Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to weigh in on the Biden administration’s attempt at controlling the origins of the monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19.
Read the full story
President Biden’s job-approval rating has fallen six percentage points, to 43%, since August. The number is the lowest of his roughly eight-month presidency, and now for the first time, a majority, 53%, disapproves of his performance, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.
The poll was conducted from Sept. 1 to 17, after the U.S. military left Afghanistan in late August. The military’s departure after 20 years in the country included the chaotic evacuation of 120,000 people that was overshadowed by a suicide bomber killing 13 U.S. service members.
Read the full story
An Ohio organization that has fought cities collecting income taxes from people who had not worked in specific cities during the COVID-19 pandemic has filed an appeal in a Cincinnati case that was dismissed in June.
The Buckeye Institute, a Columbus-based think tank, recently filed its appeal with the First District Court of Appeals on behalf of Josh Schaad, who lives in Blue Ash but is employed in Cincinnati. The case was dismissed four months after it was filed.
Read the full story
The Board of Education in Williamson County, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly Monday evening to extend its mask mandate for COVID-19 prevention until January.
At the urging of Superintendent Jason Golden, school directors initially voted on Aug. 10 to impose the requirement on elementary-school students. On Aug. 26, the board enjoined that mandate on middle-schoolers and high-schoolers as well. The rule would have expired this Tuesday but for the prior evening’s vote.
Read the full story
One of the key reasons I left the Democratic Party years ago was the atrocious way they treated black people.
I’m not just talking about “Jim Crow” or LBJ’s well-known patriarchal and racist use of the “n-word” to celebrate blacks voting Democratic forever in gratitude for his ultimately useless early “virtue signaling” called the “War on Poverty.”
(Notice any difference between South Central then and now?)
Read the full story
The tens of thousands of Afghan refugees being imported into the United States by the Biden Administration are carrying numerous dangerous diseases in addition to the Chinese coronavirus, including malaria, measles, and tuberculosis, as reported by Breitbart.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) admitted to the influx of diseases through the Afghan arrivals in a statement on Monday, declaring that all of the refugees will be required to take the measles vaccine; however, there are still no measures in place to require them to receive a coronavirus vaccine.
According to the CDC press release, they had been “notified by public health departments of 16 measles cases among the evacuees.” Subsequently, they ordered that “evacuees who are in the United States are required to be vaccinated with MMR and complete a 21-day quarantine from the time of vaccination at U.S. ‘Safe Haven’ designated locations.”
Read the full story
A medical professional who works for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is blowing the whistle on the federal government for pushing dangerous experimental vaccines on an unsuspecting public, calling the malfeasance “evil at the highest level.”
“You have the FDA, you have the CDC, that are both supposed to be protecting us, Registered Nurse Jodi O’Malley told Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe, “and everything that we’ve done so far is unscientific.”
The whistleblower works at Phoenix Indian Medical Center, an Arizona hospital run by the Indian Health branch of HHS, but perhaps not for long. After contacting O’Keefe, she recorded some of her HHS colleagues raising concerns about the COVID vaccines. Putting her faith in God, O’Malley said that after everything she had witnessed, she was willing to lose her job to expose the federal government’s counterproductive and destructive COVID policies.
Read the full story
The Virginia Employment Commission is still lagging in processing claims, according to an interim report from the Joint Legislative Audit Review Commission (JLARC) presented to legislators Monday.
“A theme that you will hear in the presentation is that while the agency could not have been expected to be fully prepared to respond to the pandemic, it could have been better prepared,” JLARC Director Hal Greer said. “As you’ll hear, 18 months into the pandemic, the agency is still overwhelmed by backlogs of claims. Its call center continues to under-perform, and the agency is struggling with how to recoup a significant amount of benefit payments that were incorrectly issued.”
Read the full story
Louisiana State University has begun unenrolling students who failed to comply with COVID-19 regulations.
As Fox 23 reports, seventy-eight students were told that they had been “resigned” from the school and would be refunded 50 percent of their fees. Louisiana State media relations director Ernie Ballard confirmed on Twitter that the students are “being contacted that they are being unenrolled from the university.”
Read the full story
Three similar lawsuits challenging Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s executive order allowing parents to opt students out of mask mandates are proceeding across the state and are at different points.
