“Crime went down under Biden, and crime went up under Trump,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden similarly claimed. And fact-checkers, at places like Politifact, rate Biden’s statement as “true.”
Read the full story
Just over half of Americans now say they would support the mass deportation of illegal migrants, a poll released Thursday found.
The 51 percent who approve of the action includes 42 percent of Democrats, as well as 68 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of independents, according to the Axios Vibes/The Harris Poll survey. Approximately two-thirds of respondents believe illegal immigration is a legitimate crisis as President Joe Biden’s administration has seen record numbers of border crossings.
Read the full story
While we have been extensively reporting on former President Donald Trump’s significant increase in support compared to 2020 among working class voters, minorities, and young people, one group of Americans appears to be shifting away from Trump at the margins – seniors. Voters over age 65 have shown a shift away from Trump in recent polls that amounts to as much as ten percentage points compared to 2020.
Trump’s highest level of success in 2020 was among voters over 65, with the former President winning seniors by five points, 52 percent to 47 percent. However, several recent polls show Trump losing seniors to Biden by around ten points. The March New York Times/Siena College poll shows President Joe Biden leading with seniors 51 percent to 42 percent.
Read the full story
House Republicans are demanding answers from the Biden administration after newly surfaced documents show that about 320,000 illegal immigrants from Latin America were flown into cities across the United States amid already record-high numbers of migrant encounters at the southern Border.
Read the full story
Dr. Robert Trenschel, chief executive officer of Yuma Regional Medical Center l told the House Committee on Homeland Security in February that the influx of illegal immigrants seeking medical services has skyrocketed over the past two years.
Guess who’s picking up the tab for the uninsured patients, many of who arrive suffering from major illnesses or ailments?
Read the full story
Eau Claire residents are speaking out against a plan to relocate potentially hundreds of Somali refugees to the northwest Wisconsin community without the consent of elected city officials.
One Eau Claire County resident who spoke to The Wisconsin Daily Star said the relocation effort amounts to “taxation without representation.”
Read the full story
Taking a page from a Florida plan to bring tax relief to families, two Badger State Republican legislators are pushing a bill that would create a sales tax exemption on baby-related products.
State Representative David Steffen (R-Howard) and State Senator Jesse James (R-Altoona) recently introduced the “Tiny Tot Tax Cut” to help fight inflation where it can hurt families the most.
Read the full story
As Donald Trump met with voters Tuesday in Iowa’s second-largest city, a new poll found Hawkeye State Republicans aren’t happy about the former president’s recent criticisms of their popular governor.
But the poll, it should be noted, was conducted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ polling firm — an organization that has failed to provide background information on other positive DeSantis polls.
Read the full story
Conservative firebrand Kari Lake is coming back to her home state to stump for Trump, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum is paying cash for campaign contributions, and Chris Christie says he’s got the meat.
Here’s a look at the latest news from the presidential campaign trail in our Road to ’24 Roundup.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden held his first presidential re-election campaign event on Saturday at the Philadelphia Convention Center, making strong appeals to his left-wing base.
Biden appeared alongside organized-labor activists and mentioned in the first few seconds of his oration that when he thinks of working Americans, he especially values the ones who associate with causes he finds politically congenial.
Read the full story
One day before Joe Biden heads to a Saturday Philadelphia rally, U.S. Representatives Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA-14) and Dan Meuser (R-PA-9) excoriated him in a press call over quality of life issues.
Joined by Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas, the two lawmakers blasted the president for seeking reelection in 2024, insisting Biden has made life worse for Americans on virtually every facet affected by public policy. They mentioned that inflation rages, real wages slump, energy production languishes, gas prices rise, fentanyl use spreads, reading and math scores tumble and crime swells.
Read the full story
The writing appears to be on the wall for controversial Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, who is running out of time and friends in the Wisconsin State Senate.
Several legislative sources told The Wisconsin Daily Star that Wolfe doesn’t have enough votes to survive confirmation in the Wisconsin Senate, a reality that would bring her tenure as the administrative head of state elections regulation to an unceremonious end.
