Tennessee Governor Bill Lee joined lawmakers at the state and federal level, as well as other prominent figures, in signing a letter asking Yale Law School to discipline a “vitriolic mob” that derailed a bipartisan panel on free speech at the campus in March.
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In the 1980s and 90s, I worked in child advocacy. One of my jobs was to teach children how to protect themselves from abuse. First and foremost I taught children that adults should not be telling children to keep secrets. I taught children if an adult were to tell a child that something the adult does or says must be kept secret from mom or dad, the adult was doing wrong. The first way for a child to protect themselves was to immediately tell mom and dad about adults wanting to keep secrets.
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The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin is stepping into the fight over political signs in Waukesha schools.
The ACLU on Thursday said it’s filed an open records request to find out how the policy began and to see how it is being enforced.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigned on creating 20 new charter schools in Virginia, but the Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee killed Republican-led charter school legislation. As a result, Republicans are pivoting to lab schools — schools that are part of the local district operated as partnerships with education programs at local higher ed institutions. Legislation to expand Virginia’s lab schools to institutions with programs beyond education is currently in conference committee with negotiators from the House of Delegates and the Senate to try to create a compromise to send to Youngkin.
“It’s going to be an opportunity for us to move some charter-schools-lite through,” House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Scott) told The Virginia Star during a discussion of top priorities at the beginning of the 2022 special session.
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A Minnesota Democrat pleaded guilty to driving drunk and is now on probation for one year.
Rep. Tou Xiong, DFL-Maplewood, was arrested in January for drunk driving and booked into the Anoka County Jail for one night, jail records show.
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Georgia lawmakers approved legislation they say would eliminate so-called “free speech zones” on college campuses.
House Bill 1, the Forming Open and Robust University Minds (FORUM) Act, ostensibly aims to protect free speech rights anywhere on a college campus, not just in a designated area. It now heads to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, for his signature.
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Ohio businesses will not have to pay employees overtime for some tasks, and high-volume online marketplace sellers will have to be identified after Gov. Mike DeWine signed two bills into law.
Senate Bill 47, which spent more than a year in the General Assembly, was one of the laws created with DeWine’s signature. Its changes to overtime pay requirements were a result of adjustments to employee workdays as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also followed changes to federal overtime rules.
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Statistics provided by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) show that the number of traffic crash and pedestrian fatalities have increased significantly in 2021 when compared to 2020 and 2019. The alarming increases are consistent with national trends.
In 2021, FLHSMV reported 3,405 crash related fatalities which is 9.0% above the 3,098 reported in 2020. FLHSMV reported a 5.0% increase in 2020 and 1.2% increase in 2019.
Col. Justin Ferrara, with the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office located in central Florida, said that “high-stress levels and frustration led to aggressive and unsafe driving.” “Enforcement, education, traffic-calming techniques and common sense are all areas of concentration,” Ferrara said.
Federal data from the department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) indicate traffic deaths began to increase in 2019. NHTSA has blamed reckless driving behavior for increases during the pandemic, citing behavioral research showing that speeding and traveling without a seat belt have been higher. Before 2019, the number of fatalities had fallen for three straight years.
Ironically, while the rate of fatalities have increased in Florida, the number of crashes since 2018 has actually declined. Again, this is consistent with national trends. The latest NHTSA crash data shows that crashes have become more deadly.
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Connecticut lawmakers are renewing their calls for immediate legislative public hearings on the state’s school construction financing program, according to a press release by the Connecticut Senate Republicans.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued an interim report this past week on his investigation of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, which found “instances of election fraud by individuals who have been or will be prosecuted for various election crimes,” and a couple of days later he learned some more possibly troubling news. Attorneys for Maricopa County told him ballot tabulators used artificial intelligence to determine whether voters’ ballot affidavit signatures matched their signatures on file.
During an interview with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on Bannon’s War Room show, Brnovich broke the news. “We got another letter from their lawyer for the first time — and this is not in the report — admitted they are using AI to verify signatures,” he said. “And so the whole signature verification process, is something that I think that, regardless of where you fall on the spectrum, it should be troubling and concerning that they are trying to verify hundreds of thousands of signatures so quickly. And of course that raises the question, how is that even humanly possible?”
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The highly anticipated first report from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s investigation into the results of the Maricopa County independent ballot audit are in, and includes criminal prosecutions. Addressed to Senate President Karen Fann (R-Prescott), who launched the independent audit, the letter referenced the work of his office’s Election Integrity Unit. Brnovich stated, “The EIU’s review has uncovered instances of election fraud by individuals who have been or will be prosecuted for various election crimes.”
Leading gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who just called for the results of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona and Wisconsin to be reversed, told The Arizona Sun Times, “Today, Attorney General Brnovich confirmed what most of us have known since November 3rd, 2020: The election in Maricopa County was crooked and never should have been certified. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It’s an American issue. I look forward to seeing the prosecutions that the Attorney General has in store. It’s time for the perpetrators of this fraud to be held accountable for their actions.”
