A conservative journalist has sued Gov. Tim Walz’s administration after he was barred from participating in the governor’s daily press briefings on the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the lawsuit, Scott Johnson, an attorney and writer for PowerLine, was allowed to participate in the daily briefings until April 27, when he was suddenly “excluded from all future daily briefings without explanation.”
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For nearly 20 years, Bridget McGinty and her sister ran Tastebuds, a popular lunch spot in downtown Cleveland.
On May 1, she made the torturous decision to close it forever after keeping it on life support for weeks after being closed due to the COVID-19 lockdowns.
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The U.S. economy gained 2.5 million jobs in May, while the unemployment declined to 13.3%, according to Department of Labor data released Friday.
Total non-farm payroll employment rose by 2.5 million in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, and the number of unemployed persons fell by 2.1 million to 21.0 million.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has granted the federal government’s request to delay the release of medically vulnerable inmates at a federal prison in eastern Ohio where hundreds have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued the brief order Thursday evening — staying an order from a lower court to speed up the inmates’ release — until the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules in the matter.
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Several authors of a large study that raised safety concerns about malaria drugs for coronavirus patients have retracted the report, saying independent reviewers were not able to verify information that’s been widely questioned by other scientists.
Thursday’s retraction in the journal Lancet involved a May 22 report on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, drugs long used for preventing or treating malaria but whose safety and effectiveness for COVID-19 are unknown.
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Tennessee delivered unemployment payments to more than 314,000 people last week, as the number of new jobless claims continued to run much higher than normal during the response to the new coronavirus outbreak.
Stay-at-home orders from Gov. Bill Lee and city and county officials in mid-March led to business closures and hundreds of thousands of layoffs, as officials scrambled to stem the rise of COVID-19.
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Michigan Rising Action is calling for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to “put politics aside and focus on Michigan.”
In an opinion published on May 30 in The Detroit News, Tori Sachs, the executive director for Michigan Rising Action, argued that Whitmer should shift her focus from politics and “raising her national profile” back to the state of Michigan.
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A new poll finds a racial divide among Americans when asked about trust in law enforcement and fears surrounding coronavirus.
When asked if they trusted local police, 77% of white Americans said yes, while only 36% of black Americans agreed, according to an Axios/Ipsos poll.
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Gov. Bill Lee confirmed Tuesday afternoon that GOP leaders are considering Nashville as an alternative site for August’s Republican National Convention just hours before President Donald Trump announced that he will be pulling the convention from North Carolina.
Lee’s office told WTVF that officials with the Republican National Committee will be visiting Nashville Thursday to tour the city.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unveiled enhanced enforcement actions on Monday against nursing homes after preliminary federal data shows that at least 25,923 nursing home residents across the country have died from coronavirus.
“This data, and anecdotal reports across the country, clearly show that nursing homes have been devastated by the virus,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield wrote in a letter to U.S. governors on Sunday.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer left out information on nursing homes and other long-term care residential facilities during her testimony about the coronavirus to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy and Commerce on Tuesday.
The state’s decision to place people diagnosed with the novel coronavirus into nursing homes has been met with harsh criticism, especially as the state continues to not track or report data related to deaths in those facilities.
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Voters across America navigated curfews and health concerns Tuesday in a slate of primary elections amid dueling national crises as Joe Biden looked to move closer to formally clinching the Democratic presidential nomination.
In all, nine states and the District of Columbia were hosting elections, including four that delayed their April contests because of the coronavirus outbreak. While voters cast ballots from Maryland to Montana, Pennsylvania offered the day’s biggest trove of delegates. The state also represented a significant test case for Republicans and Democrats working to strengthen their operations in a premier general election battleground.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer lifted Michigan’s stay-at-home order on Wednesday, moving the entire state to phase four of the MI Safe Start Plan.
Under the new phase, retail will be allowed to open on June 4 and restaurants will be allowed to reopen on June 8, both with capacity limits. Day camps, office work, outdoor pools and in-home services such as housecleaning will also reopen.
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A defiant Owosso barber must shutter his business for the remainder of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s coronavirus lockdown.
