Stock indexes are higher on Wall Street in choppy trading Monday as investors weigh the risks that rising coronavirus cases could pose to hopes for an economic recovery.
The S&P 500 rose 0.4% in midday trading after an initial slide of 0.6% following weakness in overseas markets as the global tally of infections approaches 9 million. The price of gold rose, a signs of caution in the market. Bond yields were mixed.
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Spectators in North Carolina’s capital cheered Sunday morning as work crews finished the job started by protesters Friday night and removed a Confederate statue from the top of a 75-foot (232 meter) monument.
Across the country, a peaceful protest in Portland, Oregon, against racial injustice turned violent early Sunday after baton-wielding police used flash-bang grenades to disperse demonstrators throwing bottles, cans and rocks at sheriff’s deputies near downtown’s Justice Center.
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Just as the infamous Dred Scott case in 1857 would have extended slavery throughout America, so Thursday’s decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California threatens to make the machinations of bureaucratic government supreme and unrepealable.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ 5-4 court opinion strengthens the grip of the administrative state – the interlocking network of bureaucracy and political correctness – over the democratically elected branches that are supposed to make us a nation of self-governing citizens.
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Comedian D.L. Hughley announced he tested positive for COVID-19 after collapsing onstage during a performance in Nashville, Tennessee.
The stand-up comedian, 57, lost consciousness while performing at the Zanies comedy nightclub on Friday night and was hospitalized, news outlets reported. On Saturday, Hughley posted a video on Twitter in which he said he was treated for exhaustion and dehydration afterward.
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A federal judge on Friday said he was approving a $58 billion plan by the nation’s largest utility to end a contentious bankruptcy saga that began after Pacific Gas & Electric’s outdated equipment ignited wildfires in California that killed more than 100 people, wiped out entire towns and led the company to confess to crimes driven by its greed and neglect.
The decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali clears the way for PG&E to pay $25.5 billion for losses from devastating fires in 2017 and 2018. The judge said he will sign the formal order confirming PG&E’s plan late Friday or Saturday after the company’s lawyers make a few minor revisions worked out during a two-hour hearing.
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Attorney General William Barr hit the establishment media in an interview aired Sunday for what he called its “bovine silence” regarding the debunked narrative of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
In an interview on “Fox Sunday Futures,” Barr also asserted that the various government investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Kremlin were the “closest we have come to an organized effort to push a president out of office” since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
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The ski industry has taken an estimated $2 billion hit because of shutdowns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a trade group.
The Colorado-based National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) said U.S. ski visit totals for the 2019-20 season were down 14 percent to 51.1 million visitors.
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We all know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. It is not just a children’s story. Rather, it is an eternal story about human nature. If people are surrounded by a mass or a mob who speak nonsense as a Truth — with a capital “T” — then perfectly sensible people who internally know better will fall into line and babble the same “Truth.” For a reality check and sanity in the public arena, it ultimately often takes a little kid who simply has not been taught social conformity and political correctness to look and say, “But this ‘Truth’ simply is not true.”
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In yet another example of statues being vandalized on America’s college campuses, the namesake statue at Brigham Young University in Utah was vandalized with the word “racist” written across the monument in red paint, according to the campus newspaper, The Daily Universe.
Separately, a sign marking the location of the Abraham O. Smoot Administration Building was also splattered with a red “X.”
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The biggest teachers’ union in Utah has offered its endorsement of incumbent Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox after his administration vetoed a special education bill that the union opposed.
The bill in question was House Bill 332, introduced by state representative Mike Schultz (R-Utah). The main purpose of the bill was to provide greater funding to special needs programs across the state, and sought to do so by creating a new individual/corporate tax credit that would provide the funding for a new scholarship program for such students. This not only would provide more assistance for the roughly 80,000 students in the state classified as special needs, but would do so from a new source of revenue rather than diverting any more funds from the currently existing education budget.
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In the midst of a hotly contested race for U.S. Senate, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA-09) called on Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr to appoint a special prosecutor in the wake of murder charges by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard – who is also facing a tough run-off election in August – in the death of Rayshard Brooks.
“Our founders intended for our justice system to be blind – blind to race, blind to socioeconomic status, and blind to politics,” Rep. Collins said in a statement. “While we seek justice for George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and the many lives lost, we cannot turn our backs on the majority of law enforcement officers who are simply doing their jobs and putting their lives on the line for us each and every day.”
