Happy Halloween!
Star News Network Chief Meteorologist Daphne DeLoren shares her Middle Tennessee Fresh Forecast for Monday night and Tuesday, October 31 and November 01.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed (R-TN-06) Congressman John Rose in studio to discuss his district and how the economy has been on a rapid decline in the past two years while Tennessee remained steady.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed (R-TN-06) Congressman John Rose in studio to describe a Republican House takeover come midterm elections, leveraging 87,000 IRS agents, and his proposed Bank Privacy Reform Act.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Metro Nashville Council Member for District 26, Courtney Johnston to the newsmaker line to weigh in on the Titans stadium deal and ambiguous lease terms leaving Nashville on the hook.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Metro Nashville Council Member At-Large Sharon Hurt to the newsmaker line to discuss the proposed financing of the Titans stadium deal and whether or not it should be privately funded.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed (R-TN-06) Congressman John Rose in studio to describe how U.S. House of Representatives is supposed to be conducted and working with Democrats.
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With the Halloween season coming to a close, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) warned parents they should be on the lookout for “rainbow fentanyl,” multicolored pills that could be confused for candy with deadly results.
“While most of us associate rainbows with happiness, success, and a pot of gold at the end … drug cartels see things differently,” said Brnovich. “They have no respect for our values or culture — and they continue to flood our streets with deadly fentanyl pills that are now arriving in various colors and rainbow patterns. Protect yourselves and your children by not assuming that every colorful pill is candy this Halloween season. Do not eat any treats or take any medication unless they are properly packaged and from a source you trust. Fentanyl can kill. Please talk to your kids and be safe.”
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Metro Council Member Courtney Johnston (District 26) says that the recent request by the mayor’s office that the city’s legislative body approve the stadium term sheet between Metro Nashville and the Tennessee Titans is a matter of “the cart before the horse.”
Johnston initially made the point during the October 26 meeting of the East Bank Stadium Committee, at which time the mayor’s representative Finance Director Kelly Flannery asked for approval of the resolution attaching the term sheet, a 1 percent increase in the hotel occupancy tax (HOT) and advancing a request for proposal to search of a developer for the Stadium Campus, and reinforced it several times relative to more than one point during a telephone interview with The Tennessee Star on Saturday.
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Buoyed by rising popularity in the polls, Republican candidates for Congress are acutely aware their easiest job right now may be winning the midterm elections and that the harder work will be delivering afterwards — with Democrat Joe Biden still in the White House — on voters’ high expectations for fixing inflation, crime, insecure borders, the fentanyl crisis and crippling budget deficits.
From longtime lawmakers to first-time candidates, Republicans sounded consistent themes during a frank conversation with Just the News about what voters expect if they put the GOP in control of one or both chambers of Congress.
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Two Pennsylvania state representatives this weekend proposed an audit of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s major-league sports teams’ rental payments for their stadiums.
Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and PNC Park in Pittsburgh were among several stadiums benefiting from the Capital Facilities Debt Enabling Act of 1999, whereby the commonwealth would pour $320 million into the construction of new sports buildings. The arrangement entailed each arena paying $25 million in rent to the state every decade minus some deductions based on tax revenues the stadiums brought into government coffers.
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A poll released this weekend by the data company Cygnal shows Ohio Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate widening their leads against their Democratic opponents.
The survey of 1,776 likely voters shows J.D. Vance, the author, attorney and venture capitalist running to succeed retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman, with a 4.6-percent lead over Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH-13). Among those polled, 9.2 percent said they were undecided.
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A federal grand jury has indicted six people from Benton Harbor on fraud charges.
They are accused of defrauding taxpayers by $1 million via unemployment insurance fraud and small business loans.
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Twitter owner Elon Musk on Sunday said he would “look into” why a story from Just the News about election ballots was marked as “unsafe” on the social media platform.