The Michigan Court of Appeals determined by a 2-1 vote Thursday that Owosso septuagenarian Karl Manke’s business presented an “imminent danger” to public health during the coronavirus pandemic, deciding with the plaintiff, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
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As the coronavirus crisis unfolds and the 2016 election and post-electoral scandals ooze into the open, God is affronted and false gods disintegrate. The discussion over the opening of churches is generally presented as a public health issue, coupled with a First Amendment freedom of religion argument. But, in many cases, it is an outright assault on the practice of religion generally.
Compared to other advanced Western democracies, the United States is a country that practices religion. But the media, academia, and conventional wisdom embedded in the contemporary ethos of America’s governing elites is, estimating very roughly, one-quarter religious communicants or sympathizers, one-quarter agnostic, one-quarter atheist, and one-quarter anti-theist. All of these groups, of course, are entitled to have and to express their opinions—but they are not entitled to impose their opinions on others.
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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler believes Democrats are politicizing the agency’s response to coronavirus and using flawed research to argue regulation rollbacks are disproportionately hurting black people amid a pandemic.
Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts used a politically-motivated research and a study based on 15-year-old data from Europe to suggest that the agency’s regulatory work is increasing the harm of coronavirus on minority groups, Wheeler said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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It is not necessary or beneficial to sacrifice human lives to save the economy.
Nor, is it necessary or beneficial to sacrifice the economy to save lives.
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More than 500 U.S. physicians sent a letter to President Donald Trump describing the coronavirus shutdowns as a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non-COVID-19 patients nationwide.
The letter is signed by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles, followed by eight pages of doctors who have signed on to the letter.
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Socialist countries and dictatorships rarely lead the way on innovation and solutions to the world’s greatest challenges. COVID-19 is just the latest example.
I should know. As a Cuban refugee, my family and I escaped an oppressive communist regime that seized private property and lashed out at dissenters.
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Michigan residents will now be able to track their daily symptoms in an online tool to help provide insight on where a new coronavirus outbreak may be next, as well as decide if they should return to work.
The Michigan departments of Health and Human Services and Labor and Economic Opportunity have partnered with the University of Michigan School of Public Health and College of Engineering to create the MI Symptoms Web Application.
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The costs of the government responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have been severe. New evidence suggests they could be even worse than we imagined.
An ABC affiliate in California reports that doctors at John Muir Medical Center tell them they have seen more deaths by suicide than COVID-19 during the quarantine.
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Many individuals considered to be the most at-risk for coronavirus live in states that had the best health infrastructures in place before state restrictions began in March, according to two recent analyses.
Residents of West Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia were found to be the most vulnerable, according to personal-finance website WalletHub’s analysis of States with the Most Vulnerable Populations to Coronavirus.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has submitted a letter to President Trump requesting the authority to continue using the Michigan National Guard to help in coronavirus response and recovery through the end of July.
Whitmer originally asked the National Guard to assist with the state’s coronavirus response on March 18. Trump approved her request on March 30.
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The Metro Public Health Department in Nashville will still provide COVID-19 patient information to first responders and law enforcement.
Metro Public Health Director Michael Caldwell said the practice is “temporary,” but that it’s working, WPLN reported Thursday.
“This is an emergency,” he says. “This is critical, timely, life-saving information that has reduced and contained the spread of this disease within our medical institutions and within our jails. I’m puzzled by why the state reversed course.”
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Several Republican senators asked President Donald Trump to preserve key guest worker programs for foreign nationals, revealing a split in the conservative base on how to best protect U.S. workers and the economy.
Nine GOP senators signed onto a letter delivered to the president on Wednesday, asking that he keep in place non-immigrant temporary visa programs as a means to aid the recovery of the U.S. economy. Their request came in sharp contrast to immigration hardliners who have recently pressed Trump to scrap the programs amid record job losses.
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California’s multi-million dollar aid program for illegal aliens has been bogged down by technical issues, with many applicants inundating phone lines every day to no avail, according to NPR.
The implementation of California’s Disaster Relief Fund, a $125 million initiative backed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom that provides one-time cash payments to undocumented immigrants, remains rocky as there are simply too many callers for workers to handle. Reports of jammed phone lines and unanswered calls have plagued the program’s rollout.
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What happens to a government when the consent of the governed breaks down? History has many instances of this some ending with peaceful transformation, others with successful revolution as in our own history and still others with military crackdowns as we currently see in Hong Kong.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which was written as a series of reasons why the American colonists no longer accepted the rule of King George III. The opening two paragraphs of this seminal document used to be memorized by school children as part of their school exercises, a practice which was largely abandoned in the 1960s. So as a refresher, here is what Jefferson penned:
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The oil and gas industry lost 26,300 jobs in April, the largest drop of industry jobs in a single month, according to job data dating to 1990.
