New York education bureaucrats are rapidly and gleefully ditching standards for what children in public schools should learn. Why then are they increasing their imposition on private yeshivas?
The State Board of Regents has finalized new regulatory oversight of yeshivas, and the standards by which these and other private schools can demonstrate that their education is “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in government-run schools.
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He wears a rosary on his wrist, attends Mass weekly, and remains the only Catholic president in United States history other than John F. Kennedy. And yet, a clear majority of Catholic voters would prefer that President Biden not return to the Oval Office.
When asked if the president should run for a second term, 58.4% replied “no.” Only 22.2% said “yes.” Rough results, but Biden shouldn’t take them too personally.
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Abortion advocates say that new laws limiting access to abortion will deny women necessary health care, like treatment for miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. They say the new laws could prohibit IUDs (intrauterine devices) and IVF (in vitro fertilization).
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When Congress authorized $80 billion this year to beef up Internal Revenue Service enforcement and staffing, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy invoked the language of war to warn that “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.”
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In the final weeks of the 2022 midterm campaign, Pennsylvania Democratic candidates continue to bet big on abortion. It was the dominant theme of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman’s first rally in Philadelphia. And the party’s candidates in swing U.S. House districts, like the 1st in suburban Philadelphia and the 17th in suburban Pittsburgh, are hoping that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will entice voters to go blue.
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A team of engineers from Michigan State University led by Associate Professor Annick Anctil projects that rising fuel efficiency standards for internal combustion engine (ICEV) vehicles in the U.S. could lower their greenhouse gas emissions to be close to those of electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030.
The analysis, published earlier this year in the Journal of Environmental Management, should give pause to EV-obsessed policymakers doling out lavish tax credits for purchasing EVs and banning the sale of new ICE vehicles. At least twelve states aim to phase out sales of new, gas-powered cars by 2035.
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As the generic ballot closed over the course of the summer, the battle for the House of Representatives has moved into the forefront of political analysis. House races tend to develop late, and it is too soon to predict with specificity what the outcome is going to be. But we can probably set some reasonable bounds for expectations at this point.
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Since being named special counsel in October 2020, John Durham has investigated or indicted several unscrupulous anti-Trump informants. But he has spared the FBI agents who handled them, raising suspicions he’s letting investigators off the hook in his waning investigation of misconduct in the Russiagate probe.
In recent court filings, Durham has portrayed the G-men as naive recipients of bad information, tricked into opening improper investigations targeting Donald Trump and obtaining invalid warrants to spy on one of his advisers.
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Strung out on drugs half her life, Brandi Edwards, 29, said the longest she held a job before getting sober four years ago was “about two and a half months.”
“I worked at an AT&T call center, a day-care center for a month, fast food places, but I had to take drugs to get out of bed in the morning and when I did show up, I wasn’t productive,” the West Virginia mother of three told RealClearInvestigations. “The first paycheck came along and I was out of there.”
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Parents are understandably concerned with the divisive curricula now taught in America’s schools. Ideas like critical race theory and extreme gender ideology often replace the subjects traditionally taught in core classes like science and social studies. Students no longer learn the importance of our nation’s history. They learn a warped worldview that divides us into the oppressors and the oppressed.
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Schools on American military bases, educating almost 70,000 children of service personnel, push the same anti-racism curriculum found in America’s most liberal school districts, with the goal of preparing these students for lives dedicated to a global citizenship meant to displace American citizenship and the American way of life.
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America’s big auto companies, less than 15 years since they were bailed out of bankruptcy following the Clinton-Bush recession of 2008, are betraying the American people out of their greed for government cash and favor. Their “net zero” plans – in conjunction with the globalist dictators and the Biden Administration – include eliminating huge numbers of jobs and devastating major segments of the U.S. economy.
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Until Wednesday, there was a routine at the White House.
The national average for a gallon of gasoline would drop, and the president’s staff would publicly celebrate the dip as more evidence that the decision to tap the strategic petroleum reserve was helping the everyday American. And while gas was not, and is still not, cheap, the downward streak was undeniable. It lasted 99 consecutive days.
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Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.
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You may suffer from autoimmune pulmonary alveolar proteinosis, or aPAP, but you might not know it yet. Importantly, your doctor may not know it either.
