Nashville Metro Council approved on Tuesday a workaround attempt to sidestep the Tennessee state law banning sanctuary city policies via legislation that bans the use of license plate scanner (LPR) technology.
BL2022-1115 amends “Section 13.08.080 of the Metropolitan Code of Laws pertaining to the use of License Plate Scanner (LPR) technology to exclude assisting with immigration enforcement as an allowed use of LPRs.”
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Trump-endorsed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake filed a lawsuit along with Trump-endorsed State Rep. Mark Finchem (R-Oro Valley), who is running for Arizona Secretary of State, in April to block the use of electronic voting machines to count ballots in the 2022 election. The Maricopa County Supervisors responded last week with a motion requesting sanctions against the pair and their attorneys, which include former Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, asserting that the suit was “frivolous.”
Finchem tweeted, “The threatened action by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, is nothing more than the attempted weaponization of the judicial process against the political process. If they can’t stand up to scrutiny for elections, that’s their problem — not our problem. Elections must be secure and trustworthy, Maricopa County has demonstrated neither is the case in the last election. “
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The Justice Department on Wednesday announced the indictment of a Missouri man for allegedly threatening an election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County.
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Since President Joe Biden took office and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas altered federal immigration policies, roughly 5 million people from over 150 countries have entered the U.S. illegally.
This includes 3.9 million who have been apprehended entering the U.S. illegally nationwide and 3.4 million at the southern border. It also includes a minimum of 900,000 gotaways, those who’ve intentionally entered the U.S. illegally and evaded law enforcement who haven’t made asylum or immigration claims. The number of gotaways is significantly higher than what is reported and believed to be well over 1 million, Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials have told The Center Square.
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A research group has honed in on investment titan BlackRock, known for purchasing real estate in massive swaths nationwide, saying that those who have invested in the company may be at risk.
Consumer’s Research says:
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Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, said on Fox News Tuesday that the expanded Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t just go after billionaires and large corporations.
“They are targeting people that they keep telling us they think are – restaurants and barber shops and so on,” Norquist told “America Reports” guest host Gillian Turner. “That’s their target, and we know this because every single Democrat in the Senate voted against, to defeat an amendment which said this law will not allow any increase in audits on people making less than $400,000 a year.”
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A study published Tuesday at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) has reaffirmed what past research has concluded: that children who come from stable families with married parents have a greater chance of academic success than those from non-intact, single-parent families.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday he is concerned by the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, but urged Republicans to stop “attacking” rank-and-file FBI personnel and calling to defund the law enforcement agency.
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Bush Republicanism, that zombie political persuasion which in its heyday did for the GOP and the conservative movement what Jimmy Carter and Mike Dukakis did for the Democrats, might not quite be dead. But rigor mortis set in several years ago to be sure.
Just ask Liz Cheney, whose political career was zombified in January 2021 when she opted to not just turn on Donald Trump in a public fashion — Cheney was always a Never Trumper; she just didn’t out herself as one until she thought the coast was clear — but to harp on the question.
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Despite the COVID-19 pandemic significantly hampering K-12 education, millions of students across the U.S. are working on assignments substantially below their grade level, according to a study released Monday.
Readworks, a non-profit focused on K-12 literacy gaps, studied 65 million assignments given to three million students in the 2020-2021 school year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused students to miss months of learning, according to the report. Students were given assignments below their “grade level,” or academic expectations correlating to their age, one-third of the time.
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Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming said she was considering a run for president in 2024 during a Wednesday morning appearance on “The Today Show.”
“I’m not going to make any announcements here this morning, but — but it is something that I — I’m thinking about and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” Cheney said when asked if she would run for president by host Savannah Guthrie.
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More than 40 percent of pregnant women who participated in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine trial suffered miscarriages, according internal Pfizer documents, recently released under court order. Despite this, Pfizer, and the Biden administration insisted that the vaccines were safe for pregnant women. Out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, according to an analysis of the documents.
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Outgoing Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III announced via a press statement on Wednesday that his has reached an agreement in principle with the opioid maker Endo International PLC and its lenders that “would provide up to $450 million to participating states and local governments, ban promotion of Endo’s opioids, and require Endo to turn over millions of documents related to its role in the opioid crisis for publication in a public online archive.”
“In Tennessee, Endo’s tactics were especially profitable for them and devasting for us,” said General Slatery. “From 2009-2015, Tennessee’s Opana ER sales were the highest in the nation, and the drug was abused at three times the rate of the older formulation.”