A preliminary injunction granted last week in Shelby County against Lee’s order applies to only Shelby County.
Read the full story
Multiple public officials in Colorado are warning that the state’s official COVID-19 death count is skewed due to the practice of conflating patients who have died directly due to the disease with those who have merely tested positive for it prior to death.
Data experts and health officials have long struggled to separate out those two key data points in government tallies of COVID deaths, leading to accusations that the death rate for the disease is being inflated modestly or even significantly.
Multiple public officials in Colorado, meanwhile, told “Full Measure” host Sharyl Attkisson that they had personally observed death tallies that erred on the side of COVID, leading to death counts that were effectively misleading to the public.
Read the full story
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), childhood obesity rates skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic to “substantial and alarming” levels, as reported by Fox News.
The CDC’s findings, released on Thursday, determined that increases in obesity were most prevalent among children who were already overweight before the pandemic started, but found a “profound increase in weight gain for kids” across the board. Overall, the study determined that 22 percent of American children and teenagers were obese in August of 2020, which marked an increase of 3 percent from August of 2019.
Read the full story
Federal officials have indicted certain South Georgia medical professionals for the alleged illegal distribution of opioids and conspiracy to commit health care fraud. This, according to a press release that officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia published Friday.
Read the full story
After filing the first lawsuit in the country against President Joe Biden over his sweeping business COVID-19 vaccine mandate, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich next signed onto a letter with 23 other attorneys general to Biden listing their objections, including non-legal ones. The attorneys general stress that the mandate will drive healthcare workers out of hospitals where they are desperately needed. If Biden does not reverse course, the 24 threaten to sue the administration.
“President Biden’s vaccine mandate lacks both legal authority and integrity,” Brnovich said in a statement. “I am proud to stand alongside my colleagues to push back on this assault on state sovereignty and the liberties of Americans.”
Read the full story
On Wednesday, Tennessee Representative Scott DeJarlais (R-TN-04) authored a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra outlining his concerns over the new distribution protocol of monoclonal antibody therapies.
Read the full story
Joe Biden gave a bizarre speech recently in which he formally declared Americans who have refused the COVID vaccine to be enemies of the United States.
Pledging to make life for this “distinct minority” extremely painful, Biden said that “patience” is “wearing thin” and that it is now time to draw blood.
Read the full story
Some 4,800 state employees in Washington have already requested medical or religious exemptions from Gov. Jay Inslee’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
According to information released this week by the state, those requests amount to nearly 8% of the 60,000 state workers who fall under Inslee’s 24 cabinet departments. As of Sept. 6, less than 50% of all employees in those agencies were verified as being fully vaccinated.
Inslee last month issued an executive order that all state employees, as well as K-12 and state university staff, must be fully vaccinated by Oct. 18 or face dismissal.
Read the full story
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and 23 other attorneys general said this week that federal agencies shouldn’t force private sector employees to choose between either a COVID-19 shot or a weekly COVID-19 test. Carr and the other attorneys general voiced their concerns in a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden. Biden wants officials with the U.S. Department of Labor and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to force private sector employees to guard themselves against COVID-19 — or else lose they will lose their jobs.
Read the full story
Just a month after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in Memphis, Tennessee announced that it had confiscated thousands of counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards, CBP officials in Cincinnati made a similar bust.
“Since August 16, Cincinnati officers have seized five shipments containing a total of 1,683 counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards and 2,034 fake Pfizer inoculation stickers,” a CBP press release said.
Read the full story
NASHVILLE — Hundreds of Tennesseans said their displeasure with COVID-19 mandates has intensified and it’s time for Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) to relent and allow a special legislative session so the state can fight back. Those angry residents, along with several state legislators, rallied at Beth Harwell Plaza, near the state capitol, on Thursday.
Read the full story
The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking.
In empirical fashion scientists advised us to examine evidence and data, and then by induction come to rational hypotheses. The enemies of “science” were politics, superstition, bias, and deduction.
Read the full story
The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims increased to 332,000 last week as the economy continues to slowly recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics figure released Thursday represents an increase in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending Sept. 4, when 312,000 new jobless claims were reported. That figure was revised slightly up from the 310,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
Read the full story
Employers and business organizations are voicing their opposition to the vaccine mandate announced last week by President Joe Biden.
Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to requite companies with more than 100 employees to make sure their workers are either vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested weekly for the virus. The mandates received a mixed reaction from companies and business groups, with some welcoming the new rules and others expressing their opposition.
Read the full story
Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs put U.S. President Joe Biden on notice Thursday regarding one of the president’s COVID-19 mandates and said his county will flatly refuse to obey. Specifically, Jacobs said Knox County will not honor Biden’s executive order mandating that all businesses with 100 or more employees require COVID-19 vaccines for workers or implement weekly testing.
Read the full story
Certain crimes in Atlanta demand prosecution. This was the message that Georgia State Representative Alan Powell (R-Hartwell) conveyed Wednesday at a House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee. Committee members met to discuss Atlanta’s soaring crime rate.
Read the full story
The Loudoun County school board voted on a revised professional conduct policy to specifically mention “Protected Speech” and the First Amendment rights of employees.
The new policy is a response to Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) teacher Tanner Cross who went viral for his comments at a school board meeting in May, where he spoke out against the district’s gender policy and was put on administrative leave shortly afterward. On Aug. 30 the Virginia Supreme Court ruled to reinstate him, calling his removal “likely unconstitutional.”
Read the full story
In defiance of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for group gatherings, Georgia faculty and students have coordinated weeklong protests of the University System of Georgia.
The students are gathering to demand that the University System implement a mask mandate on all of the state’s publicly-run university campuses.
Read the full story
In a terse essay titled “Science and Dictatorship,” Albert Einstein warned that “Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.” And on his deathbed, Einstein cautioned, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.”
With reckless disregard for both of those principles, powerful government officials and big tech executives have corrupted or suppressed the central scientific facts about face masks. The impacts of this extend far beyond the issue of masks and have caused widespread harm and countless deaths.
Read the full story
U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) on Monday criticized U.S. President Joe Biden for his new COVID-19 vaccination mandates. Biden said that, in order to work, all employees of private employers with 100 or more employees must take the COVID-19 vaccination or subject themselves to an at-least-weekly COVID testing.
Read the full story
U.S. Representative Jody Hice (R-GA-10), running to replace Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger next year, has announced he will have to postpone a previously announced Election Integrity Tour. Hice originally scheduled the tour for this week.
Read the full story
A textbook assigned to students at a North Carolina community college states that COVID-19 protocols “saved tens of thousands of lives” while Americans who disagreed with those restrictions caused deaths.
“Most Americans responded to the pandemic by limiting their social contact, covering their faces when going out, and washing their hands thoroughly after they did,” the passage begins and then continues with, “yet lives were lost because some Americans held beliefs that were at odds with the facts.”
The textbook appeared in the POL 120: American Government course at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte.
Read the full story
If you watched HBO’s recent docudrama about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, you may have been struck by the historic connection to the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan. The epilogue posited the theory that the need for helicopters to mitigate the nuclear disaster caused the Russians to pull the attack helicopters from Afghanistan, making the already pointless war impossible to continue. So in 1988, the Soviets cut their losses and withdrew from Afghanistan.
The Afghan rebels did not seize control of Afghanistan until 1992. But the 1988 withdrawal also played a huge role in the loss of legitimacy for the Soviet system itself. The apparent juggernaut wielded terrifying power at its borders but remained frail and vulnerable to collapse from within. The very idea that the great Soviet evil empire could fail set off a series of dominoes that led to its collapse. The Afghan war, the struggling economy, and the Chernobyl disaster all combined to reveal the wise and powerful leaders in Moscow as incompetent despots.
More than 30 years later, American planners may have felt they had years or at least months during which residual civilians could make an orderly departure from Afghanistan as needed. The Soviet puppet government lasted almost four years (ironically, longer than the Soviet Union continued to exist), so why wouldn’t an American-sponsored government be able to hold on at least that long? The American planners probably believed that they were prolonging the longevity of the puppet regime by leaving nearly $80 billion in military equipment in the hands of the American-aligned Afghan government.
Read the full story
The economic impact of Georgia’s airports increased by more than 18% over nearly a decade, data shows.