Read the full story
Lefty-led LinkedIn is censoring anti-woke crusader Vivek Ramaswamy’s account, the GOP presidential candidate says.
The Ohio entrepreneur and political outsider fired off a tweet Thursday morning declaring, “Big Tech election interference has begun.”
Read the full story
Lauri Badura lost her son Archie to an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2014. Back then, she had no idea what the synthetic opiod was.
Now, the Oconomowoc activist who has committed her life to fighting the scourge of the deadly drug knows better than any that “fentanyl is America’s new ‘F’ word.’”
Read the full story
Well over two months have passed since a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, less than a mile from Pennsylvania’s border, and President Joe Biden hasn’t visited affected communities in either state. Pennsylvania lawmakers are urging him to do so.
Six weeks ago Biden said he would “be out there at some point.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether he has yet scheduled a visit. (Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg first went to the site more than two weeks after the derailment.)
Read the full story
Former President Donald Trump will speak to the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition’s 23rd Annual Spring Kick-Off later this month.
The early frontrunner in the Republican presidential nomination chase will remotely address the conference at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 22 at the Horizon Events Center in suburban Des Moines.
Read the full story
Recent reports that China’s claimed “weather” balloon was taking multiple images of U.S. military sites and sending them back to the communist nation are raising greater national security alarms.
U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is demanding the Biden administration release all information available on the spy balloon that invaded U.S. air space in late January and early February.
Read the full story
Taking a different position than his old boss on a key foreign policy issue, former Vice President Mike Pence told a gathering of Iowans Saturday that the U.S. must continue to help provision Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression.
While he repeatedly trumpeted “Trump-Pence” successes, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate definitely differs with potential top presidential race rivals, former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on U.S. involvement in the war-torn European country.
Read the full story
In the wake of growing support for the idea that COVID-19 originated in a lab in China, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08) is reintroducing a bill requiring the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the pandemic.
Gallagher’s COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 comes back as the U.S. Department of Energy concludes at least with some confidence that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely arose from a lab leak. The agency came to that conclusion based on a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and certain members of Congress.
Read the full story
It’s time to open up the classified pandemic files, says U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
With revelations the U.S. Department of Energy now believes a lab leak was the likely cause of the COVID-19 outbreak, Gallagher is calling on the Biden administration to declassify the intelligence surrounding the origins of the deadly coronavirus.
Read the full story
The Biden administration’s woke Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) policies are putting politics ahead of people and hurting retirees savings, a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges.
The complaint, filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) on behalf of two Waukesha County residents, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting the U.S. Department of Labor from implementing its controversial ESG rule, pending the resolution of the lawsuit. Ultimately, the suit seems a declamatory judgment that the rule violates federal law on administrative powers.
Read the full story
State Senator Michael Rulli (R-OH-Salem) this week castigated President Joe Biden for failing to visit East Palestine, Ohio in the aftermath of the train derailment and controlled toxic chemical burn.
Speaking on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio show, Rulli described the president’s failure to visit communities surrounding the site where a 53-car train crashed on February 3. Rail company Norfolk Southern subsequently conducted a controlled vent and burn of five of the rail cars containing vinyl chloride. Biden did however visit Ukraine and Poland early this week to express his ongoing support for Ukraine’s military struggle against Russian encroachment — a trip that didn’t escape the state lawmaker’s notice.
Read the full story
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s opposition to Norfolk Southern Corp.’s handling of its East Palestine, Ohio train derailment contrasts strongly with his initial satisfaction with the controlled vent and burn of the rail vehicle’s toxic cargo.
The 53-car train with some cars carrying vinyl chloride derailed on February 3 in the village of about 5,000 residents one-quarter mile west of Beaver County in Pennsylvania. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the train went off the rail as a result of a defective axle.
Read the full story
The longest-serving governor in U.S. history says the Democratic National Committee made a huge mistake in turning its back on Iowa.
