Report: Children Under 14 Dying from Fentanyl Poisoning at Faster Rate than Any Other Age Group

Children under age 14 are dying from fentanyl poisoning at a faster rate than any other age group in the U.S., according to a new analysis from Families Against Fentanyl.

In the past two years, synthetic opioid (fentanyl) deaths among children surged.

Fentanyl-related deaths among infants (children under age one) quadrupled from 2019 to 2021; more than tripled among children between the ages of 1 and 4 and nearly quadrupled among children between the ages of 5 and 14.

Read the full story

Biden Helped Sink CIA Nominee in 1970s with Classified Documents Allegation

When President Joe Biden was a senator during President Jimmy Carter’s term, he reportedly used an accusation about the mishandling of classified documents to sink a nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Classified documents from Biden’s tenure as vice president were found in November, December and this month at his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and at his home in Wilmington, Del. A special counsel was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland last week to investigate the matter. 

Read the full story

Lawsuit Filed Against City of Scottsdale for Rio Verde Foothills Water Scandal

A group of Arizona citizens residing in the Rio Verde Foothills (RVF) area outside of Scottsdale sued the City Thursday for cutting off its water supply, which they claim is vital for their community.

“There are approximately 500 households in Rio Verde Foothills which rely upon hauled water obtained from the Scottsdale Standpipe to serve their daily needs for domestic water,” according to the complaint. “Plaintiffs rely solely upon a source of water owned and provided by the City of Scottdale. The City has provided water service to the RVF community for over 30 years.”

Read the full story

Runbeck: Election Firm Involved in Maricopa County’s Alleged Chain-of-Custody Violations

As Republican Kari Lake appeals a legal defeat in her lawsuit challenging certification of her narrow loss in Arizona’s Nov. 8 gubernatorial election, she is alleging that ballot chain-of-custody issues occurred at Runbeck Election Services, a company that municipalities across the country use for outsourcing election operations.

Lake is appealing a ruling against her last month in her suit against former Secretary of State and current Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County election officials demanding the election result be set aside due to alleged failures and misconduct by the county. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson found that Lake failed to meet a legal standard of clear and convincing evidence that intentional misconduct changed the outcome of the election.

In her appeal, which challenges the legal standard applied by the trial court, Lake alleges that Maricopa County’s “massive violations of law and maladministration” included violating Arizona law’s chain-of-custody requirements by not having Election Day dropbox ballots counted at Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC) before going to Runbeck.

Read the full story

Commentary: Voters Can No Longer Tolerate Business as Usual, So It’s Time for Ronna McDaniel to Go

Kevin McCarthy’s speakership vote should have sent a clear message to GOP establishmentarians everywhere: conservatives have real power to leverage against Establishment-era Republicans, and they aren’t afraid to use it.

Even before the battle began on the floor of Congress, polling from Trafalgar Group and Convention of States revealed that Republican voters were dissatisfied with Republican Party congressional leadership. Capitalizing on the frustration of their constituents, a small band of Congressmen rebelled against the status quo and successfully managed to break up business as usual in our broken federal government.

Read the full story

Minnesota Department of Corrections Expands Abortion Coverage for Inmates

The Minnesota Department of Corrections will now pay for any inmate’s abortion, regardless of the reasons for seeking the procedure, according to a new policy.

The new policy, adopted January 10, replaces a 2018 policy that limited the department’s coverage of abortion to cases where the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest or if the life of the mother was at risk.

Read the full story

Bill Demands Elections Commission Cleans Up Wisconsin’s Voter Rolls

A bill released last week for co-sponsorship aims to remove ineligible voters from the state’s official voter registration list in a more timely fashion, a key election integrity concern that has dogged Wisconsin’s voter rolls for years. The legislation, authored by state Rep. Ty Bodden (R-59th Assembly District) and Sen. Andre Jacque (R-1st Senate District), would require the Wisconsin Elections Commission to clean up the WisVote database.

Read the full story

DeSantis, State Legislature to Further Limit Chinese Influence in Florida

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he’s considering banning Chinese entities from purchasing property in Florida and that the state legislature was looking at ways to further restrict the communist country’s influence in Florida.

“We don’t want to have holdings [in Florida] by hostile nations. If you look at the Chinese communist Party, they’ve been very active gobbling up land … and when they have interests that are opposed to ours and we see how they have wielded their authority especially with President Xi [Jinping], who’s taken a much more Marxist-Leninist turn, that is not in the best interest of Florida to have the Chinese Communist Party owning farm land, owning land close to military bases.”

Read the full story

Youngkin Rips Fairfax County Schools for Failing to Notify Students of National Merit Recognition: ‘Maniacal Focus on Equal Outcomes for All Students at All Costs’

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) said the failure of high schools in Fairfax County to notify students of their National Merit Scholarship program recognition is due to the district’s “maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs.”

In an interview Friday with ABC 7News, Youngkin commented on the acknowledgement by seven high schools in Fairfax County that they did not inform students of their recognition in time for their college scholarship and admission deadlines.

Read the full story

State Senator T.J. Shope Says Legislature will ‘Hold the Line’ on Hobbs’s Proposed Budget

Following the unveiling of Gov. Katie Hobbs’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 Executive Budget, State Sen. T.J. Shope (R-Florance) stated it was a budget he, and his GOP colleagues in the state legislature, would not support.

“My colleagues in the Senate GOP will not support this budget and its declaration of war on parents. We will not support taxpayer funded scholarship programs for non-citizens. We will not support a repeal of the Border Strike Force at a time when the scourge of fentanyl plagues our people,” Shope tweeted. “We are united and we will hold the line for the Arizona we love.”

