education.
In October, Milton Academy (MA) in Milton, Massachusetts, asked parents to pick affinity groups for their children to separate them based on race, according to a report from Parents Defending Education (PDE). The groups are now being implemented among MA students as young as five, a parent told PDE.
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New Hampshire may become the first state to allow the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to be obtained without a prescription. A Republican-sponsored ivermectin bill (HB 1022) passed in the N.H. State House Wednesday on a vote of 183-159 and has been sent to the State Senate for review.
“Ivermectin is available over the counter in 79 countries,” State Representative Jim Kofalt, R-Hillsborough noted during a legislative hearing in January. “And it has a good safety profile.”
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A great plague of our contemporary political landscape is that one bad policy begets even more bad policies. Such is the case with many of America’s existing immigration laws.
Federal law, for example, calls for specific enforcement protocols. But our elected representatives have decided that some of those protocols simply should be ignored. This mindset led to ideas like catching and then releasing illegal aliens into our communities, preventing local law enforcement from working with federal law enforcement, and “sanctuary” cities where those who have broken our laws can hide from accountability.
From this witches’ brew of bad ideas has come the latest product rollout, one suited for our time: stimulus checks for illegal aliens. Using the economic damage caused by COVID-19 as a pretext, anti-borders activists and their allied politicians have found a way to sustain those here illegally while creating further incentives for even more foreign nationals to move here.
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Journalists with the Real America’s Voice TV network were detained by border patrol agents at the southern U.S. border on Friday, with a reporter describing being “detained at gunpoint” amid the open crossing of illegal immigrants into the United States.
Ben Bergquam, a reporter with Real America’s Voice — with whom Just the News is partnered — posted a video depicting him in the back of a border patrol vehicle, showing what appeared to be a border patrol agent directing Bergquam’s colleagues with his gun drawn.
“And all of this is happening [with] 60 illegal [immigrants] just standing by the wall, no problem,” Bergquam said.
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Democrat-sponsored legislation which contains creation of firearm buyback program and refers to gun violence as a public health issue is scheduled for Tennessee General Assembly Committee consideration over the coming days.
The legislation requires the Tennessee Department of Safety to develop a firearm buyback program “in
collaboration with local community groups.”