Texas saw a record surge of more than 2 million claims for unemployment in roughly a six-week period after Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order in March shut down businesses he deemed nonessential to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and to tanking oil prices resulting from an oil war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. The economic fallout also sent commodity prices to historic lows.
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Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer distanced herself from a much-criticized decision to award a no-bid contract to two Democratic firms to handle the state’s coronavirus contact tracing.
But a senior adviser in the Michigan Department of the Health and Human Services said that the executive office of the governor [EOG] gave the contract a “green light,” a newly public email shows.
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Some 100 million people in China are now back in lockdown as fears of a second wave surge. Now that the US and the rest of the world is opening up, the probability of infection will most likely go up, as will the number of infections. What does that mean for the economy?
First, uncertainty and fear of another lockdown will negatively influence business decisions and overall economic recovery. Even if your business survived the first wave, would you be willing to go all in, invest, rehire people, renew leases, etc., if you think you will be shut down in the autumn?
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Perhaps the most unserious response to the coronavirus pandemic has been the facile assertion that lockdowns, the destruction of the economy, and the suppression of our historic freedoms are all justified if they “save just one life.” As Joe Biden put it on Twitter, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: No one is expendable. No life is worth losing to add one more point to the Dow.”
While every person is unique and has an immortal soul, we do not do anything and everything to save lives from all hazards, nor should we. Adults know that there are no easy solutions to most problems, and real life consists of tradeoffs.
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Testing every nursing home resident and care facility worker in the U.S. for COVID-19 would cost $440 million in federal and state funding, a health care group found.
Doing so would require almost 3 million tests, according to the American Health Care Association’s National Center for Assisted Living, an industry group representing nursing homes and assisted living centers that calculated how much it would cost for states to receive adequate funding so all resident and care facility workers could be tested.
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An organization representing more than 120 Michigan gyms has filed a lawsuit against the state to protest continued closures from the coronavirus pandemic.
The lawsuit, filed Friday by the League of Independent Fitness Facilities and Trainers, names Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Robert Gordon, the director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. It alleges that the executive orders shutting down gyms are “broad and overreaching” and “not narrowly tailored to their purpose, as required under constitutional law,” according to a statement from LIFFT.
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Michigan reported its lowest single-day death count from the coronavirus since March over the weekend, with just five deaths in Sunday’s report.
The lowest daily report before Sunday was on March 22, shortly after the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the state, according to data analysis from the Detroit Free Press.
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U.S. Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN-01) and his colleagues in the House Republican Doctors Caucus recently sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking her to resume “in-person legislative business.”
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On Wednesday, students sued Harvard University for not refunding tuition and fees after the coronavirus pandemic forced classes online.
This makes Harvard at least the fourth Ivy League school to be targeted for failing to reimburse educational costs, following Brown, Columbia, and Cornell. The school is facing a $5 million federal class-action lawsuit. Students chose to pursue legal action as a result of not having “received the benefit of in-person instruction or equivalent access to university facilities and services.”
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by Jason Hopkins White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien on Sunday suggested that the Chinese Community Party would very likely try to steal American developments on a coronavirus vaccine. During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” O’Brien predicted that the United States would be the first country to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. But he added that the Chinese government has been working diligently to steal the U.S. government’s coronavirus vaccine research — and he “wouldn’t be surprised” if their espionage efforts succeeded. “I think we’re going to develop a vaccine first,” the president’s adviser said on Sunday. “Now, there’s a chance, and it has been reported that the Chinese have been engaged in espionage to try and find the research and the technologies that we’re working on — both for a vaccine and a therapy.” “Look, they’ve got a many, many year history of stealing American intellectual property and knocking off American technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did that with the vaccines,” O’Brien said. NEWS: The Trump Administration is looking at cutting off travel from Brazil amid #coronavirus pandemic, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien tells @margbrennan. See more of O'Brien's interview…
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Ohio Democrats said they were “outraged” by Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposal for addressing the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Ohio’s black population.
African Americans make up 14 percent of Ohio’s population, but represent 26 percent of positive COVID-19 cases, 31 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations, and 17 percent of COVID-19 deaths.