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One might think the Catholic Church would stand against the orgy of iconoclasm that we are witnessing across the country — toppled statues, defaced churches, and the like. But, no, the feeble voices of priests and bishops join the creepy chorus of the mob. In California, the mob has targeted statues of Junipero Serra, the saintly Franciscan who spread the faith through a system of missions. Where is the Church to protect the statues? Nowhere. In Ventura, where the mob demands the removal of a Serra statue in front of its city hall, the Church has gone along with it.
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A federal judge asked the Michigan Supreme Court to settle questions regarding whether Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has the authority to issue executive orders under two state laws.
U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney certified two questions to the Michigan Supreme Court.
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Former Vanderbilt University professor Dr. Carol Swain and former Presidential candidate Herman Cain both agreed that support for President Trump is growing and not just in the black community, in an exclusive interview with The Tennessee Star prior to the official start of the Trump rally in Tulsa Saturday.
Both are members of the Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board, which started out with about 35 members and has now expanded to about 50. The Board includes other spiritual and social leaders such as Dr. Alveda King, Reverend C. L. Bryant, Deneen Borelli, Diamond and Silk and the Hodge Twins. At the insistence of others, Cain said he serves as one of the Board’s co-chairs.
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At his first event in months, President Trump delivered a high-energy speech to an enthusiastic crowd of supporters in Tulsa Saturday night that lasted nearly two hours.
The backdrop of racial tensions and rhetoric about the spread of COVID-19 may have dampened attendance, but not the spirits of Trump supporters.
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Almost half a century separates us from May 1968 revolution, which derided bourgeois values and made the classical virtue of courage seem dubious, if not obsolete. Intellectuals of a Marxist persuasion, such as Eric Fromm, described the traditional family as a puritanical cage imprisoning the inquisitive spirit of the youth. Leftist propaganda minimized the bravery of American soldier, especially during the Vietnam War, and ridiculed the notion of personal risk or individual heroism.
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A pre-dawn shooting in a park in Seattle’s protest zone killed a 19-year-old man and critically injured another person, authorities said Saturday.
The shooting happened at about 2:30 a.m. in the area near the city’s downtown that is known as CHOP, which stands for “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” police said.
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A massive spyware effort targeted users of Google’s Chrome web browser extensions downloaded tens of millions of times, Reuters reported Thursday.
The people responsible for the spyware attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s web browser, and collected browsing history and other user data, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters. Google removed more than 70 malicious extensions after researchers alerted the company of the attack in May, the company said.
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Neil McCabe, the national correspondent for The Tennessee Star and Star News network, was interviewed by Politico last week for a front-page story on the nation’s division.
The article focused on Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, called CHAZ for short, which Politico described as a “microcosm of the culture wars.” The CHAZ was established by protesters earlier this month after law enforcement officers withdrew from the scene.
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Brazil’s government confirmed on Friday that the country has risen above 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases, second only to the United States.
The country’s health ministry said that the total now stood at 1,032,913, up more than 50,000 from Thursday. The ministry said the sharp increase was due to corrections of previous days’ underreported numbers.
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McDonald’s plans to hire more than a quarter of a million people over the course of the summer as economic lockdowns continue to slow down, the company announced Thursday.
The restaurant chain will add 260,000 employees as it reopens dining rooms after shutting down amid lockdowns designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, according to the president of the company.
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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, minorities have disproportionately suffered from the virus’s health effects. A new study reveals that the government-mandated economic lockdowns have also hit minorities hardest.
In response to the outbreak and under the guidance of federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, state and local governments imposed quarantine orders and mandated shutdowns for many businesses deemed “non-essential.” Whether one supports lockdowns as a public health measure or not, they undoubtedly resulted in tens of millions of Americans and counting filing for unemployment and a sharp economic downturn.
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The statue of a Roman Catholic saint, Junipero Serra, will be removed from public display over accusations that statues of the missionary reflect oppression of indigenous peoples, according to city officials.
The mayor of Ventura, California, representatives from the Barbareno/Venureno Band of Mission Indians, and a pastor of the Mission San Buenaventura issued a joint statement agreeing to take down a bronzed, 9-foot statue of Serra and have it “moved to a more appropriate non-public location” on Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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Solvay, a polymer-specialist company in the mid-Ohio Valley with operations in Washington and Pleasants counties, has partnered with Paragon, a medical-supplies development company to create a special shield for health care workers.