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Star News Network Chief Meteorologist Daphne DeLoren shares her Middle Tennessee Fresh Forecast for Wednesday Night and Thursday.
Catch Daphne’s Fresh Forecast weekdays at 5pm, during The Tennessee Star Evening News Update, and on demand.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to discuss the broad DOJ warrant permitting the FBI to raid former President Trump’s residence and the speculation of a coming indictment.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the National Association of Scholars Senior Fellow, John Sailor to the newsmaker line to detail the recent report entitled The Anatomy of a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Take Over.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed investigative reporter for One America News, Neil W. McCabe to the newsmaker line to discuss the elusive Ron DeSantis, Kari Lake, and Liz Cheney’s loss.
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The federal government handed out more than twice as much money in COVID-19 funeral reimbursements to Ohioans over the past seven months than it did from the beginning of the program in 2020 until January.
As of Aug. 1, FEMA has given more than $2.7 billion to fulfill 420,000 applications for help with funeral costs for pandemic-related deaths since Jan. 20, 2020. In Ohio, 18,860 of those have shared more than $122.2 million.
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President Joe Biden signed a $740 billion spending package into law Tuesday, the final step for the green energy, health care and tax hike bill after months of wrangling and controversy, in particular over the legislation’s hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents to audit Americans.
Democrats at the White House Tuesday touted the bill’s deficit reduction of $300 billion over the next decade. The bill includes several measures, including a $35 per month cap on insulin copays, an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, and authorization for Medicare to negotiate certain drug prices.
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White House Senior adviser Anita Dunn has consulted for companies and trade groups that have benefited or stand to benefit from federal funding and is being forced to recuse herself from matters involving them, according to a financial disclosure.
Dunn has consulted through the public affairs firm SKDK during the past two years for the likes of Pfizer, AT&T, Micron and the American Clean Power Association, according to a filing reported on by CNBC Friday. Dunn, who founded the SKDK in 2004, is recused from working on issues related to past clients, a spokesman for the White House told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Those acquainted with gospel music are sure to be familiar with the celebrated music of the Ernie Haase and Signature Sound quartet. After a young Haase completed his debut with the popular Cathedrals in the 1990s, he formed his own gospel quartet in 2003 whose familiar heartfelt sound is well known by the Gaither set and Christians worldwide.
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The frantic and deadly U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan was so disorganized that 1,450 children were evacuated without their parents, and senior leaders in Vice President Kamala Harris’ and first lady Jill Biden’s offices, as well as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked private veteran groups for assistance evacuating certain people from the country.
In the waning days of the evacuation, more than 1,000 women and girls waited more than 24 hours on dozens of buses, desperately circling the Kabul airport and trying to avoid Taliban checkpoints. Many of them were told multiple times they were not allowed to enter the airport. Now, nearly a year since the Taliban took control of the country, fewer than one-third of them have managed to flee the country.
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President Joe Biden’s new abortion messaging strategy will focus on the impact new restrictions could have on men, according to Reuters.
The plan is part of Biden’s three-pronged abortion strategy, which includes tailored messaging, litigation and research on state-level abortion restrictions, Reuters reported. The White House will target men with messaging about how they’ll be financially impacted by abortion restrictions, particularly if their female relatives are unable to get abortions.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is stepping up his efforts to empower parents and stamp out liberal ideology in schools as part of his fall reelection campaign.
The Republican on Monday announced a statewide tour and his intention to get involved in local school board races through endorsements.
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The National Institutes of Health failed to insure that all clinical trials funded by the agency and required to be reported in 2019 and 2020 met federal requirements, according to an inspector general report released Tuesday.
The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General reviewed a total of 72 such trials from that period and found results were never submitted in 25, late in 12 and on time in 35.
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In a statement released on Monday, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol announced over 1.82 million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border for Fiscal Year 2022 and several Tennessee Republican leaders were quick to voice their displeasure with the statistic.
In comparison, there were 1,662,167 arrests in Fiscal Year 2021 and 405,036 for Fiscal Year 2020, the last year of former President Trump’s term.
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On Monday, U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) joined America Reports on Fox News in order to discuss the state of U.S. support of Taiwan in the face of aggression from the Chinese Communist Party the Asia-Pacific region.
Hagerty stated that he believes China is emboldened by what he calls the weakness of the Biden administration.