“I will look into this. Twitter should be even-handed, favoring neither side,” Musk tweeted early Sunday morning in response to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who posted the Just the News article, “Election ‘misinformation’ policing returns as Twitter flags JTN ballot harvesting report.”
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In the first eight days of early and absentee voting for the general election, a total of 423,220 Tennesseans cast their vote according to data released by the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office.
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A group of parents, grandparents, and concerned citizens are backing a bill in the Ohio legislature that would lift the statute of limitations on rape cases in addition to a bill that aims to provide age-appropriate sexual abuse prevention education to school children.
A group of Ohioans, who call themselves Ohioans for Child Protection, gathered at the Statehouse on October 20th, to urge lawmakers to pass House bills (HB) 266 and 105 into law in the state of Ohio.
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With the upcoming Midterm election on November 8th, Ohio election officials want young people to register to vote, but they also need them to come and be trained to be poll workers.
According to the Pew Research Center, older people are the primary individuals serving as volunteer poll workers in U.S. elections.
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“The Bird is Freed!”
That’s what Elon Musk tweeted upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. ’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be “legal on Twitter.”
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A new analysis of data from the Nation’s Report Card shows that Tennessee students lost, on average, what equals five months of math learning between 2019 and 2022 while the state’s students lost four months of reading learning.
The Education Recovery Scorecard, from researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project, includes interactive district-level learning loss information from across the state of Tennessee and the country.
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During his tenure on the MNPS School Board, former Bredesen advisor Will Pinkston worked with a laser-like focus to prevent the growth of charter schools in Tennessee. Though he is no longer a board member, he is leading a new effort to continue that fight by drawing attention to the financial cost charter schools impose on local school districts. Pinkston, a Democrat, has joined forces with former Wilson County Schools Director Donna Wright, a Republican, to create a new nonprofit, nonpartisan group advocating for traditional public schools.
The stated focus of the new group is to shed a light on the fiscal cost of charter schools on local districts’ budgets. Visitors to the fledging group’s website will find a series of research studies including one by Derek W. Black. Black is considered one of the nation’s leading experts in public education funding and is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law and director of the Constitutional Law Center at the University of South Carolina. He argues that charter schools have a negative impact on the budgets of local school districts due to fixed costs.
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In Pennsylvania, Medicaid eligibility has expanded at the same time that officials have suspended verification. The result is that costs have gone up — along with the number of people getting benefits while not legally qualifying for them.
So explains a new report from the Commonwealth Foundation on Pennsylvania’s “Wayward Welfare State.”
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In response to a recent protest during which students took over a campus building, shouted and banged on doors, University of Florida has pledged to enforce a ban on indoor demonstrations as the Board of Trustees meets next week to appoint Republican Sen. Ben Sasse as president.
Current UF President Kent Fuchs stated in a letter to students that those who violate a long-standing campus regulation that “no demonstrations are permitted inside university buildings” will face disciplinary action under the Student Conduct Code.
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You may have missed it, but a recent Census Bureau report revealed that the bureau made significant errors in the most recent census, overcounting the population of eight states and undercounting the population of six states.
As a result, the citizens in undercounted states, such as Florida, did not receive all of the congressional representation to which they are entitled, while citizens in states such as Minnesota and Rhode Island that were overcounted are overrepresented in Congress.
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Pima County officials violated Arizona state law by giving a company a multi-million dollar subsidy, an Arizona appellate court ruled recently.
The Goldwater Institute filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of a deal made between Pima County and World View, a company that says it will take passengers on rides to the upper stratosphere using high-altitude balloons.
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A Wisconsin appeals court has upheld a lower court’s ruling forbidding the practice of “ballot spoiling,” requiring the state’s election commission to rescind guidance it had earlier issued on the matter.
The state’s 2nd District Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld a county circuit court’s directive that ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission to rescind its earlier instructions issued to voters who wished to void their submitted ballot and cast a new one.