Terry Branstad, a Republican who served a record six terms as Iowa governor, tells The Iowa Star the DNC decision to cast aside the Hawkeye State’s preeminent position as host of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses will prove costly.
Read the full story
Demanding that the Biden administration “trust the science,” U.S. Reps. Tom Tiffany (R-WI-07) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO-03) are reintroducing a bill calling on the re-populated gray wolf to be removed from the Endangered Species List.
The Trust the Science Act also would require wolf populations to be managed by states, not by “one-size-fits-all” federal government regulations.
Read the full story
Having received an appointment to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee this week, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is poised to play a major role in this year’s fight over raising the debt ceiling.
Earlier this week, Blackburn joined her Utah Republican colleague Mike Lee in penning a letter, signed by 22 of their fellow senators, insisting a rise in the federal debt limit must only happen as part of a deal to pare back government spending. In an interview with The Tennessee Star, Blackburn explained her view that fiscal circumstances demand such an agreement so debt does not snowball into an even more unmanageable burden on American families.
Read the full story
Numerous university think tanks have had national political leaders as figureheads. The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement isn’t unique in that regard. What does set the center apart from similar institutions — besides its recent immersion in national scandal — is its limited research output.
The Penn Biden Center is undergoing intense and somewhat bipartisan criticism for having housed nearly a dozen classified government records after Joe Biden used the space as his main D.C. office from 2017 to 2019 while also nominally working as a professor. The documents were discovered last November and other restricted federal materials turned up this month in the president’s Delaware home. Some of the records were generated when Biden served as a U.S. senator and others materialized when he was vice president.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden’s D.C.-based think tank operated by the University of Pennsylvania reportedly held a two-day “bootcamp” last year during which congressional staffers were urged to support greater cooperation between the United States and China.
The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement has become the subject of heightened public attention in light of revelations earlier this month that Biden, who used the establishment as his main D.C. office, kept classified federal documents there.
Read the full story
A Democratic California congressman this week weighed in on President Joe Biden’s classified-document scandal, characterizing the president’s housing of restricted records in his University of Pennsylvania office and his Delaware home as indefensible.
A member of the House Oversight and Armed Services committees, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) told Fox News that Biden warrants scrutiny for keeping numerous records he obtained during his earlier service as a U.S. senator and later as vice president. Khanna noted that the law requires classified federal documents to be kept in “sensitive compartmented information facilities” (SCIFs). While presidents can sometimes temporarily designate rooms within their personal properties as SCIFs, Biden has never suggested any spaces in his home or office were deemed to be such areas.
Read the full story
The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement, the University of Pennsylvania think tank of which President Joe Biden was once the de facto leader, has had no publicized activity for nearly a year and its future is uncertain.
Biden reportedly used the Washington, D.C.-based center as his main D.C. office for much of the time between the end of his vice presidency in 2017 and his presidential run in 2020. From 2017 to 2019, Biden received approximately $900,000 in salary for a Penn professorship that did not require him to teach regular classes.
Read the full story
Revelations that President Joe Biden kept classified federal documents at his University of Pennsylvania office in Washington, D.C., have brought renewed scrutiny to his relationship with the university — and the role many Penn professors had in persuading his administration to kill a Justice Department project combatting Chinese espionage.
Read the full story
A review by The Pennsylvania Daily Star of output from the Penn Biden Center, the foreign-policy think tank established in 2017 to coincide with the start of Joe Biden’s professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests the center has produced little to no original scholarly work.
The Washington, D.C.-based center has drawn heavy media scrutiny after news came out earlier this month that nearly a dozen classified federal documents were housed there until last November. Biden reportedly used the location as his main D.C. office after his vice presidency ended and before he became president.
Read the full story
“Today, Penn’s relationship with China is strong, and continues to grow.”
That’s how the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Global website still refers to the Philadelphia-based Ivy League school’s association with the communist-run nation.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden’s former private office in Washington, D.C., where roughly a dozen classified documents were discovered earlier last November, was recently a site for high-profile University of Pennsylvania internships.