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A few days after federal agents stormed Donald Trump’s castle in Palm Beach last week, Judge Beryl Howell berated a man from Georgia for his involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021.
“Listening without question to political rhetoric that leads to serious offenses, criminal conduct, is not an excuse when you’re standing in a court of law,” Howell told Glen Simon, a Trump supporter who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on restricted grounds. “You’ve got to use your common sense and your own sense of who you are and how you’d like to conduct yourself as an American citizen before just blindly doing what a political figure says.”
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As some parts of the state and parts of the country see staffing shortages, the Chattanooga Police Department (CPD) announced that 14 new recruits passed through its police academy.
14 new officers just completed their training and graduated from the Chattanooga Police Academy! Graduation was hosted by Silverdale Baptist Church,” CPD said. “These officers will now enter field training where they will ride with veteran officers. Welcome CPD Class 2022-1!”
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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) decried what he described as Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters’ antisemitism.
“Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters describes himself as ‘pro dialogue, pro peace, [and] anti authoritarian.’…[But f]ar from standing ‘in defense of Mistress Liberty,’ Waters has become an advocate for antisemitism, Vladimir Putin’s imperialism, and the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide,” said Rubio on Tuesday, in an opinion piece published in The Floridian.
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A Fulton County Superior Court judge declined a request to block Georgia’s fetal heartbeat law that bans most abortions after six weeks.
Georgia lawmakers passed House Bill 481, the Living Infants Fairness Equality Act, in 2019. However, a federal judge initially blocked the law, commonly called the “Heartbeat Bill,” because the U.S. Supreme Court had previously upheld the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed suspending the Michigan sales tax on school supplies for the upcoming school year, drawing GOP criticism of “pandering.”
“As families gear up for the school year, they should be able to get what they need without spending too much money out of pocket,” Whitmer said in a statement. “That’s why I’m putting forward the MI Back to School Plan, which includes a proposal to temporarily suspend the sales tax on school supplies. Getting this done would lower costs for parents, teachers, and students right now, and ensure that they have the resources to succeed.”
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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is declining to participate in additional debates, Republican challenger Dr. Scott Jensen said in a press release Monday.
Walz and Jensen have only debated once so far this campaign season, meeting for the first time at FarmFest in early August. Since then, the governor has declined to participate in four additional debates, one at the Minnesota State Fair, another at Game Fair, a third with the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, and a fourth on TPT Almanac, according to Jensen.
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Connecticut State Police law enforcement officers grappled with 150 drug equipment violations in 2020, according to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
This equals 12 per month in 2020.
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In a brief Star Tribune commentary from nearly three decades ago, current Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison trashed capitalism for its “exploitation of labor” and accused the paper of contributing to “white hysteria.”
Alpha News obtained a photocopy of the Star Tribune edition printed on Saturday, Aug. 7, 1993. In the “counterpoint” section of commentary, the paper published a brief article by Ellison, a then-litigator who was identified as a participant in that year’s urban peace summit in St. Paul from July 14-18. One of the summit’s speakers appears to have been notorious anti-white racist and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Ellison’s piece responded to what he perceive
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Expect a lot of talk about election security ahead of what Wisconsin’s election administrator says could be a record year for voting.
Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe on Tuesday answered questions about election integrity, election security, and what she expects for the November election.
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The Virginia Department of Education on Tuesday hastily issued a correction after reports circulated that the agency was planning on excising language identifying George Washington as the “Father of our Country” and James Madison as the “Father of the Constitution.”
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Arizona’s firebrand Republican gubernatorial candidate is calling on her Democrat opponent, who is also the Secretary of State and in charge of elections, to recuse herself from the race.
“…Over a year ago we said [Secretary of State Katie Hobbs] should recuse herself,” Lake said on The Charlie Kirk show alongside Republican U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters. “I mean, she’s supposed to be helping to make sure we have fair elections, right? And she’s called half of Arizona – she called the Republicans – Nazis.”
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During a visit to the Whitehall Police Department this week, Gov. Mike DeWine (R) indicated he will expand funding for the Ohio Violent Crime Reduction Grant Program from $58 million to $100 million, citing a nationwide spike in violence.
According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2011 and 2020 Uniform Crime Reports, homicides in the Buckeye State rose sharply in the decade between those years. Five hundred murders occurred in Ohio in 2011 and 820 took place in 2020. Regional figures also show violence worsening, with one poll of Franklin County police chiefs showing that aggravated assault increased by 36 percent in that jurisdiction between 2020 and 2021.
