Prosecutors said Friday morning they have indicted New Jersey Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife on federal bribery charges.
They alleged in a press conference shortly after the charges were announced the Menendezs took bribes of cash, gold bars and a luxury car for corrupt acts, including having the senator, who leads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, use his influence to benefit the authoritarian government of Egypt.
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The United Auto Workers (UAW) announced on Friday that more workers will go on strike as the union and automakers continue to be unable to reach a deal.
The union announced that 38 new plants across the U.S. will join the partial strike at noon against the Big Three automakers as negotiations continue to fail to produce a new contract for the 146,000 workers, with strikes expanding against GM and Stellantis but not Ford, as the company has cooperated more than the others, according to the UAW announcement. The UAW first announced its partial strike on Sept. 14, striking at three plants: GM’s plant in Wentzville, Missouri; Ford’s plant in Wayne, Michigan; and Stellantis’ Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio.
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Republican leadership has told House lawmakers they can leave Washington, D.C., following a botched vote on a defense spending package that upended the legislative agenda that was set through Saturday.
The announcement follows a group of dissident House conservatives breaking ranks to stop a procedural vote on a Pentagon funding bill, preventing its consideration on the floor, The Hill reported. Conservatives did so on Tuesday as well in a bid to secure deeper spending cuts and to block additional aid to Ukraine.
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Townhall As Spencer reported Friday morning, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez has been indicted on a number of federal charges for bribery and selling out the United States of America to Egypt. Menendez is the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The indictment alleges Menendez accepted bribes in return for his “power and influence as a senator” to protect and enrich several Egyptian officials. “Those bribes included cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value,” the indictment states. READ THE FULL STORY
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A Tennessee nonprofit that works in tandem with a major state scholarship program is looking for mentors for high school students.
tnAchieves is looking for 4,300 mentors to register by October 20, 2023, “to provide local encouragement and guidance to students statewide,” according to its website.
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One of the key figures in the center of the budget debate – Tennessee’s own Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-05) – took a break from ongoing talks to join The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy Friday to fill in listeners on where the House is on the budget, and what he sees coming in the days ahead. TRANSCRIPT Michael Patrick Leahy: 7:33 a.m. – in-studio, original All-Star panelist Crom Carmichael; on the newsmaker line right now, the man at the center of the controversies going on in Washington D.C. this very moment, our good friend, Congressman Andy Ogles, who represents the 5th District here in Tennessee. Good morning, Congressman Ogles. Andy Ogles: Good morning. How are you guys? Michael Patrick Leahy: Well, my question to you, Andy, is this: two years ago, when you would be getting up at four o’clock in the morning and leaving your house in Columbia to come in here and spend the morning in-studio with us to talk about issues of the day, did you think that two years later, you would be the man at the center of the national budget controversy going on in Washington, D.C. today? Andy Ogles: I don’t know…
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Daily Caller Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources confirmed Friday three migrants arrived at the border in El Paso with tuberculosis, according to Griff Jenkins of Fox News. “BREAKING: CBP sources confirm to FOX News that there are ** three confirmed cases of Tuberculosis ** among migrants in the El Paso sector… further complicating the already daunting task of managing an overwhelming number arriving daily,” Jenkins, a national correspondent for Fox News, wrote on Twitter. Although there has been a surge in illegal immigration since the end of Title 42 in May, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed Biden is “stopping the flow at the border” during an August press conference. The Trump-era expulsion policy turned away asylum seekers at the border if there was a “serious danger to the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States.” READ THE FULL STORY
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Today, I introduced legislation to retain Wisconsin control over the safety and reliability of our state’s power grid instead of ceding that control to federal regulators and opportunistic out-of-state developers. This bill, known as Right of First Refusal, prevents fragmentation of the state’s transmission grid and retains the regulation and operation of the grid in Wisconsin.
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As crime rates climb across the nation, police departments in several major U.S. cities are facing a crisis, namely, the inability to recruit new police officers. As a result, staffing shortages have led to increased overtime, thinly spread patrols, and a rise in crime rates.
Violent crimes remained higher during the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. The International Association of Chiefs of Police published a paper called “A Crisis for Law Enforcement” that shows 78% of law enforcement agencies have had “difficulty in recruiting qualified candidates” and that 65% reported having “too few candidates applying to be law enforcement officers.”