Officials at Memorial Health System told local news outlets they are grateful for the new equipment and for the innovations of U.S. companies that have quickly manufactured necessary equipment needed in the fight against the coronavirus. They said they will continue to use the equipment even after the coronavirus subsides.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed Executive Order 2020-127 to extend Michigan’s state of emergency through July 16.
The first-term Democrat initially declared an emergency on March 10, 100 days ago, to curb the spread of COVID-19.
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A federal judge ruled Saturday that former national security adviser John Bolton can move forward in publishing his tell-all book despite efforts by the Trump administration to block the release because of concerns that classified information could be exposed.
The decision from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth is a victory for Bolton in a court case that involved core First Amendment and national security concerns. But the judge also made clear his concerns that Bolton had “gambled with the national security of the United States” by taking it upon himself to publish his memoir without formal clearance from a White House that says it was still reviewing it for classified information.
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TULSA, Oklahoma – In the overnight hours from Friday to Saturday morning, the crowd anticipating President Trump’s first rally since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Tulsa, swelled from hundreds to thousands.
Late Thursday evening, rally attendees numbering about 125 gathered along the one city block of West 4th Street between South Boulder and South Cheyenne Avenues some of whom had been there for nearly a week, The Tennessee Star reported.
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There is a disparity between how Americans view policing countrywide and how they view policing in their own communities, a national poll found.
Seventy-seven percent of respondents said they approved of how their local police did their job, according to the Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday. Debate over police reform has been heating up in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who died in Minneapolis police custody May 25 after an officer knelt on his neck, video showed. Floyd’s death has been the catalyst for protests and riots across the country.
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The Supreme Court’s new Leftwing majority, led by the once allegedly conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, has issued two bizarre rulings this week, the latest being in the case of Department of Homeland Security et al. v. Regents of the University of California et al. which addressed the Trump administration’s effort to end the Obama Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
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An all new LIVE STREAM of Descent Into Hell: The Crisis in Hong Kong starts at 9 a.m. Central Time on Saturday.
The two-hour special takes a closer look at the life of everyday Chinese citizens under the Chinese Communist Party and will air live on the John Fredericks Radio Network, America’s Voice Network, Dish TV Channel 219, The Epoch Times, ND TV, GTV and GNews in Mandarin.
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One of the more amusing spectacles of the recent protests has been the establishment of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ)—now called the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP)—in the middle of downtown Seattle, Washington. Conservatives on social media have had a field day making light of the pint-sized experiment in neo-Marxist utopia. Contained within these few square blocks, however, is a microcosm of all the lies and failures of Marxist regimes since the Bolsheviks came to power, and we should pay attention while they are still merely amusing.
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Apple is closing 11 stores in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina that it had reopened just few weeks ago as coronavirus infections rates in some regions in the U.S. begin to rise.
The decision announced Friday is another sign that the pandemic might prevent the economy from bouncing back as quickly as some states have been hoping. Those concerns sent stocks on Wall Street lower Friday.
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Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has withdrawn herself from the running to be Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate in November, according to CNN.
In her announcement on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show on MSNBC, she described the race riots following the death of George Floyd as “a historic moment,” and that America “must seize on this moment.” She then urged the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee “to put a woman of color on the ticket.”
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Indoor gyms in Michigan will be able to reopen this month after a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s executive orders that continue to keep indoor gyms closed.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul Maloney said in an opinion published Friday that the state had given a “blanket ‘trust us’ statement that is insufficient to uphold a no-longer-blanket rule.”
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The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Friday rejected a request to require everyone attending President Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa this weekend to wear a face mask and maintain social distancing inside the arena to guard against the spread of the coronavirus.
The court ruled that the two local residents who asked that the thousands expected at Saturday night’s rally be required to take the precautions couldn’t establish that they had a clear legal right to the relief they sought. Oklahoma has had a recent spike in coronavirus cases, but in a concurring opinion, two justices noted that the state’s plan to reopen its economy is “permissive, suggestive and discretionary.”
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The on-the-ground evidence in Tulsa is that the enthusiasm for the country and President Trump is still strong, despite or perhaps because of the events in recent months related to the COVID-19 shutdowns since March followed by the unrest going on across the country over the past few weeks.
Once President Trump announced on June 10 his first rally since the “invisible enemy” changed life around the world, people started camping out two days later to hold their place in line at Tulsa’s BOK Center for the event.
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Live from Music Row Friday 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 welcomed Tennessee Star Senior Reporter Laura Baigert to the newsmakers line.