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by Evan Stambaugh Rep. Ilhan Omar was confronted by protesters Thursday night over her support for Ukraine in its defense from Russian invasion. At a Thursday evening town hall event, a man stood up and accused Omar of failing to take the truly “anti-war” position on the issue. “You are supposed to be a progressive Democrat. Anti-war. Anti-war!” the protester said, raising his voice. “$80 billion to Ukraine is not anti-war.” When Omar noted that Congress is helping defend Ukraine from an aggressor, the protester shouted that “Ukraine is killing its own citizens in the Donbass” and implied Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was responsible for some of the “mass graves” found in the country. “There are piles of bodies that are being found in mass graves. There are little children whose lives are being lost,” Omar said in response. “Unless you are someone like me that has been that child, you do not get to tell me what my votes mean and how I get to vote in supporting people.” “You’re pressing the big red button,” someone in the audience shouted. Omar called one of the protesters (it’s unclear how many there were) “sad” and “dangerous” after he suggested that America was responsible…
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With a little over a week until Election Day, 589,627 voters had voted early as of October 29 in Virginia’s ongoing election, according to a graphic from The Virginia Public Access Project. That’s down from 2021, which saw over one million votes by election day, but which also had statewide elections and house races. In Virginia this year, only VA-02, VA-07, and VA-10 are competitive; the other congressional races are safe Republican or Democrat.
That’s not quite reflected in VPAP’s breakdown of early votes by district. VA-01 has the most early votes with 74,377, followed by VA-02 with 64,338, VA-05 with 59,987, VA-10 with 58,793, and VA-07 with 57,931.
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On polls taken up to Oct. 17, Arizona Republican nominee for Governor Kari Lake was leading her opponent Katie Hobbs by 3 and 4 points respectively in Daily Wire/Trafalgar and Data for Progress polls. And then she got the endorsement of former Democratic U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, fresh off leaving the Democratic Party, on Oct. 18 in a Twitter post.
“For too long, establishment leaders from both parties have sought to enrich themselves, play games, and build up their power while ignoring and even enabling the suffering of millions of hard-working Americans,” Gabbard said in a press release, adding, “Kari Lake is a leader who puts people first, fighting for border security, energy independence, public safety, and other policies that actually make life better and more affordable for the American people.”
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The Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania invited a representative of the People’s Republic of China, General Jin Qian, to speak with students and faculty in a private meeting held on Oct. 6.
The purpose of this event was to open a respectful dialogue with the Chinese Deputy Consul General and others about Chinese and United States diplomatic relations and foreign perspectives.
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Oregon voters are considering passing one of the most restrictive gun control measures in the country that would raise the barriers to purchase a firearm and place gun owners on a searchable database.
Measure 114, often referred to as the Reduction of Gun Violence Act, is a ballot measure that will require background checks, firearm training, fingerprint collection and a permit to purchase any firearm, according to the legislation. Oregon already requires background checks for gun owners, and the new legislation will cost the state $49 million annually while also placing an expected 300,000 residents on a gun owner database, according to Fox News.
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People on the American Right can be forgiven if they don’t know their own history. After all, American political history is almost exclusively written by people on the Left. Timothy Sandefur’s new book Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, does something to solve this problem.
Before there was Rush Limbaugh, before there was William F. Buckley, before, even, there was Russell Kirk, there was a small band of intellectuals opposing the great wave of statism that washed ashore with the New Deal. Everyone in that band was an interesting person – you had to be interesting to oppose such an overwhelming trend.
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Tomorrow night American kids will observe a tradition not widely celebrated in the rest of the world: Halloween. They will dress up as ghosts, witches, goblins, politicians, and other scary things, then go door to door greeting neighbors with Trick or treat! Residents will drop candy in the bags the children are carrying.
Regardless of anyone’s intention, the tradition nicely demonstrates the creativity of free exchange.
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Murfreesboro Central Magnet School student Matthew Feragola won the 2022 National Constitution Bee held in Brentwood, Tennessee on Saturday October 22.