Administrators of the Philadelphia-based Ivy League school brought the former vice president aboard as a professor in the winter of 2017 to coincide with the “soft opening” of the 13,800-square-foot Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Just under a year later, the think tank officially commenced operations with a stated aim of engaging “our fellow citizens in shaping this world, while ensuring the gains of global engagement are widely shared.”
Read the full story
U.S. Representative Dave Joyce (R-OH-14) is encouraging fellow congresspersons to get behind a resolution he introduced to shield American industry from new disclosure requirements meant to advance leftist environmental policy.
Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed requirements for publicly traded companies to disclose information about the “climate-related risks that are reasonably likely to have a material impact on their business, results of operations, or financial condition….”
Read the full story
U.S. Representatives Mike Gallagher (R-WI-8) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL-8) sent a letter this week to the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) opposing its decision to let TikTok run commercials during recent college football halftime shows.
The two congressmen are sponsors of a measure to ban the video-sharing application from all Americans’ computing devices. Gallagher and other Republican members of Wisconsin’s U.S. House delegation this month successfully encouraged Democratic Governor Tony Evers to prohibit the app’s download or use on any state-owned computers or phones. Numerous other state governments as well as the federal government no longer permit the program’s download or use by public entities.
Read the full story
Following the signing of five new executive orders by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Sunday night, TikTok is now prohibited on all state-owned or leased devices.
Just moments after taking the formal oath of office for his second term, Governor Mike DeWine issued five executive orders.
Read the full story
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) reported on Friday that his office discovered 630 cases of possible criminal voter fraud since he took office four years ago.
Incidents include 510 cases of potential voting by noncitizens, 97 instances of people possibly voting in more than one state and 23 allegations of election fraudsters using dead persons’ registrations. The department referred all of these cases to law enforcement, according to LaRose’s Year in Review 2022 newsletter.
Read the full story
A right-leaning election reform outfit on Wednesday denounced the current version of legislation to reform the Electoral Count Act, particularly a provision urged by Democratic election attorney Marc Elias.
The original act was enacted in 1887 to prevent presidential election crises such as that of 1876, during which three states submitted competing groups of electors, forcing Congress to determine how to resolve the count. Ultimately Republican Rutherford B. Hayes emerged victorious over Democrat Samuel Tilden.
Read the full story
U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Tina Smith (D-MN) filed legislation this week to forgive student-loan debt for new members of the agriculture industry.
Their bill, the Student Loan Forgiveness for Farmers and Ranchers Act, would cancel significant educational debt for those qualifying as “a beginning farmer or rancher” as well as minority, women, and veteran farmers.
Read the full story
In the wake of Elon Musk’s indication that he will resign as chief executive officer of the social-media platform Twitter, Nashville-based journalist and sportscaster Jason Whitlock is suggesting himself as an apt replacement.
Musk tweeted out a poll to Twitter users last weekend asking whether they wished him to remain as the website’s CEO or leave the post. The survey garnered 17 million responses, 57.5 percent of whom voted for Musk’s departure. The founder of the auto company Tesla and the spacecraft creator SpaceX acquired Twitter in late October for $44 billion and is expected to remain the platform’s owner while giving up direction of the company to another individual whom he has not yet selected.
Read the full story
U.S. Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI-8) this week touted an emerging effort in both houses of Congress to ban the video-sharing application TikTok nationwide.
Gallagher and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) penned an opinion piece for The Washington Post last month insisting Americans should not have access to the app. In a discussion with WISN CHANNEL 12 on Monday, Gallagher said he will introduce bipartisan legislation to that effect this month and he anticipates it will get a vote early next year.
Read the full story
Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson wrote jointly with several colleagues to President Joe Biden this week urging him to reverse major elements of his anti-fossil-fuel agenda.