During the second hour, Baigert described the scene in Tulsa, Oklahoma where President Trump plans to hold his first post-coronavirus rally at the BOK. She noted that there was an air of camaraderie among the people waiting in line hanging their Trump and American flags.
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Michigan residents filed 19,552 new unemployment claims during the week ending June 13, down 8,284 new claims from the prior week. The total number of unemployed Michigan residents is 726,513.
The downward trend of new claims in the state continues unabated. Michigan ranked fourth in the nation in largest decreases of new unemployment claims in the week ending June 6.
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As we watch radicals tear down statues, deface monuments, intimidate people who want to stand for the National Anthem, demand the firing of people who write or say something deemed inappropriate to the Leftist Anti-American Theology, it is utterly clear that many Americans today hate America.
People ask me how we’ve gotten to this point. All of this is the result of three generations of brainwashing going back at least to Herbert Marcuse, the German-born University of California, San Diego professor who taught young Americans the philosophical foundation of Marxism in the 1960s. As early as 1972, Theodore White was warning that the liberal ideology was becoming a liberal theology and dissent was less and less acceptable to the left.
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A judge on Thursday indefinitely extended an injunction preventing the Virginia governor from removing a historic statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from a famed avenue in the former capital of the Confederacy.
Richmond Circuit Court Judge Bradley Cavedo made the decision after hearing from attorneys for the state and for the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Gov. Ralph Northam. Earlier this month, Cavedo had issued a 10-day injunction barring Northam from removing the bronze equestrian statue of the Confederate hero from Monument Avenue.
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The Chinese Communist Party is waging information warfare to shape American public opinion and influence our economic and government policy to their benefit.
The CCP doesn’t shape public opinion by buying billboards and TV ads. That kind of persuasion is far too American for them.
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Both Target and Best Buy have announced plans to make Juneteenth a company-wide holiday, an idea that Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) wants to institute on the federal level.
“One of the most defining days in our nation’s history was when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, finally freeing all slaves in Confederate territory. But slaves in Texas wouldn’t learn this life-altering news for two and a half years,” Cornyn said during a Senate floor speech Thursday.
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Marriage and families are the cornerstone of not only civilization but of nature itself, without which humans would have never survived as wandering nomads and early farmers, let alone building cities, an economy and governments to represent the people in state-to-state relations.
Without families as a basic building block, children are not nurtured, educated and empowered to raise and sustain families themselves, and the human race could not continue, always being but one generation away from extinction.
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Twenty-eight congressional Democrats signed a letter Wednesday condemning the Department of Education for ruling that public schools that allow biological males who identify as transgender to play girls’ sports are violating Title IX civil rights legislation.
Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal joined 27 House Democrats in signing the letter, which charged that the department’s order “discriminates against transgender youth” by restricting girls’ sports to biological females.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she is ordering the removal from the Capitol of portraits honoring four previous House speakers who served in the Confederacy.
In a letter to the House clerk, Pelosi directed the immediate removal of portraits depicting the former speakers: Robert Hunter of Virginia, James Orr of South Carolina and Howell Cobb and Charles Crisp, both of Georgia. The portraits were to be removed later Thursday.
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Facebook has removed ads for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign because they featured an upside-down red triangle.
The tech giant said the ads were removed because the symbol was once used by Nazis to designate political prisoners, but Trump’s campaign has noted that the symbol is widely used by Antifa, which is why it was included in the ad.
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More than 1.5 million American workers filed new unemployment claims last week, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, even as state restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19 are easing.
More than 45 million claims have been filed in the three months since state and local governments started restrictions that closed businesses deemed nonessential, but millions of those workers have since gone back to work as states began reopening their economies.
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The Michigan House of Representatives approved a concurrent resolution on Thursday demanding transparency from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about information related to the coronavirus in Michigan and officially opposing her coronavirus nursing home policies.
Michigan only recently began publishing data about coronavirus cases and deaths in the state’s long-term care facilities like nursing homes.
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The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to end legal protections for 650,000 young immigrants, a stunning rebuke to the president in the midst of his reelection campaign.
For now, those immigrants retain their protection from deportation and their authorization to work in the United States.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Tuesday requested a major disaster declaration from President Trump in response to the flooding in mid-Michigan.
The failure of the Edenville and Sanford dams last month caused catastrophic flooding in Arenac, Gladwin, Iosco, Midland and Saginaw counties. Whitmer previously declared a State of Emergency for the area, as well as requested that the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy launch an investigation into the cause of the failures.
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