Dave McCormick, Sen. Bob Casey Each Raise $8 Million amid Pause in Advertising After Attempted Trump Assassination

PA Senate Candidates

Republican U.S. Senate nominee Dave McCormick and Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) both raised over $8 million over the last quarter, even as both candidates pause at least some of their advertising in the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last Saturday.

McCormick raised slightly more than the Democratic incumbent, with his campaign reporting $8.4 million in receipts between April and June to the Federal Elections Commission. This includes a $2.06 million loan the former Trump administration official made to his own campaign.

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DNC Sends $15 Million to Battleground States Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia After Trump Selects Vance for VP

Jaimie Harrison

The Democratic National Committee confirmed the transfer of $15 million to battleground states after former President Donald Trump selected Senator JD Vance (R-OH) to serve as his vice president on the Republican ticket for president in 2024.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the party claimed the transfers to local parties would increase state coordination and give President Joe Biden a better shot at retaining the White House in November.

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Music Spotlight: Danielia Cotton

Danielia Cotton has made a name for herself in the Americana/Roots Rock world. When I heard that voice, I knew exactly why. She has opened for Gregg Allman, Bon Jovi, Robert Cray, Robert Randolph, Cristone “Kingfish” Ingram, Derek Trucks Band, and Aimee Mann.

Cotton comes from a musical family. Her mother was one of ten children, four boys and six girls. The girls formed a capella band. (Her aunt Jeannie Brooks also has a remarkable jazz solo career and is quite popular in Philadelphia.)

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Seismic Shift for Trump in 2024 Race as Democrats’ Rhetoric, Presidential Debate, Lawfare Backfire

Donald Trump and JD Vance at RNC

A seismic shift has occurred in the 2024 presidential race as the Democrats’ rhetoric, debate performance, and persistent lawfare against former President Donald Trump have appeared to backfire on them, with support for him continuing to increase, including after the assassination attempt.

Trump has been called a “threat to democracy” by Democrats, charged with numerous felony counts in federal and state cases, debated President Joe Biden with CNN moderators, and survived an assassination attempt, all of which have appeared to backfire on Democrats in the presidential race and increase the former president’s popularity as he runs to return to the White House.

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Commentary: The Economics of Early Voting

After the recent assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump, some think the race is Trump’s to lose. I tend to agree that the race is in some ways Trump’s to lose, while at the same time feel very strongly that the left is not going to simply roll over and give up on trying to keep Trump from a second term.

So it’s important to not be over-exuberant; Trump is absolutely riding high right now, from the debacle of a debate for Biden to Judge Cannon dismissing the Jack Smith documents case to surviving an assassination attempt. But the right needs to focus on what takes place between now and November 5th, specifically on how every Republican and conservative can help Trump win by doing one simple thing: casting your ballot early.

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Former U.S. Ambassador Carla Sands Discusses Trump Era Talks on Greenland Acquisition

Carla Sands

Carla Sands, former U.S. ambassador to Denmark during the Trump administration, confirmed during an exclusive interview with The Tennessee Star’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy that she was involved in the talks during the Trump administration for the U.S. to purchase the territory of Greenland, explaining how such a move would be a valuable American security interest.

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Incumbent U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn Trounces Democrat Challenger Gloria Johnson in Fundraising Battle with over $7.1 Million More Cash on Hand: FEC Data

Marsha Blackburn and Gloria Johnson

Data recently published by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows Tennessee incumbent U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) sitting on more than $7.1 million cash on hand than her leading Democratic challenger, Tennessee State Representative Gloria Johnson (D-Knoxville).

Blackburn’s cash on hand as of June 30 is reported to be $9,227,961.41 while Johnson’s reported amount is $2,050,627.43 – a total difference of $7,177,333.98.

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FBI Says It Has No Record of ‘Legacy Token’ Documents After FOIA Request

In response the a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says it has no record of any documents containing the terms “legacy token” or “legacy tokens,” despite the fact that The Tennessee Star has such a document from the FBI in its possession. 

“Based on the information you provided, we conducted a main entity record search of the Central Records System (CRS) per our standard search policy,” the FBI said in response to the FOIA request. “However, we were unable to identify records subject to the FOIPA that are responsive to your request. Therefore, your request is being closed. If you have additional information pertaining to the subject of your request, please submit a new request providing the details, and we will conduct an additional search.”

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Elon Musk Reportedly Says He’ll Unleash Around $45 Million a Month Toward Pro-Trump Super PAC

Elon Musk and Donald Trump (composite image)

Billionaire Elon Musk reportedly said he plans to commit around $45 million a month to a super political action committee (PAC) helping to elect former President Donald Trump into office come this November.

Sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal about the billionaire’s plans to further his support for the American PAC, the outlet reported. Other figures who are additionally involved in backing the group includes Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, cryptocurrency billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, former U.S. ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft and her husband Chief Executive of Alliance Resource Partners, Joe Craft.

