A couple of years ago, I received a post-semester email from a student’s father. He was upset about his child’s final grade in my class, which had landed somewhere between a high B and a low A.
The grade was clearly not very low, but the student’s father wanted me to reconsider. Apparently, a specific assignment’s less-than-perfect score had kept his son from making the honor roll.
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Diesel fuel prices continue to rise, hiking the cost of transporting goods to market as American consumers pay the price.
According to the latest data from AAA, the current national average price for a gallon of diesel is $4.56, up from $4.53 a week ago and $4.35 a month ago. As those prices rise, the costs are passed on to consumers.
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Billionaire Elon Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink is officially recruiting human beings for a clinical trial, the biotech firm announced on Tuesday.
The trial will be open to individuals with quadriplegia resulting from cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Neuralink announced on its website. It seeks to assess the brain implant’s safety, the performance of its “surgical robot” and gauge the chip’s effectiveness in allowing paralyzed people to influence external devices through their thoughts.
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Friday vowed to remove funding for Ukraine from a Pentagon spending package amid a conservative rebellion.
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Friday vowed to remove funding for Ukraine from a Pentagon spending package amid a conservative rebellion.
The package, which has twice failed to clear a procedural vote due to internal Republican opposition, includes $300 million in funds for Kyiv to continue its fight against the Russian military.
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The Supreme Court on Friday extended its stay on an injunction blocking the Biden administration from coercing or significantly encouraging social media companies to censor speech.
Justice Samuel Alito temporarily froze the injunction until Sept. 22 last week after the Biden administration requested a stay. On Friday, the justices extended the stay to Sept. 27.
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R) along with Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) President Sidney McPhee announced on Thursday that MTSU’s growing aerospace department will be moving from its current location at Murfreesboro Airport to a new state-of-the-art campus in Shelbyville.
Due to the rapidly expanding Aerospace industry, preparations for the new MTSU Aerospace-Shelbyville campus has been in the works since April. The press release says that the institution and the state have contributed a total of $62.2 million for the move.
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Migrant encounters for fiscal year 2023 so far are on pace to surpass the record of more than 2.3 million that were recorded crossing in fiscal year 2022, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data updated Friday.
Encounters of migrants between October 2022 and August hit 2,206,039, compared to 2,378,944 in all of fiscal year 2022, according to the data, which includes illegal crossings between ports of entry and legal crossings at ports. In August alone, Border Patrol encountered roughly 181,000 migrants that crossed illegally.
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The chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee tells Just the News he plans to soon make public new testimony that corroborates IRS whistleblowers’ accounts of interference in the Hunter Biden probe and new evidence to support the nascent impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) said Thursday his panel will hold a vote to make the new information available, including testimonies from two IRS agents who back the accounts of whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler about slow-walking and interference in the Hunter Biden tax case.
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According to the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development (TDLWD), the Volunteer State’s unemployment level remains historically low.
In August, the state hit an all-time low seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 3.1 percent, according to a release from the department.
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First Amendment experts, radical feminists and doctors are pushing back against a court ruling that held two educators responsible for their own firing because their opposition to a proposed gender identity policy sparked student protests and community complaints to Oregon’s Grants Pass School District.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke botched Supreme Court precedents on the speech rights of public employees and qualified immunity from personal liability, upheld restrictions that disproportionately target women and adopted pseudoscientific language, according to ideologically diverse friend-of-the-court briefs filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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Outgoing Nashville Mayor John Cooper posted a farewell message to his constituents Friday on social media to wrap up the last few hours of his term.
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A Florida House subcommittee met this week to discuss implementing some of the elements of a bill that passed during the 2022 session designed to promote responsible fatherhood.
House Bill 7065 was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April of 2022 and was designed to “aid in creating and sustaining safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments for children and families that allow children to grow up to their full potential,” and also focuses on responsible fatherhood.
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The Wisconsin Ethics Commission launched an investigation into newly installed Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s campaign on allegations of money laundering and fraud.
The investigation, first reported by conservative talk show host Dan O’Donnell of NewsTalk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, claims the far left justice’s campaign engaged in “smurfing,” using unwitting small-dollar donors to launder substantial cash donations.
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An investigator working for the Fulton County District Attorney’s office shot herself on Friday while at the Fulton County Courthouse. The investigator, who works in the office of District Attorney Fani Willis, was not critically injured in the accidental discharge.
News first broke on Friday morning that a shooting incident occurred at the Fulton County Courthouse, with the sheriff’s office reporting there was “no active threat” at the time. Within an hour, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office confirmed “an accidental discharge” by an “investigator who wounded herself” but was not critically injured.
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Declaring that it’s time for Washington to start working for Americans and not the other way around, GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley laid out her economic “Freedom Plan in a speech Friday in New Hampshire.