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Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D-PA-Philadelphia) proposed two bills to promote abortion in the Keystone state: an abortion training program and a bill to require insurers to cover abortion without cost sharing.
In a memorandum seeking cosponsors for her training measure, the democratic socialist representative from south Philadelphia indicated the legislation would bestow funding on the state Department of Health to provide medical professionals with up-to-date abortion instruction.
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Jenny Clark, the founder of Love Your School, spoke with the Arizona Sun Times to explain the newly signed House Bill (HB) 2853, sponsored by state Rep. Ben Toma (R-AZ-22), which expands the eligibility for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) and how it will benefit parents in the state.
“The expansion means that every Arizona family who has a child in kindergarten through 12th grade is now eligible to take a portion of their education dollars to the school or education environment that works for them,” Clark said. “The empowerment scholarship can be used for tutors, therapists, home education, and it can be used for private schools.”
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Attorney General Jason Miyares is warning that the latest congressional budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2023 will cut funding for the Virginia Army National Guard (VANG) Counter Drug unit program by about ten percent, eliminating several positions.
“The current proposed budget reductions would result in the loss of five VNG Counter Drug Unit analysts across the Commonwealth, one of which would be lost in Southwest Virginia. The loss of this analyst in SWVA would leave only two VANG Counter Drug analysts to provide support for the 52 counties in the Western District of Virginia. As you are both aware, this region is already underserved, underfunded, and has long been nearest the epicenter of the opioid crisis in our country,” Miyares said in a letter sent to Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) as well as Representatives Ben Cline (R-VA-06) and Jennifer Wexton (D-VA-10).
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Liberal “fact-checker” PolitiFact denounced a claim made in a Saturday statement by Stacey Abrams (D) that Governor Brian Kemp (R) and Georgia’s House Bill 481 stipulates a warrant for the arrest of women who suffer a miscarriage.
“Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has not said he wants women investigated or punished for pregnancies that end in miscarriage. A six-week abortion law he signed said miscarriages are legal,” PolitiFact said.
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A good guy with a gun in Arizona last week detained a suspect who allegedly intentionally ran another man over with his car.
“Mesa Police Officers arrested 61-year-old John Lagana after he used his vehicle to run over and kill a man in east Mesa,” the Mesa Police Department (MPD) said. “The victim was pronounced dead at the scene and was identified as 63-year-old Christopher Heimer.”
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The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently shared the total number of encounters at the southern border in July, and several of Arizona’s leaders have spoken on the new numbers, including Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar (r-AZ-04).
“For the seventeenth straight month, more than 150,000 illegal aliens crossed the southern border including [nearly] 200,000 illegal aliens in July 2022. Since Biden and the open border democrats took over in January 2021, they have facilitated an invasion of our sovereign borders of more than 4.2 million illegal aliens. Included in this invasion are terrorists – over five dozen documented so far, drug traffickers, sex traffickers and common criminals,” Gosar said.
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Republicans in Arizona’s Legislative District 3, which is the largest legislative district in the state located in northern Maricopa County around north Scottsdale, issued two censures on August 12. The LD3 GOP censured the FBI for raiding former President Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, and censured Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates for denying election fraud and opposing Republican candidates for office who believe there was. They called for him to resign and for the Maricopa County Republican Party to encourage Republicans to vote him out of office.
The censure of Gates began, “Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates has made and continues to make disparaging public comments about Republican Arizona Representatives and Republican candidates during interviews, all while seeming to support Democrat candidates running against them.”
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The grassroots website Awake-Illinois is reporting that only 23 of 860 school districts in the state have decided to adopt radical sex education standards, based on a national model, while 536 districts have thus far opted out.
Governor J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) signed SB 818 into law in August 2021, with his office claiming the standards are “voluntary” and will “emphasize health, safety, and inclusivity with age-appropriate resources.”
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Three passports, Privileged documents. A file on a presidential pardon. As evidence surfaces about what FBI agents seized during the raid of former President Donald Trump’s estate in Mar-a-Lago, new questions about the real focus of the investigation and new avenues for legal challenges are bubbling to the surface.
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Statement of Just the News founder John Solomon regarding access to National Archives materials from the Trump presidency:
There has been wild and irresponsible speculation in the news media about my authorization to view documents from the Trump presidency at the National Archives. While I have addressed this issue previously on the record with reporters and on my own news site, I am offering the following statement to reporters who seem to have missed or ignored my earlier reporting.
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