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Tennessee U.S. Representative John Rose (R-TN-06) recently joined three of his colleagues in introducing the Neighborhood Options for Patients Buying Medicines (NO PBMs) Act.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is moving closer towards giving illegal immigrants identification cards, according to new images obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In 2022, the agency announced the ICE Secure Docket program as a “pilot to modernize various forms of documentation provided to provisionally released noncitizens through a consistent, verifiable, secure card,” an ICE spokesperson told the DCNF at the time. The program is intended to allow migrants to use IDs as their cases progress; the IDs contain QR codes allowing migrants to access their court documents to prove to authorities that they have pending immigration cases, allowing them to travel through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints with greater ease.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced Thursday his office reached a $44.5 million settlement with Food City over the grocery store chain’s opioid-related misconduct.
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Joe Biden’s administration announced this Wednesday the renewal and expansion of an immigration permit called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which would allow some 472,000 Venezuelans to work and reside legally in the United States.
Officials explained that TPS will now be extended to all Venezuelans who have lived continuously in the United States since July 31, 2023. This significantly increases the number of beneficiaries, since previously it only applied to those who were in the country since March 2021.
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Tennessee U.S. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-05) recently introduced the Hot Showers Act to nullify a proposed Department of Energy (DOE) rule that would significantly limit the availability of water heaters in the country.
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Tennessee U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) joined 44 Republican colleagues in sending a letter to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) regarding his recent change to Senate rules, including loosening the dress code to no longer require business attire for members on the Senate floor.
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The Williamson County GOP has issued a medical rights resolution refusing to “blindly submit” to any effort by the federal government to reinstate COVID-19 mandates and urging state lawmakers to do more to protect Tennesseans’ medical freedoms.
“We, as the Republicans of Williamson County, as Americans, as God-fearing Conservatives, will refuse to blindly submit, and we thank our State Legislators for the protections they have already enacted and beg them to do far more to protect our Medical Freedom and to prevent such a horrific overreach from ever happening again; and we ask for Governor Lee to task our state’s Attorney General to investigate violations of the Tennessee Constitution and other Covid-19 crimes,” the resolution reads.
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A powerful network of liberal donors are reportedly planning to oppose No Labels, the newest political party to be recognized in Arizona, as Democrats in the state express concerns the party could serve as a spoiler and cause President Joe Biden to lose the 2024 presidential election.
The influential Democracy Alliance, the nation’s largest club for wealthy liberal donors, told German-owned Politico that Democrats are “increasingly concerned” that a No Labels presidential ticket “could function as a spoiler” for Biden and help former President Donald Trump regain the White House.
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Five Republican state representatives are seeking co-sponsorship on resolution to impeach embattled Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, who was recently fired by the GOP-controlled state Senate but refuses to leave the post.
“Administrator Meagan Wolfe’s impeachment is warranted due to her maladministration during her tenure as the Administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, as evidenced by the 15 issues outlined in the attached resolution,” states the co-sponsorship memo sent to Assembly members on Thursday.
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Democratic state Rep. Karen Whitsett of Michigan said that she will not be voting in favor of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s abortion bill package, which would significantly ease abortion restrictions, according to The Detroit News.
Whitmer announced her support of several bills on Aug. 29 aimed at lowering restrictions on abortion, such as eliminating the mandatory 24-hour waiting period for women to make an informed decision before having the procedure and allowing for Medicaid funding of abortion. Whitsett explained Wednesday that she could not support taxpayer funding for abortions, and that women should have time to make a choice and understand the decision they are making, according to The Detroit News.
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On Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his energy plan. It includes reversing all Biden administration policies to get gasoline prices at the pump back to $2 a gallon in 2025.
Gas prices and all other household goods reliant on petroleum have soared to over 40-year highs since President Biden implemented new energy policies in 2021. They include canceling the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office, halting offshore and onshore lease sales, advancing EPA and other regulatory restrictions solely on U.S. oil and natural gas companies, halting investments in the industry by imposing environmental, social governance policies to restrict lending to U.S. oil and natural gas companies, among other policies.
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Wages will rise for hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers in Connecticut next year under a 2019 law that pegs the state’s minimum wage to the federal employment index.
