Biden Appoints Kenyon College Graduate as Ambassador to Ukraine

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate a Kenyon College graduate to be the United States’ Ambassador to Ukraine, which is currently embattled in war with Russia. 

“Kenyon is proud that such an accomplished alumna has been selected for this critical diplomatic position,” Kenyon College Professor of Political Science David Rowe told The Ohio Star Monday. “Bridget Brink is being sent to one of the United States’ most important postings. How the Ukraine war is resolved will affect the fate of security and democracy in Europe and more broadly for a generation or more. We wish her all the best in what will likely be the challenge of a lifetime.”  

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Study: Recycling and Storing EV Batteries Will Be a ‘Huge Issue’

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to spend $60 million on electric vehicles (EV), including electrifying the state’s fleet. However, the production of EVs is beset by a supply chain riddled with shortages in addition to environmental concerns.

Whitmer’s proposed 2023 budget aims to spend $50 million to subsidize new EV sales or a $500 rebate for at-home charging equipment for new or used EVs. Another $10 million would start converting Michigan’s roughly 13,637-vehicle fleet to EV.

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The Satanic Temple Sues Pennsylvania Elementary School over Rejection of ‘After School Satan Club’

The Satanic Temple has filed a civil lawsuit against the Northern York County School Board in Pennsylvania, claiming the board discriminated against it by voting down its plan to begin an “after-school Satan Club,” while other groups’ clubs have been accepted.

“The First Amendment prohibits a government from considering the popularity of communicative activity when determining whether to facilitate that communicative activity on equal terms with other, similarly situated, groups,” said Mathew Kezhaya, general counsel for The Satanic Temple, according to CBS 21 News.

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Gubernatorial Hopeful Crist Calls DeSantis Supporters ‘Toothless’

Charlie Crist

In a video circulated across social media sites, Florida Congressman Charlie Crist (D-FL-13) referred to supporters of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as “toothless.” Crist is trying to outlast other Democrat candidates for the 2022 Florida gubernatorial nomination to eventually face off against DeSantis in the November general election.

In the video, Crist is speaking at an event and said DeSantis is trying to score “political points.”

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David Perdue Lambastes Brian Kemp in First Georgia Gubernatorial Debate

In the first gubernatorial debate faceoff hold on Sunday, April 24, former U.S. Senator David Perdue hammered his GOP primary opponent, incumbent Georgia Governor Brian Kemp.

During an exchange, Perdue blamed Kemp for failing to secure Georgia’s elections, leading to his 2021 Senate runoff loss. “The only reason I’m not in the United States Senate is because you caved in and gave the election to liberal Democrats in 2020.”

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First Arrest Occurs in ‘Feeding Our Future’ Food Scam

Federal authorities nabbed a man allegedly trying to flee the country after helping steal millions of dollars meant for child hunger programs.

Court documents say Mohamed Jama Ismail, 49, tried to flee the country after authorities revoked his passport in January after authorities raided more than 24 properties and seized more than $6 million from a business he co-founded named Empire Cuisine.

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Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Ditches Election Integrity as Campaign Issue

An Arizona gubernatorial candidate has apparently abandoned the issue that was the cornerstone of her campaign, in favor of issues that she now thinks matter more to Arizonan voters. 

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, currently running in the Democrat Party’s gubernatorial primary, was known for her staunch criticism of former President Donald Trump’s challenge of the 2020 election results in Arizona. She was so ardent in her opposition to Trump’s challenge, that she made it the central talking point of her campaign. 

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Longtime Conservative Campaign Strategist Gerow Persists in Bid for Pennsylvania Governorship

Charlie Gerow has worked with Republican public officials for over four decades. He hasn’t been among them, though he contends that augurs well for how he would perform if elected governor. 

“I’m an outsider who knows what’s going on inside,” he told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “And that’s what voters are looking for — somebody who’s not an officeholder, who’s not part of what’s going on right now but who knows what needs to be done and knows how to do it.”

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Running for Congress, PWC Supervisor Yesli Vega Wants to Focus on Border Security, Government Spending, and the Labor Shortage

Prince William County Supervisor Yesli Vega was inspired to be a law enforcement officer after a friend was killed and her brother was injured, victims of an MS-13 gang initiation, and she wants to bring an immigration-focused law-and-order approach if she’s elected to Congress. She’s seeking the GOP nomination in the seventh congressional district.

She shared her top priorities with The Virginia Star: “First and foremost, it’s immigration and border security.”

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Top Biden Officials Huddle with School Group That Supported the FBI Targeting Parents

Leaders from President Joe Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) met with an education group that supported the FBI targeting parents Monday.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten met with representatives from the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) to discuss “how they are addressing students’ academic needs, tackling the social-emotional needs of students and staff, and using funds from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) to help with recovery efforts,” according to a DOE press release. The NASSP has previously called on federal authorities to intervene in conflicts between school administrators and concerned parents, lauding the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) when it announced plans to “use its authority” against parents.