Thousands of Americans suffer from aPAP, a rare autoimmune lung disease caused by the progressive build-up of an oily substance normally present in the lungs called surfactant. In healthy people, surfactant forms a thin layer that lines the tiny air sacs (alveoli) of the lungs and helps them function while we breath. In people with aPAP, the surfactant over-accumulates, making the layer thicker in some air sacs and filling others, blocking oxygen from moving out of the air sacs and into the bloodstream.
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The polling industry has faced criticism for underestimating Republicans through several cycles. Pollster Nate Cohn recently wrote that the 2022 polls could do it again. These continued misjudgments can undermine public faith in how the media covers elections. Worse still, they can affect the result of close races.
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A dozen Republican state attorneys general are fed up with what they view as the leftward drift and self-dealing of their nonpartisan national association and are asking the organization to change its ways and return roughly $280 million in assets to the states.
The National Association of Attorneys General was created in 1907 as a bipartisan forum for all state and territory attorneys general. Over the last year, several of the group’s Republican members have asserted that NAAG has become a partisan litigation machine that improperly benefits from the many tort settlements it helps to engineer.
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In recent years, Americans have heard some new theories about the world from progressive activists and academics. First, that “your truth” is what matters, not the truth; you can be whoever you say you are. Second, that there is no need to debate “the other side” or confront its ideas. And third, that using the language of the oppressed – no matter how privileged you are yourself – means that you don’t need to listen or think about what would really help people.
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Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch obtained evidence that a computer contractor working under the direction of Hillary Clinton’s legal team destroyed subpoenaed records that the former secretary of state stored on a private email server she originally kept at her New York home, and then lied to investigators about it. Yet no charges were brought against Clinton, her lawyers, or her paid consultant.
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by Ross Pomeroy For people sleeping in close proximity to someone else, the first yawn in the morning can be chemical warfare. “Yuck, your breath reeks!” Yes, morning breath can be quite foul. Decreased saliva levels during sleep prevent normal flushing of oral bacteria. As you lie immobilized at night, they can rapidly proliferate, emitting foul-smelling chemical compounds in the process. Researchers at the University of Helsinki recently sought to characterize these gases in unprecedented detail. So they recruited fifteen men and fifteen women, all healthy and between the ages of 21 and 63, to hold their breath for five seconds then exhale into a 1.3-Liter sampling bag immediately after waking up. Subjects then brushed their teeth as they normally would and repeated the breath-collecting process. They returned their sampling bags to the laboratory the same day. When the scientists analyzed the morning breath samples using mass spectrometry, they found sulfur compounds like methanethiol and dimethyl sulfide to be present in large amounts, and clearly contributing to the putrid smell. Chemist Derek Lowe previously described the odor of these sulfur compounds as “the smell of things that will kill us – rotten food, dangerous vapors, probably carnivore excretion/body odors as well”. Thankfully, noxious…
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Many American voters head into midterm elections wearied by political polarization. Subjects that might have merely led to an uncomfortable dinner table conversation yesterday are more likely to be relationship-ending today.
It’s often assumed that political positions come with a Democrat or Republican party label. But beneath many of the most divisive issues of our time – think the COVID-19 pandemic response, the 2020 election, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade – lies an issue that is neither red nor blue. Would you believe me if I said religious liberty is not actually a partisan issue?
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Since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson has tried to present new state laws restricting abortion as an opportunity for the nation’s largest abortion provider. “Now that we are in a world where we are no longer defending Roe,” she told Time magazine, “we have actually an opportunity to reimagine and reconstruct something better.”
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Like many retirees, Jesus Nunez knew he was due a pension but was having a hard time tracking it down. Now 66, the Burbank, Illinois, resident had worked as a painter and garage worker for the Checker Taxi Co. Inc from 1978 to 1986 and then another year for its successor concern. But when Checker Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, he never got a notice about his anticipated retirement checks. He figures he’s due about $300 per month.
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When a man in his mid-50s living in New Delhi, India first noticed some mild irritation in his right eye, he figured it would pass. But after it persisted for ten days, he thought back to an unlucky occurrence a month prior, when a hapless insect had collided with that very same eye. So he went to a doctor to get it checked.