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After Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued executive orders forcing the closure of many of the state’s businesses amid the coronavirus pandemic, small-businessman Erik Kiilunen said he saw $600,000 in contracts disappear overnight.
Kiilunen, of Ahmeek, Michigan, runs Kiilunen Manufacturing Group, which makes construction materials.
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A progressive group has called on Nashville Mayor John Cooper to use funds from the city’s share of the federal CARES Act to provide “free bus fare” to the polls.
Nashville is expected to receive $121 million from the coronavirus relief bill and Mayor Cooper convened an advisory group last week to discuss how the money should be used.
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Gov. Tim Walz announced Saturday that he would lift his restrictions on religious services and allow all places of worship to open for larger groups beginning Wednesday.
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Minnesota’s unemployment rate increased to 8.1 percent in April, the first full month impacted by coronavirus restrictions.
Between March and April, the state’s unemployment rate jumped from 2.9 percent to 8.1 percent. Nationally, the unemployment rate rose from 4.4 percent in March to 14.7 percent in April.
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When schools reopen in the US amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they will be even more restrictive than they already were. Schools have long controlled students’ movements and imposed constraints on where they can go, when, and with whom. With virus concerns, those controls will increase in quantity and intensity.
NPR recently proclaimed that “disruption from the pandemic constitutes an ‘adverse childhood experience’ for every American child.” While many children are sad to be away from their friends and activities, being home with their family members for a prolonged period of time is hardly an “adverse childhood experience” for most American children. Returning to schools with extreme virus control and social distancing measures, however, could very well be traumatic for many kids.
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A Michigan Court of Claims judge has ruled in the favor of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, saying that she had the authority to extend Michigan’s state of emergency order.
Judge Cynthia Stephens said that while Whitmer had the authority to extend the order under the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act of 1945, she did overstep by trying to extend it under the Emergency Management Act of 1976, which requires legislative authority, according to reporting by The Detroit News.
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The general manager of the Minnesota State Fair announced Friday morning that the annual gathering will be canceled this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ve been working hard and doing our very best with preparations for the 2020 State Fair. The picture was cloudy in March, but things have cleared up considerably since then. Right now is the time of year when things need to really take off if we’re going to have a fair, but we can see that we’re out of runway and can’t get off the ground. There will be no State Fair this year,” General Manager Jerry Hammer said in a statement.
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A new lawsuit seeks the release of inmates at the Shelby County Jail who are at “high risk of severe injury or death from COVID-19.”
As of Friday afternoon, the jail reported 160 confirmed coronavirus cases among detainees, but 156 have already recovered, according to the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. Another 68 employees have tested positive for the virus, 46 of whom have recovered. Only one current hospitalization was reported among both employees and detainees.
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Infection prevention and control deficiencies were widespread across most of the country’s nursing homes before the coronavirus outbreak, a watchdog group reported Thursday.
More than 82% of the United States’ 15,500 nursing homes were cited for infection prevention and control deficiencies between 2013 and 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) wrote in a blog post Thursday.
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Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy was joined in the studio by former Vanderbilt professor and mayoral candidate Dr. Carol M. Swain.
At the top of the third hour, Swain discussed her disappointment in Mayor Cooper’s decision-making process by keeping Nashville shut down and acknowledging his lack of compassion. She added that it appears that his brother Jim Cooper may be the man behind Mayor Cooper pulling the strings and who’s first priority is satisfying the desires of national Democrats instead of Tennesseans.
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Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – Leahy was joined on the newsmakers line by Tennessee Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Manny Sethi.
During the third hour, Sethi explained how he has been campaigning throughout Tennessee and witnessing people filled with anxiety about the coronavirus yet recognizing that we need to get back to work. Nearing the end of the segment he called for a second industrial revolution in his Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in Tennessee by which would bring back supply chains and medication manufacturing the state.
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The Senate Republican Caucus expressed concern over the governor’s “alarming” interpretation of executive authority in a letter sent this week to Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison.
“Your interpretation of the scope of the Governor’s authority under Minnesota Statutes, section 12.45, is incorrect and inconsistent with legislative intent and with a more measured reading of the law. Most importantly, it is an infringement on the Legislature’s fundamental and exclusive authority to define and prescribe the punishment for a crime,” states the letter.
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