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Pennsylvania Shooter’s Neighbors Portray Detached, Reclusive Family

Conversations by the Pennsylvania Daily Star with around two dozen neighbors near the house where Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump lived, painted a picture of a family that mostly keeps to itself and a young man who had little interaction with the neighborhood. 

Crooks lived on Milford Lane in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, in a modest, hilly, middle-class neighborhood with mostly single-story houses built in the 1950s. 

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U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn Joins Push for Senate Judiciary Committee to Hold Hearing on Assassination Attempt of Former President Donald Trump

Sen. Marsha Blackburn

Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) was among the Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans who sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) requesting that he organize a committee hearing on the circumstances leading up to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump over the weekend.

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Amtrak Trains Keep Breaking Down Despite Massive Injection of Taxpayer Cash

Amtrak Train

Amtrak, the national passenger railroad company of the U.S., continues to have routine breakdowns despite receiving massive injections of taxpayer dollars from the Biden administration, according to data from the Department of Transportation (DOT).

Since 2021, there have been 333 Amtrak train incidents reported nationwide as of July 9, 2024, slightly less than the 397 incidents that occurred between 2016 and July 2020 during former President Trump’s tenure, according to the DOT. The Biden administration, as a part of an announced $66 billion for passenger rail in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, has dedicated huge amounts of taxpayer cash to Amtrak, including $4 billion being given to the rail company near the end of 2022, according to the White House.

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Ted Cruz Unveils Bill Nixing Biden Regulation That’s Hamstringing Oil Development to Protect Tiny Lizard

Ted Cruz

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced a new bill to nix the Biden administration’s protections for a lizard species that critics argue will restrict oil and gas development.

Cruz unveiled his Congressional Review Act (CRA) bill to walk back the Biden administration’s decision to protect the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, a species that is indigenous to parts of New Mexico and western Texas, under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Cruz and other critics of the designation have asserted that the lizard’s protections are more likely intended to complicate oil and gas development in the Permian Basin, an oil- and gas-rich region of western Texas and New Mexico.

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‘Squad’ Democrat Heading for Bruising Primary Defeat, Poll Suggests

Cori Bush

Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri is facing a massive polling deficit behind her primary challenger, prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, Wesley Bell, according to a poll obtained by the New York Post on Sunday.

Bush, who like other ‘squad’ members has been vocally anti-Israel, is now up against a 23-point deficit against Bell as her primary approaches on Aug. 6, according to the poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for the CCA Action Fund. In June, fellow ‘squad’ member Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York was also confronted with a massive polling disadvantage after being outspokenly anti-Israel, going on to eventually lose his primary against now Democratic nominee George Latimer on June 25.

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Commentary: The Biden Titanic

Joe Biden

Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems.

Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of a battered American middle class and poor.

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Mar-a-Lago Case Dismissal Could Spell the End of Smith’s D.C. Prosecution and Anti-Trump Lawfare

Mar-a-Lago Documents

After surviving an assassination attempt over the weekend, Trump began the week with good news in the form of Judge Aileen Cannon dismissing special counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago case against him in a seismic ruling that could spell the end of his federal legal woes and build on his existing momentum in the national spotlight.

Smith had charged Trump in connection with his storage and retention of materials at his Mar-a-Lago estate, which the FBI raided in August of 2022. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in late 2022 to pursue the case and he brought an initial indictment in 2023. Trump pleaded not guilty though Smith in July of that year brought a superseding indictment with additional charges. The former president has long maintained he was innocent of any wrongdoing and that the case was part of a broader political witch hunt designed to derail his 2024 bid for the White House.

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Report Finds One Of Biden’s Favorite Green Industries to Miss 2030 Target by Years Despite Billions In Subsidies

Offshore Wind Farm

Offshore wind is likely to miss the Biden administration’s 2030 target for the industry despite receiving billions of dollars of subsidies, according to a Tuesday American Clean Power Association (ACP) report.

The administration has a stated goal of having the offshore wind industry provide 30 gigawatts (GW) of power by 2030, but the ACP report projects that capacity will only reach about 14 GW by then. The Biden administration has subsidized the industry to the tune of billions of dollars since assuming office in 2021, but those efforts appear unlikely to put the 2030 target in reach until at least 2033, per ACP’s analysis.

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Commentary: Alarming Number of Americans Open to Electoral Cheating

People Voting

Based on all the accusations being hurled back and forth over the past eight years, if there’s one thing everyday Americans agree on, it’s the importance of maintaining faith in our elections.

Electoral integrity is a foundational block in our republic’s Jenga tower that, if pulled away, will topple it. Unfortunately, that may be just what a small but dangerous number of Americans are hoping for.

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‘Headed For Obsolescence’: Chinese Automakers Could Be Poised to Wipe Out American Car Titans

BYD Chinese electric vehicle

American automakers will need to make major changes to their businesses if they want to remain competitive with Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) poised to flood the global market, according to analysis published by auto industry consultants.

U.S. manufacturers currently do tens of billions of dollars of business abroad, but Chinese competitors are poised to take over approximately one-third of the global market share by 2030 with particularly strong growth in Europe, South America and Asia driven by EVs and plug-in hybrids, AlixPartners projects in its report.