Feragola, a senior, earned a $10,000 scholarship from the Star News Education Foundation, a non-profit organization established by the management team of Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns and operates The Tennessee Star.
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Carrie Schween, a candidate for the Germantown Municipal School District (GMSD) School Board, criticized the board for “attempting to silence parents’ voices.”
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CatholicVote, a political advocacy group, is spending $2 million to highlight the positions of Catholic Democrats in key Congressional races with ads targeting regular church attendees, the group announced in a press release.
The “Can You Trust Them?” campaign addresses the views of Democratic Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Democratic Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Democratic Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan on parental rights, abortion and gender issues and will reach a projected one million regular mass attendees, according to CatholicVote. A series of video ads highlight Kelly, Cortez Masto ad Ryan’s support for child gender transitions and underage abortions without parental consent.
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The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy and the City of Knoxville announced a partnership launching a fellows program for Baker Center students.
The program would allow the students to “work directly in a variety of departments or agencies with the City of Knoxville,” according to a Friday press release by the City.
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A South Carolina school district has removed 97 books from its libraries following complaints of “adult content,” according to WSAV News.
A parent of the Beaufort County School District complained about books in the school libraries featuring sexual explicit content such as “Tricks” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” causing the books to be removed, according to WSAV News. The books have been pulled from the district and are currently under review by a material reconsideration committee.
“Tricks” by Ellen Hopkins is about several teen prostitutes and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson is a graphic memoir about the experiences of a queer black boy, according to each book review.
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Seven years ago, the former New York City Schools Chancellor said the city’s decision to lift a ban on cell phones in schools was “common sense.”
Last week, the Philadelphia Board of Education approved a contract of up to $5 million with a company that makes locking phone pouches that allow educators to make classrooms phone-free.
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A new peer-reviewed study has revealed the true extent of efforts to promote life-altering “gender transition” surgeries to children, with a staggering increase in “top surgeries” altering children’s chest areas over the last several years.
The Daily Caller reports that the study, conducted by Dr. Galen Perdikis, Dr. Salam Al Kasis, and Rishub Karan Das, determined that between the years 2016 and 2019, “the annual number of gender-affirming chest surgeries increased by 389 percent.” The study was published by the pediatric network of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on October 17th.
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The near $300 million in capital improvements recommended in a 2017 report by Venue Solutions Group (VSG) would have resulted in an average of $12 million in expenditures per year for the following 20 years.
The 159-page Facility Condition Assessment was prepared on behalf of Metro Nashville Government (Metro) and the Metro Sports Authority (Authority) to benchmark the condition of the Tennessee Titans stadium.
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Taxpayers might foot $15 million for a private-public deal to redevelop the former Buick City brownfield site in Flint. The partnership hopes to create 3,000 jobs.
Real estate investment company Ashley Capital is contracted to purchase the 350-acre former Buick City site from Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response Trust and plans to develop an industrial park.
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There are people who talk nonstop with their dogs and cats. When I get bored, I interrogate machines. My favorite is Google Trends because it shows a lot of things that Democrats would rather you didn’t know. For example, it demonstrates that the main concern of the American people has to do with their sports team and not with sex-change operations and things like that. This leaves Democrats deeply disappointed. A contemporary Democrat is someone who firmly believes that people get out of bed, kneel in front of a picture of the ozone layer, and beat their chests while apologizing to Pachamama for climate change.
With one eye on the elections, I asked Google a few questions, paying special attention to the search trends of American users, and the answers are interesting, to say the least. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, and using George Floyd’s death as an excuse, Democratic discourse focused on stopping the racism that Republicans supposedly encouraged, pretending that this was the country’s biggest problem. But the evolution of Google queries on “racism” reveals a fun fact: no one cared about racism in the least until the Democratic Party decided to bring it into the campaign to capitalize on Floyd’s death. And the funniest thing: that concern disappeared completely the same day Joe Biden became president of the United States, which places his government’s actions in the realm of the paranormal. To put it another way: the old zombie works miracles! As I am suffering a terrible flu (this article might turn out to be posthumous), this miracle has me now seriously thinking of catching a plane, turning up at the White House, and trying to touch the hem of Joe Biden’s robe in a desperate attempt to be healed.
