Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed into law a bill that protects the religious convictions of people approached to solemnize or officiate a marriage.
“A person shall not be required to solemnize a marriage if the person has an objection to solemnizing the marriage based on the person’s conscience or religious beliefs,” reads the new law which took effect on Wednesday.
Read the full story
The Anti-Defamation League claimed that right-wing extremists committed “all” the extremist-related murders in 2023, discounting the apparent extremism of Audrey Hale, the transgender shooter who killed three adults and three students in March at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder released three pages of the shooter’s manifesto, which police confirmed were legitimate, in November.
Read the full story
Tennessee State Representative Scott Cepicky (R-Culleoka), who chairs the Education Instruction Subcommittee, said Governor Bill Lee’s universal school choice bill, known as the Education Freedom Scholarship Act, will likely be revealed next week.
Cepicky said there was a meeting on Wednesday for the committee chairs and caucus members to go over the bill’s language, making tweaks to ensure the bill will “function properly” and is “constitutional.”
Read the full story
Tennessee State Senator Bill Powers (R-Clarksville) has announced he has “no plans” to run for Congress in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District amid the announcement of incumbent U.S. Representative Mark Green’s (R-TN-07) retirement.
“For me, family is more important than any congressional title in Washington DC. I’m honored to be your state senator and have no plans to run for congress,” Powers wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.
Read the full story
Phillip Schwenk, the founding head of school at Rutherford Classical Academy, said one of the reasons why parents are drawn to the charter school is due to the classical education model assuming that the parent is the primary educator for their children.
Read the full story
Tennessee U.S. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN-05) said he has received a response from the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Memphis in regards to his request for inmate Stewart Parks, who is serving his eight month sentence for being present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to be moved to the prison’s minimum security satellite camp.
On February 13, Ogles sent a letter to Warden F.J. Bowers of the FCI in Memphis requesting that Parks be moved to the satellite camp for the duration of his incarceration, as previously reported by The Tennessee Star.
Read the full story
James Biden altered his story during a closed-door interview with lawmakers on Wednesday after congressional investigators presented him with evidence directly contradicting his claims, according to a source familiar with the interview.
Joe Biden’s younger brother, in closed-door testimony to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, initially told his interviewers that he was not part of a business deal involving Hunter Biden and several of his associates, according to a source familiar with the interview. However, after investigators showed him an agreement that featured his signature alongside those of Hunter Biden and his business partners ,James Biden then told legislators that he did not remember signing the agreement.
Read the full story
An Arizona county prosecutor is refusing to allow the man accused of murdering a New York mom and getting away while wearing her leggings to be extradited to New York City to face charges over concerns about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s response to violent crime.
Read the full story
More U.S. cell phone users are reporting service outages Thursday at major networks, including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, and the outage is impacting some 911 networks.
Read the full story
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has sought a 30-day extension to pay the $355 million in penalties that New York Judge Arthur Engoron imposed in New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud case against him.
Read the full story
Steve Cortes, former senior spokesman and strategist for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and current head of the League of American Workers, said there is a consensus among Americans that Chinese companies should not be allowed to buy and control American resources, including farmland.
Read the full story
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is working with a left-wing advocacy group to boost voter turnout as part of President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to get involved in elections.
The USDA worked directly with Demos, a New York-based group that helped draft Biden’s Executive Order 14019, according to records obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Read the full story
Mortgage applications sank last week as high prices and rising mortgage rates have increased unaffordability for average Americans, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.
The total volume of mortgage loan applications for homes declined 10.6% in the week ending Feb. 16 compared to the previous week when seasonally adjusted, while the purchase index fell 10% in that same time, according to a release from the MBA. The drop in applications follows an increase in the average interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for homes under $766,550 to 7.06% from 6.87% the week prior, intensifying housing unaffordability.
Read the full story
Legislation that would allow Tennessee counties and cities to reduce or eliminate the state sales tax on groceries is advancing through the Tennessee General Assembly as more states look for opportunities to defray the effects of inflation on citizens.
The bill would allow all “counties and municipalities, by resolution or ordinance” set the “tax on the retail sale of food and food ingredients” at any “rate less than” the state’s sales tax rate.
Read the full story
Rep. Debbie Dingell developed a severe nerve condition from a mandatory swine flu vaccine, which initially made her “scared to death” to get a COVID-19 vaccine, she told a congressional hearing last week.
The Michigan Democrat might want to reconsider her now-unquestioning enthusiasm for COVID vaccines, including those made through traditional methods, in light of a massive international study of “adverse events of special interest” funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and set to be published in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal Vaccine.
Read the full story
The recessions currently plaguing several major countries around the world could be what drags the U.S. into an economic downturn of its own, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Germany announced on Monday that it fell into a technical recession in the fourth quarter of 2023, after reporting its second month in a row of negative growth, following several other top nations experiencing economic difficulties. While the U.S. has managed to avoid a recession due to its size and diverse industries, foreign economic malaise may drag the U.S. economy down through changes to trade and global inflation that would lead to a loss for American businesses, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Read the full story
According to an online free speech expert, the U.S. military is directly working to censor “right-wing populist groups” on the internet.
“An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outlet,” Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week. “Essentially, infrastructure that was created [and] initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones – basically the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.”
Read the full story
A politically-connected Midwestern nonprofit focused on “building bridges” with China has extensive ties to groups and individuals who are affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) influence arm, the Daily Caller News Foundation has found.