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A Virginia parent won a legal victory when a Fairfax County judge dismissed four charges of libel and slander with prejudice Friday.
Harry Jackson, a former PTA president of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology who opposed changes to the school’s admissions policy, was facing libel and slander charges in the wake of claiming that a proponent of the new admissions policies exhibited “grooming behavior” on social media. The new policies, which critics have characterized as “race-based,” eliminated standardized testing requirements and were found by a federal judge to discriminate against Asian Americans.
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The Walt Disney Company is staying silent following reports it helps the children of its employees with sex change procedures through its benefits program.
A leaked video shared by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo Thursday purportedly showed a Disney internal meeting in which a man explained Disney’s efforts to help employees “express their gender” at the company. Disney has not publicly addressed its efforts to help employees medically transition their children to the opposite sex following the release of the video, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., has filed a bill that would give states a greater ability to enforce immigration laws when the federal government won’t.
Posey and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced his bill, the Immigration and Enforcement Partnership Act of 2022, after the Biden administration decided to terminate Title 42, a federal public health rule used during national public health emergencies. Moody has sued the administration several times for violating immigration law.
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Border authorities are seeing a continued flow of migrants crossing into the U.S. that are from countries beyond Central America ahead of an expected surge when Title 42 ends.
Title 42, the Trump era order, which has resulted in the expulsion of over 1.7 million migrants, will end May 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced Friday.
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On Thursday, a federal court upheld Joe Biden’s mandate that all federal government employees be forced to take a coronavirus vaccine.
The New York Post reports that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Louisiana issued a ruling that overturned a lower court’s decision to block the mandate, which was first issued in September of 2021. In January, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown had ruled the mandate unconstitutional, determining that the rule constituted an overstep in federal authority.
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On Thursday, a researcher with the University of Kansas was convicted of covering up illegal work he was doing on behalf of China while living in the United States.
According to ABC News, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson is still weighing a motion to have the case against Feng Tao of Lawrence, Kansas dismissed. Robinson asked Tao’s lawyers to submit in writing their arguments for dismissal. Until then, the trial will proceed accordingly.
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Moderate Senate Democrats joined Senate Republicans on Thursday in an effort to block President Joe Biden from lifting Title 42, a measure enacted during the pandemic that allows for the quick expulsion of migrants.
The bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed legislation that would halt the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from ending the policy, which the agency announced would cease on May 23, without an adequate plan in place.
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee- Even though I am not much of a whiskey drinker, I am always drawn to a good whiskey song. Something about the solace of sipping the stuff leads to a deeper examination of one’s true self.
Karissa Ella’s newest single “Whiskey Whispers Your Name” is all that and more. They led me to further delve into this rising singer/songwriter and find out what drives her.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the No Patient Left Alone Act into law Wednesday. The bill guarantees that Floridians can visit their loved ones in hospitals, hospices and long-term care facilities regardless of a public health emergency.
In Florida, and nationwide, families have been kept apart as loved ones died in hospitals, hospices and long-term care facilities due to coronavirus safety protocols. In late 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reinstated federal visitation protections for long-term care facilities, which includes waiving visitation policies for hospitals allowing them to prohibit patient visitation.
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Before the pandemic hit, Pennsylvania’s economy had been steadily growing for a decade – but not its population. The population loss has both political and economic consequences.
Federally, Pennsylvania’s influence will lag. The state lost a Congressional district thanks to net emigration from the state. The future of economic growth, too, may fall off as natives and would-be migrants from other states look to growing areas of the South and West.
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Egg prices continue to soar as the country approaches Easter weekend with more states experiencing H5N1 avian influenza A outbreaks, killing millions of birds.
Meat and egg producers in at least 24 states have experienced the worst avian flu outbreak since 2015, killing nearly 23 million birds and driving the price of eggs and poultry even higher, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), USA Today reported.
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Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel joined a coalition of 23 attorneys general in an amicus brief seeking to restore federal funding for family planning services.
Led by New York and California, the lawyers filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, supporting the efforts of President Joe Biden’s administration to restore Title X funding to providers that left the program under restrictions enacted in 2019.
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Who hasn’t noticed that current trends have been leading us away from human happiness? We will be better prepared to make the desperately needed corrections if we recapture the forgotten power of the American idea offered in Robert Curry’s Common Sense Nation. Curry introduces us to the English, French, Scottish, and American Enlightenment. That will equip us to distinguish between the path that leads to ordered liberty and the other path that is now leading us toward chaos.
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On Saturday, April 9, Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Scott Golden briefed the TNGOP State Executive Committee on the challenge process, explaining that the challenges would be adjudicated before noon on April 21.
Prior to the start of the meeting, there was some confusion, as sources expected the TNGOP to take action on the challenges at Saturday’s meeting.
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