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Gloucester County Public Schools has partnered with the county Sheriff’s Office to install license plate cameras on school buses to detect drivers who illegally pass stopped school buses.
“At Gloucester County Public Schools, the safety of our children is a top priority. Earlier this month, the National Association of State Director of Pupil Transportation (NASDPTS) announced the rate of school bus illegal passing is at an ‘epidemic level,’ with motorists illegally passing stopped school buses an estimated 41.8 million times a year. Over time, this safety initiative seeks to curb dangerous driving behavior around school buses,” the district said in a October 19 letter to parents.
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More than 250,000 ballots have been mailed to Pennsylvania voters without their identities being verified, according to state data collected by election integrity group Verity Vote.
On Tuesday, 15 Pennsylvania state legislators sent a letter to acting Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Leigh Chapman regarding unverified ballots sent to voters. As of Thursday, state data show that more than 250,000 ballots have been mailed to voters without verifying their identification.
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Dr. Scott Jensen repeatedly called on Gov. Tim Walz to provide direct answers to Minnesota voters during a debate Friday afternoon in what was the last and most intense meeting of the two candidates before the election.
The last time Jensen was on a debate stage, he stood next to an empty podium.
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Inflation is driving up the cost of road projects in Georgia, with some project bids more than 40% higher than projected.
As a result, Georgia Department of Transportation officials have rejected some high bids and deferred resurfacing projects for the last six months.
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The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rankings indicate that Florida students are “well ahead of their peers, especially with younger and educationally at-risk students who were harmed the most from distance-learning in other states,” the governor said.
“We insisted on keeping schools open and guaranteed in-person learning in 2020 because we knew there would be widespread harm to our students if students were locked out,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. The results, he said, “once again prove that we made the right decision.”
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A leading sports gambling organization believes Ohio will wager more than most every other state once betting becomes legal Jan. 1.
PlayOhio, a division of PlayUSA, predicts people across the state will place $8 billion in bets during 2023, ranking only behind New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Nevada in terms of handle.
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At the Virginia Governor’s Transportation Conference, Governor Glenn Youngkin touted a mix of federal and state investment in Virginia’s transportation infrastructure in ports, roads, rail, and air infrastructure, and said he’d defend Virginia’s right-to-work laws.
“This year we will have a record level of support for our Commonwealth and the Commonwealth Transportation Fund. That $9 billion includes $3.5 billion in surface transportation capital construction projects. $3.3 billion in keeping and maintaining our highways and our bridges and our tunnels at best-in-class standards. $1.1 billion in keeping rail and transit moving forward. $1 billion in allocation of funds for the regional transportation needs,” he said Thursday.
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Following the release of a $500,000 TV ad Friday from Liz Cheney’s Political Action Committee (PAC) urging Arizona voters to stay away from Republican nominees Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, Lake said her campaign received a huge boost in donations. Lake thanked Cheney for contributing to the campaign.
“Thank you [Cheney] for your generous in-kind contribution to my campaign. Your recent television ad urging Arizonans not to vote for me is doing just the opposite,” Lake said in a letter to Cheney. “Our campaign donations are skyrocketing and our website nearly crashed from traffic as people rushed to learn more about my plan to put Arizona first and join our historic political movement.”
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The Pentagon identifies China as the No. 1 threat to U.S. national security in the latest version of the National Defense Strategy, released just days after the leader of the communist regime secured a third five-year term.
“The key theme … is the need to sustain and strengthen U.S. deterrence with the People’s Republic of China as our pacing challenge,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday during a press conference on the new document.
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