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According to the FBI’s court-approved search warrant for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, probable cause existed to believe Donald Trump may have violated three laws by seemingly stealing 300 classified government documents from the White House, some extremely sensitive, and squirreling them away in his Florida mansion. For the public, the most arresting (no pun intended) of these allegedly violated statutes is the Espionage Act of 1917.
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Eight years ago, the Obama administration bristled at the word “recusal.” White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that the reason that top presidential adviser John Podesta would not be involved in the decision-making process involving the Keystone XL pipeline was that the State Department, not the White House, was already evaluating it “in an impartial way.” It wasn’t a “recusal,” Earnest insisted – there just was no need for Podesta to be involved.
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In celebration of New York’s new gun control law taking effect on September 1, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul claimed: “This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.”
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Union bosses and their apologists often grossly understate, or forget about altogether, regional cost-of-living differences when they are debating living standards in Right to Work states versus in forced-unionism states.
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Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, maintains that he agrees with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist, on “virtually every issue.” Sanders, in turn, has endorsed Fetterman and appeared at events with him. But if Fetterman is taking his economic advice from the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, where is he getting counsel on dealing with violent crime? Sadly for Pennsylvania voters, Fetterman seems to be taking his lead from the City of Brotherly Love’s Larry Krasner, district attorney of Philadelphia.
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In a 2021 lecture at Yale University titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani described her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.”
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Millions of dollars are being spent on pursuing ‘equity’ in our healthcare system while insisting that we do not have “equity” because our entire medical enterprise is systemically racist. To get there, some even suggest that we should prioritize care delivery by skin color.
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The pace of China’s nuclear modernization has been described as breathtaking by Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command. The increased size and sophistication of the capabilities being developed make them a strategic threat to the U.S. and its allies. Along with that threat comes the uncertainty around how large China plans to grow its force.
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“And whatever interpretive force one attaches to legislative history, the Court normally gives little weight to statements, such as those of the individual legislators, made after the bill in question has become law.” Barber v. Thomas, 560 U.S. 474, 486 (2010).
“The Court has previously found the post-enactment elucidation of the meaning of a statute to be of little relevance in determining the intent of the legislature contemporaneous to the passage of the statute.” Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578, 596 n.19 (1987).
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As workers across the country look forward to a long Labor Day weekend, we feel compelled to alert policymakers of a robust movement of manufacturing and other jobs and opportunities from Ohio to Michigan and Indiana, our home states.
We have examined the employment impact of state right-to-work laws at the county level. Right-to-work laws simply say that no worker need be compelled to join or financially support a union. These laws allow for greater worker freedom, and evidence shows that they are a powerful economic development tool. Our study found mostly positive impacts for states with such protections and an unambiguously negative impact on the Buckeye State, which lacks a right-to-work law.
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Maybe Vladimir Putin SHOULD get the Nobel Peace Prize after all.
To be sure, Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine is an affront to humanity, given his targeting of civilians. Russia even fired upon medical and humanitarian aid convoys and is using a nuclear power plant as a shield for his military operations.
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Promising new medicines could soon be available to help patients fend against this disease. Government must ensure Medicare is able to cover them.
Approximately six million Americans are living with some form of Alzheimer’s, a number poised to double over the coming decades. Citizens are living 30 years longer than a century ago, primarily due to incredible advances in the field of medicine. Future opportunities are limitless if we foster an environment that rewards rather than discourages innovation. Unfortunately, that’s not what our leaders in Washington are doing.
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It may be one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction. These links are so solidly evidenced that, for the most part, modern social scientists simply try to explain them. They’ve put forth numerous possible explanations.
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American doctors go to great lengths to maintain the highest ethical standards as they work to save thousands of desperately ill patients waiting for an organ match, as underscored in recent reporting of innovative transplant experiments using genetically modified pig hearts. China’s transplant sector, unconstrained by rigorous ethical rules, found a more expedient solution. China created a thriving transplant industry, the world’s second largest, based on a supply of organs forcibly harvested from executed prisoners – most likely prisoners of conscience.
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With the Biden administration’s announcement this week that it would continue the moratorium on student loan payments through the beginning of next year and will forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt per student, student loan forgiveness is at the top of the current political agenda. Meanwhile, there’s little talk about bringing the cost of college under control, or why the cost of college became so outrageous in the first place.