The former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador is proposing a litany of middle-class tax cuts, regulatory relief and “third rail” entitlement reforms in a proposal she asserts will check communist China aggression through American prosperity.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is over, but vaccine mandates imposed by colleges and universities are not. Now a Virginia congressman has introduced a bill to withhold federal funds from institutions of higher education that require vaccinations against the disease.
President Joe Biden declared the pandemic over in ending the public health emergency May 11. Despite this, nearly 100 colleges and universities currently require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 for the 2023-2024 school year.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland gave his best Captain Renault impression on Capitol Hill in denying a double standard in how the Justice Department investigated (or didn’t) Hunter Biden (and his father) versus how they pursue his political rival. Shocked, shocked, indeed.
Those experiencing the less pleasant side of judicial double standards see rather clearly the woke hall pass.
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Attorney Kenneth Chesebro argued that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis may have violated his privileged communications with clients during her blanket search of his email account, according to legal filing made by his lawyers on Thursday.
Chesebro, who is among those indicted by Willis in her racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and those who helped him contest the 2020 election, alleged that Willis and her office violated Georgia law when it gained blanket access to Chesebro’s email account in July, according to his lawyers’ filing. Chesebro is asking Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee to suppress any evidence gathered from those emails.
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Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Brad Astrowsky conducted a hearing Wednesday regarding Maricopa County and Runbeck Election Systems’ motions to dismiss a lawsuit filed by We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA). WPAA requested video surveillance from Runbeck showing ballots being transferred to and from Runbeck on Election Day and the day after the 2022 general election. Runbeck refused to turn them over, claiming it was not subject to public records requests as a private entity, so WPAA sued the company.
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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison issued a supplemented legal opinion regarding school discipline laws after dozens of police departments pulled school resource officers.
Ellison said the new opinion addresses “good-faith” concerns about the law.
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law three bills that effectively bans marriage of those under 18.
Previously, Michigan residents could get married as young as 16 with parental consent, and someone under 16 could with court approval.
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State grants issued this week will help counties feed some of the 1.5 million residents facing food insecurity every day.
On Tuesday, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced that $1.6 million will go to 40 food banks, pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens to make emergency meals easier to get in 26 counties.
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Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes determined that a Phoenix city ordinance allowing the transfer of guns to Ukraine is unlawful.
Republican state Reps. Quang Nguyen and Selina Bliss filed a complaint in July, asking the office to look at the legality of the ordinance.
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An Ohio judge issued a temporary restraining order Thursday to block a proposed law that would change who gets to write statewide education standards, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
Republican Ohio Sen. Andrew Brenner and other Republicans want powers transferred from the state school board to a single cabinet appointee because of ideological fights over culture war issues and bureaucratic gridlock in the Ohio school board, according to The Columbus Dispatch. The Ohio school board filed a lawsuit Tuesday arguing the proposed plan to give control over statewide school standards to the governor’s office is unconstitutional, which prompted Democratic Judge Karen Held Phipps to block the proposed law as it moves through the courts.
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It might go down as the whopper of the year.
During his opening statement to the House Judiciary committee on Wednesday morning, Attorney General Merrick Garland attempted to head off expected criticism from Republicans by insisting his Department of Justice is blind to politics. “[We] apply the same laws to everyone. There is not one set of laws for the powerful and one for the powerless. One for the rich and another for the poor. One for Democrats and another one for Republicans. The law will treat each of us alike.”
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On May 15, 1970, the New York Times published an article by esteemed Russia scholar Albert Parry detailing how Soviet dissident intellectuals were covertly passing forbidden ideas around to each other on handcrafted, typewritten documents called samizdat.
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Last week, American Greatness reporter Debra Heine reported a bombshell story that a “highly credible” CIA whistleblower has told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that the CIA “bribed” six of its analysts with significant financial incentives to change their initial conclusion that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a biolab leak in Wuhan, China and to instead conclude that the virus emerged naturally.
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On Tuesday, an anti-affirmative action group filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point over its race-based admissions process in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning such practices.
As reported by Axios, the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by Students for Fair Admissions (SFA), the same advocacy group that ultimately ended affirmative action through two cases it had filed before the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. In both cases, SFA successfully argued that affirmative action unfairly benefits black and Hispanic students, while disproportionately discriminating against White and Asian students.
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The number of homeless camps that have sprouted up all across San Francisco is now at the highest point since 2020.
The Daily Caller reports that more people moved into homeless shelters in just the first six months of 2023 than during any other six-month period since 2021, according to information compiled by the San Francisco Standard. There are 523 homeless camps in the city as of July of this year, the highest total since 530 camps in October of 2020. Across these 523 camps, there are over 4,000 homeless people in San Francisco.
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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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