The letter from the senators takes issue with several actions the White House has taken to hinder investment in and use of oil, natural gas and coal in an effort the administration insists is important to lessening global warming.
Read the full story
Republican members of Congress from Wisconsin this week called on Democratic Governor Tony Evers to end all state-government usage of the video-sharing application known as TikTok.
The app, which has garnered about 80 million monthly active users since its release in 2016, is run by the Chinese technology corporation ByteDance. Recent reporting indicates the communist Chinese government is using the program to mine data from TikTok users aggressively and track some Americans’ whereabouts.
Read the full story
U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) retires at the end of the year, but before he does, he hopes to have a hand in reenergizing openness toward global trade, a policy perspective that hasn’t been ascendant in the Biden administration or the preceding Trump administration.
In a guest column for the D.C.-based Hill newspaper, Portman and his Democratic Delaware colleague Chris Coons called on Congress to pass a legislative package facilitating foreign trade agreements. The lawmakers particularly urged enactment of their Trading System Preservation Act. The act would enable the president to iron out industry-specific trade deals with other nations that are part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and would allow negotiation of comprehensive agreements with Ecuador, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and Kenya.
Read the full story
Democrats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives’ Philadelphia Delegation on Thursday took the arrival of 28 illegal immigrants into their municipality as occasion to celebrate Philadelphia declaring itself a “sanctuary city.”
State Representative Morgan Cephus (D-Philadelphia), chair of the delegation, also disputed the notion that the migrants bussed in from Texas should be deemed unlawful entrants, despite the fact that they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. He noted that they secured “temporary protective status” by U.S. border agencies.
Read the full story
Joining an effort to kill a new Biden-administration regulation to advance the manufacture of electric vehicles, the Columbus-based Buckeye Institute filed a brief against the rule in federal court last week.
In so doing, the pro-free-market think tank joined the state of Texas and other petitioners in asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to throw out tightened greenhouse-gas emission standards. The Environmental Protection Agency designed the new standards last year to further President Joe Biden’s objective to make all newly manufactured vehicles in the U.S. electric-powered by 2030.
Read the full story
Ohio Republican J.D. Vance prevailed in his race Tuesday against U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH-13) for the U.S. Senate seat from which Republican Rob Portman is retiring this year.
With 95 percent of the state’s voting precincts reporting at 11:15 p.m. on Election Night, Vance was beating Ryan 53.63 percent to 46.37 percent and NBC News called the race for the Republican. Vance thus secured a key victory for his party’s effort to retake the Senate majority. The win by the attorney, author and venture capitalist also boosts the wing of the GOP most favorable toward former President Donald Trump who enthusiastically endorsed Vance earlier this year.
With 58.27 percent of the state’s 8,933 voting precincts reporting at 10 p.m. on Election Day, Vance was beating Ryan 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent. The Republican thus appeared to secure a key victory for his party’s effort to retake the Senate majority. The projected win by the attorney, author and venture capitalist also boosts the wing of the GOP most favorable toward former President Donald Trump who enthusiastically endorsed Vance earlier this year.
Read the full story
A Cincinnati-area Democratic public official is urging Ohioans to vote against his party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.
Supporters of Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance and critics of Democratic hopeful Tim Ryan are enthusiastically sharing an opinion piece Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes (D) penned for The Cincinnati Enquirer on Friday. In the guest column, Rhodes calls Ryan “a fraud who must be defeated” and who “does not deserve your vote” irrespective of one’s party affiliation.
Read the full story
Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty announced on Thursday that he and his Florida Republican colleague Marco Rubio wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin this week expressing alarm at the removal of America’s F-15-jet fleet from Okinawa, Japan.
The United States Air Force last week publicized its intention to phase out the fleet’s presence at Kadena Air Base on the southeastern Japanese island starting on November 1. The two squadrons now being withdrawn comprise half of the roughly 100 fighter aircraft the United States currently maintains in Japan. Instead of replacing the jets, the Biden administration anticipates periodically sending F-22 planes from Alaska to the base.
Read the full story