Beginning Jan. 1, Connecticut’s wage floor will rise from $15.00 per hour to $15.69 per hour as a result of the state’s first-ever economic indicator adjustment.
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Stefi Outlaw, the president of the local NEA affiliate in Clarksville, Tennessee, emailed the chairman of the Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools chairman Kent Griffy, and Mark Nolan an attorney regarding board member Aron Maberry. The claim she made was he used his official capacity as a board member to promote a “See You at the Pole“ prayer rally.
This raises a few interesting points. As a public official, using your public account probably provides more transparency to taxpayers. How much public business gets conducted behind the scenes with private emails? The use of private email for public business can be controversial and legally problematic in some cases.
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A push to reform the oversight of Pennsylvania’s half-dozen homes for veterans would create an advisory board to improve care and watch over the dwellings.
Senate Bill 933 would give a 15-member Veterans Home Advisory Board the responsibility to provide input on quality of care concerns for the more than 1,300 Pennsylvania veterans living in the six homes across the state.
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed about a dozen witnesses she plans to call in her racketeering case against former President Donald Trump in a legal filing on Wednesday. Willis named the witnesses to illustrate potential conflicts of interests for defense attorneys.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), and his wife Patricia, will both be called as witnesses by the prosecution, according to Willis’s filing.
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The Minnesota Freedom Fund supplied $100,000 bail for the release of Myon Demarlo Burrell earlier this month after he was charged with illegally possessing a firearm and narcotics.
Hennepin County Jail records show Burrell was released from custody on Sept. 2 after supplying bail. However, a document posted by Crime Watch showing that the controversial bail fund supplied the bail wasn’t uploaded into the online court record until Monday of this week.
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Since early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border.
The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the “border is secure.” He is now written off as a veritable “Baghdad Bob” propagandist.
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Most likely voters say that Susanna Gibson, the Virginia Democrat who live-streamed sex acts with her husband online while asking for tips, should drop out of the House of Delegates race in a highly competitive suburban Richmond district, according to a new survey.
While 56% likely general election voters say Gibson, a nurse practitioner and mother of two young children, should drop out of the race, just 30% say she should continue and 14% say they are unsure, according to a survey released Wednesday by the political research groups Founders Insight and co/efficient.
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Arizona’s border port authorities issued a joint resolution Monday emphasizing the need for border security to sustain economic growth in the region.
The resolution came from the Douglas International Port Authority, the Greater Nogales and Santa Cruz County Port Authority, and the Greater Yuma Port Authority, with specific ideas during their Board of Directors joint session in Tucson.
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The family of a deceased Fulton County Jail detainee who was stabbed to death announced its intention to sue the jail on Wednesday but will first offer the facility a 30-day window to “address the situation appropriately” before the lawsuit is filed. During a Thursday press conference, the family’s lawyers provided details surrounding the stabbing death.
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Whey Jennings is as great a performer as you would expect him to be, but his path to stardom has not been an easy one.
When the singer was around six years old, he picked up a microphone that Jessi Colter left on a chair backstage at his grandpa’s show. Young Whey Jennings pranced out onto the stage and began singing “Mamma’s Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.” Jennings’s grandpa Waylon Jennings shouted out, “Hey hold up there Hoss…wait for me!” Waylon went to pickin’ and when the song was finished, the crowd went nuts.
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While the American public was misinformed about Hunter Biden’s laptop in a 2020 letter signed by former intelligence officials – who used their job titles to add credibility to their claims – some of them have since landed plum jobs, including working with the federal government.
Just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, 51 ex-high ranking intelligence officials signed a letter insinuating the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” after The New York Post reported on the laptop days earlier. The Post report mentioned how Hunter had abandoned his laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop and had emails regarding his business dealings.
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Republicans have had a crash course since 2016 in the ways the power of the intelligence community can be abused. To take a few examples, four consecutive judges operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act approved wiretaps of a Trump adviser, Carter Page, relying without question on the partisan fictions of the Steele dossier. Michael Flynn was ousted after he was the target of an unprecedented leak of another FISA intercept. And 51 former intelligence officers intervened in the 2020 election to dismiss without evidence the Hunter Biden laptop contents as likely Russian disinformation.
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