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Doors Locked at Ohio Redistricting Commission Meeting Room

Democrats on the Ohio Redistricting Commission invited the five Republican members to a commission meeting Monday morning after contacting members several times over the past week asking for the group to reconvene.

When House Minority leader Allison Russo, D-Upper Arlington, and Sen. Vernon Sykes, D-Akron, showed up to the committee meeting room at the Ohio Statehouse, the doors were locked and no Republican showed up.

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Election Integrity: New Complaint Alleges Illegal Ballot Harvesting in Green Bay

The nonprofit, conservative law firm the Thomas More Society has filed a new formal complaint against the city clerk of Green Bay, Wisconsin, for allegedly participating in illegal ballot harvesting in a close, April 5 city council election.

The complaint was filed Thursday against city Clerk Celestine Jeffreys with the Wisconsin Elections Commission for allegedly accepting multiple absentee ballots from the hand of a single person several times, according to the Epoch Times.

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Google Launches New ‘Inclusive Language’ Function

Person on laptop

The search engine giant Google has rolled out a new feature that acts as an auto-suggestion for changing certain language to more politically correct terms.

According to the Daily Mail, users who type out certain words will be faced with several suggestions encouraging them to adopt language that is gender-neutral, or otherwise more politically correct. For example, “landlord” will yield suggestions such as “proprietor” or “property owner,” while “mankind” will lead to the suggestion of “humankind.” “Policeman” is now recommended to be “police officers,” while “housewife” is to be replaced with “stay-at-home spouse.”

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China Bans Its Own National Anthem as Anger over Lockdowns Rises

China’s censors banned social media posts featuring the communist country’s national anthem after internet users co-opted its lyrics to protest Shanghai’s ongoing lockdown, multiple sources reported.

Censors are actively removing Chinese posts containing the first stanza of “The March of the Volunteers,” which features the lyrics “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves,” NY Daily News reported.

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Majority of Pennsylvania Voters Support Liberalizing Liquor Laws

A push from the liquor lobby to end Pennsylvania’s monopoly on wine and spirits looks like it has majority support from the public, though the timeline of any deregulation is unclear.

A new poll released by the Distilled Spirits Council, conducted by the Tarrance Group, found that 64% of Pennsylvanians support a constitutional amendment to end the government retail sale of wine and spirits, allowing private businesses to sell them. The model of nearby states like Ohio and West Virginia, where the state still distributes wine and spirits but private businesses sell them, garnered the support of 61% of Pennsylvanians in the poll.

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State Supreme Court Reaffirms Arizona’s Nation-Lowest Flat Income Tax

Arizona’s high court has pulled a ballot question from the November election that could have erased the state’s largest-ever income tax cut.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a veto initiative to repeal a gradual change from Arizona’s progressive income tax to a flat 2.5% wasn’t appropriate for the ballot process. The court didn’t immediately offer an analysis of the opinion.

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Carpetbagger Morgan Ortagus Alleges Tennessee Republican Party Corruption to Entire Country on Fox News but Offers No Evidence

Former TN-5 candidate Morgan Ortagus told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Monday morning that the Tennessee Republican Party is corrupt but offered no evidence to corroborate her claims.

Ortagus told Kilmeade at the close of an interview, “We’re going to work on efforts to clean up the corruption here in the Tennessee GOP as well.”

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Ford Motor Company, University of Tennessee Commit to Multimillion Dollar Partnership

Ford Motor Company and the University of Tennessee announced a new partnership for “a stream mitigation and restoration agreement” that will focus on water streams located on the University’s Lone Oaks Farm.

Lone Oaks Farm is located in West Tennessee and serves as a 4-H and science, technology, education, and math (STEM) education center for K-12 students.

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Commentary: What Trump’s ‘America First’ Agenda Got Right in Central Europe, Ukraine, and the Politics of Security

Russia’s invasion not only poses an existential threat to Ukrainian sovereignty, but it also represents a direct challenge to American power and credibility globally. If Vladimir Putin prevails, the promise of the United States to act as a security guarantor through NATO in Europe or on its own anywhere will be in shambles.

Moscow is clearly pursuing two goals simultaneously: territorial gains in Ukraine as part of the revanchist ambition to restore the Soviet-era sphere of influence and, more importantly, degrading American strategic prominence, with the goal of driving the United States out of Europe.

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Minnesotans Demand Permanent Tax Cuts: ‘They’re Stealing from Us’

Minnesotans are calling on Gov. Tim Walz and the Legislature to return the record-breaking $9.3 billion budget surplus to the people by permanently cutting taxes.