Travis Vallin, the vice president of aviation construction planning firm Jviation, presented the data Wednesday to the General Assembly’s Joint Study Committee on Airport Infrastructure & Improvements.
Read the full story
Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) in Virginia denied that one of its departments calls itself “woke” in an automated voice message, Fox News reported Friday.
“Sorry, woke special services 2 email is not available, record your message at the tone,” the Department of Special Services automated voicemail appeared to say. FCPS said the message actually said “Wok” for one of their administrative centers, Willow Oaks, Fox News reported.
The Department of Special Services organizes into four different offices which includes help with psychology services, student safety and wellness, social work and special education.
Read the full story
Data available on the Tennessee Department of Health’s (TDOH) website suggests the flu endangers more children in the state versus the effects of COVID-19. One recent flu epidemic claimed the lives of about 10 Tennessee children. TDOH’s most recent data says COVID-19 has claimed the life of only one child in the state.
Read the full story
The global chip shortage is beginning to impact consumers, driving up prices of smartphones, vehicles and personal electronics as manufacturers struggle to keep up with rising demand.
“We’re seeing 5% to 10% price increases right now,” Glen O’Donnell, vice president and research director at Forrester, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They will increase more as this issue drags on.”
Semiconductors, the internal components essential to the functioning of almost every electronic device, have been in short supply since early 2020 due to high consumer demand of mobile electronics cloud services, and other products that require computer chips, according to O’Donnell. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem by stalling semiconductor production and disrupting supply chains, with demand for consumer electronics only skyrocketing due to more people working from home.
Read the full story
“Get vaccinated,” whispered the doddering, white-haired failure of a president before beating a hasty retreat from the podium. Reporters barked questions at him which neither he nor his handlers had interest in answering, because they have no answers.
Joe Biden has no answers for COVID-19. What Joe Biden has is blame and Otherization for Americans not invested in the tired narratives of his handlers and the managerial elite he represents so badly.
That’s clear. It’s the only true takeaway from the disgraceful, alarming speech Biden gave Thursday.
Read the full story
U.S. and Chinese researchers funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) created viruses in a Wuhan lab that exhibited over 10,000 times higher viral load in humanized mice than the natural virus they were based on, according to an infectious disease professor citing documents recently released by the agency.
The U.S. nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance notified the NIAID in two reports that between June 2017 and May 2018 it had created three lab-generated chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses in China that exhibited “significantly higher” viral loads, documents first reported by The Intercept show, but the agency continued to fund the project with taxpayer dollars without flagging it for review by an independent federal committee created in late 2017 to oversee gain-of-function research.
Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright, a vocal opponent of gain-of-function research, said the data was a “bona fide bombshell” that proves the NIAID, under Fauci’s leadership, violated federal policies, endangered the public and lied to the public.
Read the full story
As Joe Biden launches via executive order a sweeping vaccine mandate for all federal government workers, and now a brand-new initiative for private-sector mandates, the issue has once again risen to the forefront of the national dialogue.
United Airlines, for example, recently became the first U.S. airline to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for all its employees. United Airlines’ mandate takes effect on September 27, and it might augur a broader trend: A poll conducted last month by insurance and advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, for example, suggests that 52 percent of private-sector employers surveyed expect to have a workplace vaccine mandate by the end of 2021. As Biden’s brand-new announcement of a Department of Labor rule for private sector vaccination requirements now makes clear, that poll was prescient.
Against this backdrop, several Republican-leaning states have advanced laws or executive orders that prohibit private sector vaccine mandates for employees, customers, or in some other respect. That tally is now at least eight states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Texas, South Carolina, and South Dakota. The legal mechanics and specifics differ from state to state. But the highest-profile and most mechanically straightforward Republican-led assault on vaccine mandates is the one in my new home state, Florida.
Read the full story
The expansion of several government programs last year likely prevented hunger from rising despite the sudden economic downturn caused by the pandemic, a study showed.
The percentage of U.S. households that reported food insecurity was virtually unchanged in 2020 compared to the year prior despite the recession, according to a report from the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service released Wednesday. More than 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs in April 2020 as state and local officials implemented strict restrictions on business activity to curb the spread of coronavirus, Labor Department data showed.