Read the full story

Penn Biden Center Had UPenn Interns Running Around 13,800-Square-Foot D.C. Offices

President Joe Biden’s former private office in Washington, D.C., where roughly a dozen classified documents were discovered earlier last November, was recently a site for high-profile University of Pennsylvania internships. 

Administrators of the Philadelphia-based Ivy League school brought the former vice president aboard as a professor in the winter of 2017 to coincide with the “soft opening” of the 13,800-square-foot Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Just under a year later, the think tank officially commenced operations with a stated aim of engaging “our fellow citizens in shaping this world, while ensuring the gains of global engagement are widely shared.” 

Read the full story

Parent Educational Freedom Act Reintroduced in Ohio Senate

Republican State Senator Sandra O’Brien (R-Ashtabula) has reintroduced the Parental Education Freedom Act. The measure would make each student in the state eligible for an Educational Choice (EdChoice) Scholarship to be used at a private school of their choice, or an increased tax credit for expenses related to homeschooling.

O’Brien introduced this legislation during the lame-duck session last month as SB 368 however, the legislation did not progress before the start of the 135th General Assembly so she had to reintroduce it. 

Read the full story

New Senate Bill Proposes Ban on Vaccine Mandates in Pennsylvania

An impending proposal in the Pennsylvania Senate takes aim at vaccine mandates.

“The fight for medical freedom continues into the new legislative session,” said prime sponsor Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Chambersburg, in a Jan. 4 press release.

Mastriano first introduced the measure, called the Medical Freedom Act, in December 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both versions of the legislation would shield residents from adverse employment actions or discrimination for refusing vaccination while working for state agencies or political entities.

Read the full story

Ohio Looking at Options to Replace Gas Tax

Calling the gas tax an unsustainable way to fund transportation infrastructure, the Ohio Department of Transportation is studying its options.

Using a $4 million federal grant, Ohio developed a website to seek public opinion on potential funding options. Those results will eventually be forwarded to the General Assembly later this year, according to a promotional video produced by ODOT.

Read the full story

Commentary: The (No So) Stealthy Democrat Plan to Ditch Biden

The Democrat powers-that-be have decided! They don’t want senile president Joe Biden to run for reelection now!

How else could anyone explain what happened last week with the emerging story of the president having been caught with his hands in the cookie jar – or more descriptive, his fingerprints on boxes of documents, including a generous smattering of classified information – at his Chinese funded University of Pennsylvania pre-presidency office and then, get this, at his house in Delaware. It’s old news by now, but the garage space that holds Biden’s prize possession – his classic Corvette – also contained papers from his vice presidency days – and so did a room adjoining the garage.

Read the full story

Hundreds Show up to Show Their Respect to Arizona’s Legendary Legislator Russell Pearce at His Funeral

One of the most well-known and revered Arizona legislators in recent years, Russell Pearce of Mesa, passed away on January 5, and his funeral was held on Monday. Hundreds packed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints central stake center in Mesa to listen to eulogies from family and friends, most of who were brought to tears speaking of his love for Arizona, his family, church, God, and the Constitution. 

His sister Kathy Pearce spoke about “the work he did to protect our freedoms.” He “kept out country free so we could have the rights we do,” she said.

Read the full story

UFO Sightings Have Skyrocketed Since March 2021, Report Finds

U.S. intelligence agencies received 366 reports of unidentified airborne objects between March 2021 and August 2022, according to the newly revealed unclassified version of a report provided to Congress in 2022.

A majority of the new reports — totaling 510 over a 17-year period — originated from U.S. military pilots and operators, who say they observed strange flying objects while on duty, according to the report, which the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released in unclassified form Thursday. Just over half of the 366 new sightings were marked down as everyday objects after a first pass, but government agencies tasked with investigating the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) said 171 required further analysis.

Read the full story

Commentary: Occupational Licenses Are Killing Minority Entrepreneurship

Ashley N’Dakpri runs Afro Touch, a hair-braiding salon in Louisiana. She wants to hire more stylists to meet demand, but Louisiana’s strict occupational licensing regulations prevent her from doing so.

Ashley legally isn’t allowed to hire new stylists unless they have a cosmetologist’s license, a certification that requires five hundred hours of training and thousands of dollars in fees to obtain. She notes that many potential employees are no longer interested in working for her once they discover the onerous occupational licensing requirements.

Read the full story

Female Athletes Threaten Legal Action if NCAA Continues to Let Males Compete in Women’s Sports

An organization of female athletes sent a letter Thursday to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, demanding that the NCAA reverse its policy of allowing male athletes who identify as women to compete on women’s teams, or face legal action.

A group of current and former collegiate and professional female athletes also protested Thursday outside the NCAA convention in San Antonio, after the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, or ICONS, sent the letter.

Read the full story

During Visit to the Southern Border, New York City Mayor Says His City Has ‘No Room’ for Illegal Migrants

Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams said his city is at capacity and has “no room” for illegal migrants during a visit to El Paso, Texas, over the weekend.

Adams stressed that there’s misinformation going around that New York City is where illegal migrants can obtain housing and jobs, during a news conference Sunday in the border city. The Big Apple mayor has previously complained about the surges of illegal migrants coming to New York City on transports sent by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Democratic El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser and Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

Read the full story

North Carolina, North Dakota, Among States Phasing Out Income Tax

Americans in search of economic freedom and opportunity are flocking to Florida, Tennessee and Texas, and at least part of the attraction is that these three states, along with six others (Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington, Wyoming and New Hampshire), don’t levy an income tax.

Other states may soon follow.

“There are 10 states that are in the process of moving their personal income tax to zero,” President of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist said on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

Read the full story