The Missouri-based United States Heartland China Association (USHCA), a 501(c)3 bipartisan organization, characterizes its mission as “building bridges and promoting opportunities” between U.S. officials and businesses in Midwestern states and China. USHCA runs a number of U.S.-China programs, including agricultural roundtables, business seminars, student forums and political junkets to China.
Read the full story
Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Paula Skahan was publicly reprimanded in a disciplinary action by the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct (TBJC) on Wednesday as a result of her actions that led to Tennessee briefly freeing a man in 2022 after he was previously sentenced to a 162-year prison sentence.
Skahan in 2022 arranged for the release of Courtney Anderson, who spent months outside of prison before Tennessee Court of Appeals Judge J. Ross Dyer ruled Skahan “illegally” released him and ordered Anderson remanded back into the state’s custody.
Read the full story
The Office of Global Michigan is encouraging “everyday Americans” to volunteer to house illegal immigrants and “make a difference by welcoming refugees from around the world.”
“Volunteers [are] needed” to “support refugee resettlement efforts in Michigan,” says the office’s website, which was recently launched by the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Development.
Read the full story
The Republican led South Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee passed hate crime legislation Wednesday, which will advance to the Senate floor for a full vote.
“When a person commits a violent crime as defined in Section 16-1-60 or commits assault by mob in the second degree as defined in Section 16-3-210(C) and the trier of fact determines beyond a reasonable doubt that the offense was committed against a victim who was intentionally selected in whole or in part because of the person’s belief or perception regarding the victim’s race, color, religion, sex, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability, whether or not the perception is correct, the person is subject to additional penalties…” says the text of S.615.
Read the full story
In a statement released Tuesday, Governor Glenn Youngkin committed to see through his plans to bring the Washington Wizards and Capitals to Alexandria, Virginia with a new sports and entertainment district complete with new facilities for the teams to play.
Youngkin made the declaration after a breakdown of negotiations with two major unions resulted in their opposition to the arena, and after Virginia Senator L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) successfully stalled a Senate bill necessary for the arena project to begin and now controls the fate of the House version of the bill after it landed in the Senate Finance Committee she chairs.
Read the full story
Former President Donald Trump maintains an 8-point lead over President Joe Biden in a new poll of Georgia voters that was conducted as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis testified in a hearing to determine whether she should be disqualified from her prosecution of the former president.
The Emerson College pollsters found 48 percent of Georgia voters support Trump, and 42 percent support Biden, giving the former president an 8-point lead of the incumbent. Biden was declared the winner in Georgia during the 2020 elections with a margin of less than 12,000 votes.
Read the full story
As Ohio’s March 19 primary begins today with early in-person voting, state senators are moving ahead with election-related legislation to stop foreign campaign contributions.
Senate Bills 215 and 137 are planned to go before the chamber’s General Government Committee.
Read the full story
An Arizona affiliate of Catholic Charities USA has reportedly notified 30 of its employees that they will be terminated on March 30 after Republicans in the U.S. Senate successfully blocked a controversial border bill.
News that Catholic Community Services (CCS) of Southern Arizona now plans to reduce its apparent “temporary sheltering and transportation assistance” of illegal immigrants who were released into the United States by government officials surfaced through a memorandum written by Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher to the Board of Supervisors on February 16.
Read the full story
The National Association of Scholars’ Civics Alliance coalition released a comprehensive report critiquing Connecticut’s social studies standards, which is the state’s guide for teachers detailing what students should be learning from Pre-K through 12th grade.
The 34-page report, titled “Disowned Yankees: How Connecticut’s Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students,” details how the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) produced the curriculum, the result of implementing the curriculum, as well as “recommendations for how to fix the adoption process and the substance of Connecticut’s social studies instruction, by substantive revision of the Standards.”
Read the full story
by Debra Heine A girls’ basketball game between two Massachusetts high schools was cut short earlier this month after three female players were injured while playing against a six foot tall trans-identified biological male. On February 6, the Collegiate Charter School of Lowell forfeited against KIPP Academy after only 16 minutes of play, ItemLive reported. KIPP was leading the February 6 game 31-14, but the game reportedly went into the books as a 10-0 forfeit win for KIPP. A video posted on YouTube by “Inside Lowell” shows a Collegiate Charter School girl being dragged to the ground like a ragdoll while wrestling for a rebound with the much larger biological male player from KIPP Academy. The girl can be seen grabbing her back and wincing in pain as she tried to get back up off the floor. According to ItemLive’s sources, the biological male player is “more than 6 feet tall with facial hair.” He has reportedly been on the roster since the beginning of the season. “A man hitting a woman used to be called domestic abuse. Now it’s called brave,” said former competitive swimmer Riley Gaines on X. “Who watches this and actually thinks this is ‘compassionate, kind, and inclusive’?” Prior…
Read the full story
Denver’s public school system has been taking in as many as 250 new students a week since the new year, which it attributes to the increase in the number of migrants arriving in the city.
Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero called the situation an “unprecedented challenge” in a message to the community posted on the district’s website. The district said the influx of new students will cost an additional $837,000 “to support additional needs across the system.”
Read the full story
The Intelligence Community of the United States of America has been weaponized against the incumbent leader’s political opposition, having even turned the spy agencies of our closest allies against the leading Republican candidate.
This is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn if a bombshell report released last week is accurate.
Read the full story