“This is huge news — it shows you how much of a buffer we had from an expanded safety net,” Urban Institute researcher Elaine Waxman told The New York Times. “There was no scenario in March of 2020 where I thought food insecurity would stay flat for the year. The fact that it did is extraordinary.”
Read the full story
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) is leading the charge among Republican officials to litigate against President Joe Biden’s order that all employers with 100 or more staffers ensure that their workers are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or that they show a negative test weekly.
“Just ended a call with my fellow Republican governors,” Kemp tweeted Friday. “We are fighting back against @POTUS’ outrageous overreach and attack on individual freedom.”
Read the full story
After removing the huge statue of Lee from its pedestal on Wednesday, crews spent all day Thursday excavating a corner of the pedestal in search of an 1887 time capsule reportedly placed in the monument. But they never found it.
“Disappointing not to find the time capsule,” Governor Ralph Northam’s Chief of Staff Clark Mercer told reporters Thursday evening.
Read the full story
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee this week announced he will fight U.S. President Joe Biden’s stricter and newly-announced COVID-19 vaccine requirements. “To be clear: the vaccine is the best tool we have to combat the pandemic but heavy-handed mandates are the wrong approach,” Lee tweeted Thursday.
Read the full story
The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims decreased to 310,000 last week as the economy continues to slowly recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics figure released Thursday represents a substantial decrease in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending Aug. 28, when 345,000 new jobless claims were reported. That figure was revised up from the 340,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
Read the full story
An acclaimed study on the effectiveness of masks in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 has been widely mischaracterized and suffers from serious design flaws, according to critics.
They include Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who was suspended from Twitter for a month for questioning the protective power of masks for unvaccinated elderly people.
Read the full story
Confidence that President Joe Biden has communicated a clear COVID-19 plan has tumbled, according to a new Gallup poll published Tuesday.
The Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans do not believe Biden communicated a clear plan to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, up from 35% in July. Exactly 40% of Americans think Biden presented a clear strategy to combat COVID-19, making this the first time citizens have been more negative than positive on his communications.
Read the full story
It’s been 20 years since my son was old enough for his first MMR vaccine. At that time, the CDC was insisting on two things: 1) there had been a huge increase in children with autism, and 2) there was no connection between the MMR vaccine and that increase in autism. I could see very clearly that if you believed the first it would be extremely easy to not believe the second. Once you unleash hysteria, it’s hard to call it back. That is what I call the 2020 Fallacy.
Thanks to Thomas Sowell, I knew that the CDC’s first claim was not true. There was no dramatic increase in the occurrence of autism. There was a dramatic increase in what we diagnosed as autism. Neurologists invented the autism spectrum disorder to explain a long-existing phenomenon. And with that invention, the so-called “dramatic increase in autism” was born.
Read the full story
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson spoke against mask mandates, Critical Race Theory, and COVID-19 vaccines for children in a Loudoun County appearance alongside GOP candidates Glenn Youngkin and Winsome Sears on Wednesday night. A large, energetic crowd filled a conference room; the event was hosted by Fight for Schools and 1776 Action.
Read the full story
Federal unemployment benefits ended over the holiday weekend, raising questions about how the payments’ expiration will affect the job market and whether Congress will renew the benefits.
Congress passed the $300 weekly unemployment payments as a remedy to joblessness during the COVID pandemic when government restrictions forced the layoffs of millions of Americans, but critics have since said the federal benefits are contributing to an economic quandary: elevated unemployment alongside widespread job availability.
Read the full story
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued a legal opinion on Tuesday stating that the City of Tucson’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for city employees violates S.B. 1824 (soon to be A.R.S. 36-681) and Gov. Doug Ducey’s Executive Order 2021-18 prohibiting local and state governments from implementing them. Sen. Kelly Townsend (R-Mesa) submitted a SB 1487 request for the investigation.
“Tucson’s vaccine mandate is illegal, and the city could be held liable for attempting to force employees to take it against their beliefs,” Brnovich said. “COVID-19 vaccinations should be a choice, not a government mandate.” His spokeswoman, Katie Conner, told reporters during a phone call, “Adhering to the rule of law in Arizona is not optional.”
Read the full story