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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.”
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.”
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
“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.”
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.”
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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…
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.”
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story
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.
Read the full story