A crowd gathered inside the Minnesota Capitol rotunda Saturday for the “Give it Back Tax Rally.” The rally was hosted by the Center of the American Experiment and involved several speakers including multiple radio hosts and a former U.S. congressman.

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Columbus Challenges Ohio’s ‘Conscience Clause’ with Lawsuit

Ohio’s largest city filed suit Wednesday to stop a new law that allows medical providers to deny treatment based on their beliefs.

Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein filed the suit in Franklin County Common Pleas Court on behalf of the city of Columbus, challenging the law, known as the “Conscience Clause,” that protects individuals and health care payers who deny care or payment for any service they feel violates their conscience.

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Budget Compromise Not Expected in Time for Veto Session

Glenn Youngkin

The General Assembly will be back in town Wednesday to vote on Governor Glenn Youngkin’s amendments and vetoes to legislation passed earlier this year, but are unlikely to have a budget compromise ready for approval by then.

“Informally, the chairs are going back and forth a little bit, and we keep getting briefed, but we have not really gotten to a point where we can do a final negotiation, if you will. There’s still significant differences there in what we we’re working on,” conferee Senator Emmett Hanger (R-Augusta) told The Virginia Star on Thursday. “We’ve got some tentative agreements, I guess you’d say.

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Connecticut State Employee Contracts Ratified

By a 22-13 vote, Connecticut’s state Senate on Friday ratified contracts with state workers estimated to cost taxpayers roughly $1.9 billion.

The Democrat-controlled state House of Representatives approved the agreements with the State Employee Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC) 96-52 the prior day. All House Democrats and only one House Republican, Thomas Delnicki (R-South Windsor), voted for the deals. The Senate vote came down along party lines.

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Commentary: Joe Biden and His Hostility to Conscience Rights

In 2020, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against the University of Vermont Medical Center for forcing a nurse to assist at an abortion. Trump’s Department of Justice called the hospital’s bullying of the nurse “the kind of indecent coercion [that] violates everything this country stands for.”

In 2021, the Biden administration dropped this lawsuit. It did not want to defend the nurse. This rankled former Trump officials. “It is a dereliction of duty that is an insult to the bipartisan consensus that says you cannot force people to assist in abortions,” Roger Severino, the former head of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights (OCR) told Fox News.

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Record Number of Hispanic Republicans Are Running for State House in Border State

A record number of Hispanics in New Mexico are running for state House seats as members of the Republican Party, Axios reported Tuesday.

The state, which has the highest percentage of Hispanics in the country, has 18 Hispanic Republicans campaigning to be elected to the Democrat-controlled state House of Representatives, Axios reported. The candidates are largely running competitive districts, both urban and rural.

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Georgia Officials Won’t Reveal Business Development Incentives Said to Be ‘In Progress’

Georgia officials have lauded the decisions of companies to either relocate their headquarters or expand their operations in Georgia.

Whether the state of Georgia offered tax incentives to those companies is a closely-guarded secret, and taxpayers will not know until the state says the project is complete and no longer “in progress.”

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Pennsylvania Still Restricts Nurses’ Scope of Practice, Health Care Options

Though a majority of states allow nurse practitioners full authority to deliver care, Pennsylvania still requires oversight from a physician. A bill in the legislature could change it though, but it’s unclear if it will advance through the General Assembly soon.

The legislation, SB25, sponsored by Sen. Camera Bartolotta, R-Washington, would update state requirements for nurses and would remove a requirement for nurse practitioners to have a collaborative agreement with a physician for them to practice and write prescriptions.

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Free Speech Criticism Has Unlikely Source: The Press

When the far-right website Infowars was banned by all the major tech platforms in 2018, mainstream media outlets didn’t come to the defense of founder Alex Jones, whom they described as a conspiracy theorist.

Two years later, the same outlets had a similar non-response when Big Tech imposed another media ban — this one on the New York Post, one of America’s oldest and most well-established newspapers.

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Americans Support Trump’s China Tariffs as Republican Senators Push to Remove Them

As GOP senators seek to roll back former President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China now that he’s out of office, polling indicates Americans want to keep the harsh policies in place.

“For decades, Congress cut tariffs without much thought. But we cannot continue to do that when it comes to products made in China,” Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. “We should do everything possible to move supply chains out of China, but this so-called ‘China bill’ is actually subsidizing manufacturing in Communist China. It’s ridiculous.”

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Virginia Governor Plans to Elevate His National Profile Ahead of 2024

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is looking to raise his national profile by establishing two new political groups in the aftermath of becoming the first Republican to win statewide in over a decade, Politico reported.

The move will allow the recently elected governor to have a larger role in the upcoming midterm elections, Politico reported. Youngkin, who is limited to one term as governor, has not expressed any interest in a 2024 presidential run, but has not ruled out the possibility.

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