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Warning Signs About Secret Service Emerged Months Before Trump Assassination Attempt

Secret Service

Driving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris by an undetected bomb. Refusing extra resources for a presidential candidate. Admitting an agent on a White House detail assaulted her supervisor.

Long before the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday night such focused a harsh light on the Secret Service, the presidential security agency was already facing difficult questions about its capability, training, recruitment and emphasis on diversity.

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Pennsylvania Democratic Party Silent amid Bipartisan Condemnation of Trump Assassination Attempt

State Senator Sharif Street

The Pennsylvania Democratic Party did not respond to The Pennsylvania Daily Star when asked about a statement after former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt in the commonwealth on Saturday.

Despite every member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation issuing statements expressing solidarity with Trump or condemning political violence, the Pennsylvania Democrats had yet to release a statement on their website, or social media accounts including X, Facebook or Instagram, by press time.

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Pennsylvania Rally Attendee ‘We Thought the Shooter Was in the Crowd’

Butler, Pennsylvania Trump rally

An attendee at former President Donald Trump’s Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania told The Pennsylvania Daily Star that attendees feared the shooter stood among the crowd and felt relief only when Trump rose to his feet and raised his fist.

The attendee, who declined to be named, is from Scott Township, a suburb seven miles southwest of downtown Pittsburgh. He said he and his friends viewed the rally about 200 feet away, from Trump’s, left when Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate the former president.

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Secret Service Claims 21-Officer Butler Township Police Department Responsible for Building Used by Would-be Trump Assassin

Anthony Guglielmi

A spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service on Sunday appeared to blame the Butler Township Police Department (BTPD) for failing to secure the building that would-be assassin Thomas Crooks used to shoot former President Donald Trump before Crooks was killed at the rally on Saturday.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Gugliemi claimed the agency was not responsible for securing the building, according to The New York Times, which reported it “was outside of the designated perimeter of the Trump rally, so it was secured by local law enforcement, not Secret Service agents.”

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Congressman Who Introduced Bill to Strip Trump of Secret Service Detail Mum After Assassination Attempt

Rep. Bennie Thompson

The office of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS-02) was silent Monday when asked by The Tennessee Star whether Thompson, who introduced a bill that would have stripped former President Trump of his Secret Service detail, had reconsidered that bill in light of Trump’s near assassination on Saturday. 

Thompson’s spokeswoman, Yasmine Brown, did not return a comment request from The Star. 

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Pennsylvania Fire Captain Resigns After Celebrating Attempted Trump Assassination

Tony Bendele

Tony Bendele, a social media creator and trained firefighter in Pennsylvania, claimed he resigned his position as a captain in the Sunbury Fire Department on Monday after he expressed disappointment when an attempted assassin failed to kill former President Donald Trump at the Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“Too bad it didn’t hit him square,” Bendele reportedly wrote in a now-deleted post to his Facebook page. A photographer, Bendele has more than 20,000 followers on the social media platform.

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Arizona Lawmakers Rally in Support of Trump After Assassination Attempt

Jake Hoffman, Kari Lake and Donald Trump

Arizona lawmakers and political officials issued public statements and interviews in support of former President Donald Trump following an assaination attempt during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. 

The FBI has identified the suspected shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. The attack, which occurred just as Trump began his speech, resulted in the death of former fire chief Corey Comperatore and critically injured two others before Crooks was killed by the U.S. Secret Service. Trump suffered a grazed bullet to the ear and later said, “It was God alone.”

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Navy’s Suicide Rate Soars to Record High in First Three Months of 2024

Navy Funeral

The Navy reported a record-high number of suicides in the first three months of 2024 amid previous reports of poor quality of life and high stress for members of the branch, according to new data from the Pentagon.

There have been 24 reported suicides among sailors in the first quarter of 2024, the highest quarterly sum the service has seen since 2018, which was the first year such data was made available, according to the Pentagon. A service wellness survey conducted in February by the Navy found that more than a third of sailors were suffering from “severe or extreme levels of stress” in 2023, up from roughly a quarter who reported so in 2019.

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New Federal Rule Implemented to Protect Military Bases from Foreign Land Purchases

Camp Blaz

The United States Treasury Department is enacting a new federal rule that aims to combat the rise in foreign entities strategically purchasing American land in close proximity to military bases.

According to Fox News, the new regulation will utilize a law passed in 2018 to expand the ability of the Treasury’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to analyze the consequences of foreign purchases of real estate, in order to possibly exert control over such transactions or asset transfers.

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Alaska Natives File Lawsuit Challenging Federal Overreach in Wake of SCOTUS ‘Chevron’ Ruling

Oil Drilling

Alaska Natives are fighting back against the Biden administration’s decision to shut down oil and gas development in northern Alaska, which they say is vital to the prosperity and well being of their communities. 

The Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat (VOICE), a nonprofit advocacy group for Native-American communities living on the state’s North Slope, filed a lawsuit Monday against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland over the final BLM’s final rule blocking 13 million acres in their region to oil and gas development.

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