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The Biden administration’s decision to recruit nearly 90,000 new IRS auditors could have a chilling effect on small businesses and economic growth, permanently impeding our nation’s ability to recover from its current economic malaise.
As part of the misleadingly titled “Inflation Reduction Act,” President Biden and his allies secured roughly $80 billion in new IRS funding to hire 87,000 auditors. This is bad news for the American economy.
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Two months ago, explosions and gunfire tore through a Sikh house of worship in Kabul, Afghanistan. Seven attackers, reportedly part of ISIS-K, the Afghanistan affiliate of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, tried to storm the temple on a Saturday morning, throwing grenades at security guards standing at the entrance. One gunman began firing on those worshipping inside; another attacker detonated a vehicle parked outside the temple.
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CALIFORNIA CITY — California’s precariously out-of-date hybrid power grid can’t handle the state’s growing amounts of solar and wind energy coming online, with system managers already forcing repeated cutbacks in renewables and a continued reliance on conventional energy to keep the grid stable, according to state data.
The shortcomings of the transmission grid, which energy consultants in this bellwether state have warned about for years, raise the prospect that marquee products of the growing battery economy such as electric vehicles – “emission free” on the road – will be recharged mainly from traditional electricity-generating power plants: energy from fossil fuels, some of it from out of state.
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Alarm bells are sounding at the Department of Energy as the Biden administration has moved to triple the budget for the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides low-income applicants with free home and apartment renovations, such as insulation, duct-sealing, new heating systems, and kitchen appliances. The last time the program was lavished with such a surge in funds, through President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, audits and investigations uncovered a pattern of fraud, embezzlement, shoddy work, inflated expenses for parts and materials, sketchy billing, kickbacks, and gimcrack construction.
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According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, 37.3 percent of students in grades 3 through 11 met the grade-level “proficient” standard for mathematics in statewide testing for the 2022 school year. Only 55 percent measured up in literature/language arts and 63.7 in science.
To put these results in perspective, just two years earlier, 45.4 percent performed at grade level in math, while 62.4 met the standard in literature and 66.4 did so in science.
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In recent years, America has seen parents fighting back against the indoctrination of their children in public schools. School board members have been ousted from their positions, and bills combating the influence of political ideology in classrooms have been signed into law. Teachers’ unions longstanding monopolization of education policy looks like it could finally be coming to an end. With the midterms approaching, the parental-choice movement has reason to feel encouraged.
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The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago represents the logical next step in the left’s ongoing effort to destroy Donald Trump. The raid also evinces Democrats’ spiral of worry: A successful Trump return, once unthinkable to them, is looking more possible by the day. To stop it, Democrats and their anti-Trump Republican allies are prepared to shred every last norm of American due process.
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Around the country, the number of crisis pregnancy centers is on the rise. The number of abortion clinics, on the decline. And after the repeal of Roe v. Wade, according to some analysis, more than half of American women of reproductive age now live closer to a crisis pregnancy center than they do to an abortion clinic.
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Until this month, Pennsylvania owned the dubious distinction among states of most embarrassing election management. But given its own lethargy in counting votes in its primary, Arizona has now edged out the Keystone State. While Pennsylvania had problems counting the last portion of votes the evening after its primary, it took Arizona two days to count the last 20% of the vote.
As RealClearPolitics has noted before, Pennsylvania could solve its voting-administration issues by adopting Florida’s voting reforms – but Pennsylvania is hamstrung by a divided government. Arizona does not face this problem, however. For at least the next four months, Arizona will have a Republican state legislature and governor. Arizona’s governor and state legislature should enact Florida-like voting reforms before the November elections to avoid further embarrassment.
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The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.
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The frantic and deadly U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan was so disorganized that 1,450 children were evacuated without their parents, and senior leaders in Vice President Kamala Harris’ and first lady Jill Biden’s offices, as well as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked private veteran groups for assistance evacuating certain people from the country.
In the waning days of the evacuation, more than 1,000 women and girls waited more than 24 hours on dozens of buses, desperately circling the Kabul airport and trying to avoid Taliban checkpoints. Many of them were told multiple times they were not allowed to enter the airport. Now, nearly a year since the Taliban took control of the country, fewer than one-third of them have managed to flee the country.
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