Republicans did not have a great year in 2020, but 2022 could be a much better year than anyone is expecting–especially if they target these three vulnerable Senate Democrats who each won their seats with 50 percent of the vote or less.
Democrats control the Senate, but barely. The 50-50 split means Vice President Kamela Harris is needed to break ties–and that a single Democrat could stop his party’s agenda at anytime.
Read More
A professor at Southern Illinois University received an indictment for concealing his support from the Chinese government.
According to a United States Department of Justice press release, Mingqing Xiao — who teaches mathematics at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale — “fraudulently obtained $151,099 in federal grant money from the National Science Foundation (NSF) by concealing support he was receiving from the Chinese government and a Chinese university.”
Accordingly, he was charged with two counts of wire fraud and one count of making a false statement. He faces the possibility of twenty-year sentences for each of the former, as well as a five-year sentence for the latter. All three charges are punishable by fines of up to $250,000 each.
Read More
Minneapolis is my home. My happiest memories are here. It’s where I learned to ride a bike, had my first date, received my high school diploma.
But today, I’m too afraid to even walk in my neighborhood by myself.
The ACE Hardware down the street? The one that I used to bike to in the summer? Robbed twice in the past five days.
Read More
Weeks before Donald Trump took office, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer issued an ominous warning.
“You take on the intelligence community? They have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you,” the New York Democrat said in an interview with MSNBC on Jan. 3, 2017.
Schumer was responding to Trump’s criticism of an intelligence community assessment that said Russia interfered explicitly to help the Republican win the 2016 election.
“He’s being really dumb to do this,” Schumer said of Trump.
Read More
Universities in the United Kingdom have been instructed to pay students thousands of dollars because they had ‘”less valuable” experiences due to the universities’ COVID-19 actions.
The Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) is an independent body that reviews students’ complaints against higher education institutions. It does not have the power to regulate or punish the institutions, however.
OIA recently shared several complaints students have made about the impact coronavirus has had on their educational experiences.Universities in the United Kingdom have been instructed to pay students thousands of dollars because they had ‘”less valuable” experiences due to the universities’ COVID-19 actions.
The Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) is an independent body that reviews students’ complaints against higher education institutions. It does not have the power to regulate or punish the institutions, however.
OIA recently shared several complaints students have made about the impact coronavirus has had on their educational experiences.
Read More
President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division circulated an essay from self-proclaimed Marxist poet Amiri Baraka defending cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and referring to police officers as members of the Ku Klux Klan, according an email from her days at Columbia University.
Kristen Clarke forwarded the Baraka essay in an email on June 25, 1999, to her mentor, the late historian Manning Marable.
She suggested that the essay, entitled “Mumia, ‘Lynch Law’ & Imperialism” be placed in a magazine Marable edited and used for a panel on the death penalty.
Read More
A fight is raging in Congress over proposals to restore the practice of spending “earmarks,” small provisions slipped into spending bills quietly authorizing millions for local projects and special interests. But a new report reminds us that despite a “ban” on earmarks being implemented in 2011, the practice never fully went away.
Published by the advocacy group Citizens Against Government Waste, the 2021 Congressional Pig Book exposes 285 earmarks from fiscal year 2020, totaling $16.8 billion. Here are 7 wild examples of corrupt earmarks the new report exposes.
Read More
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee overwhelmingly approved a wide-ranging and bipartisan bill on Wednesday that lays out a unified strategic approach towards the threat China poses to America’s national and economic security.
Among the measures in the 281-page Strategic Competition Act of 2021 is a provision ordering the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to produce a report assessing the likelihood that COVID-19 could have entered the human population due to a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and other origins theories such as zoonotic transmission and spillover.
“It is critical to understand the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic so the United States can better prepare, prevent and respond to pandemic health threats in the future,” the bill states. “Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all Americans, the American people deserve to know what information the United States possesses about the origins of COVID-19, as appropriate.”
Read More
A Chinese-born chemist who worked for Coca-Cola was found guilty Thursday of multiple spying-related charges including economic espionage and stealing trade secrets.
Xiaorong You, a Chinese-born American citizen, stole trade secrets related to the development of the bisphenol-A-free (BPA-free) coating found within soda cans and used it to start a new company in China, which subsequently received millions of dollars from the Chinese government in grants, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. The BPA-free technology trade secrets that You stole was worth almost $120 million.
Documents and evidence presented during You’s 12-day trial showed that she intended to benefit the Chinese Communist Party, the DOJ said. Dow Chemical, PPG Industries, Sherwin Williams and other major U.S. chemical corporations had developed the BPA-free technology that You stole.
Read More
The Senate confirmed civil rights lawyer Vanita Gupta to be the Associate Attorney General Wednesday.
Gupta, who will be the third-ranking official at the Department of Justice, was confirmed 51-49, with Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski joining all 50 Democrats voting in favor.
“I have looked at her record, I have had an extensive sit down with her,” Murkowski said before the vote. “I am impressed with her credentials … and the passion that she carries with her with the work that she performs.”
Murkowski acknowledged Gupta’s confirmation was contentious, but said her passion was “impactful.”
Read More
Apple and several retail trade groups continued lobbying policymakers in the first quarter of this year on a bill to prohibit American firms from using Chinese forced labor, according to disclosures filed with Congress this week.
Apple paid Fierce Government Relations, a Washington, D.C. firm, $90,000 to lobby the House and Senate on multiple pieces of legislation, including the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, according to Fierce’s lobbying disclosure filing.
The tech giant also paid $90,000 to Invariant LLC, another Beltway-based firm, to work on several bills and to monitor “legislative action on workforce and supply chains in China.”
Read More
The U.S. national debt is closer to $123 trillion, more than four times what the Treasury Department is reporting, Chicago-based Truth in Accounting calculates in its new annual analysis of the nation’s finances.
The federal government has $5.95 trillion in assets and $129.06 trillion worth of bills resulting in a $123.11 trillion shortfall, or a debt burden of $796,000 per U.S. household.
Because of this massive amount of debt and repeatedly poor financial decisions made by lawmakers, TIA gave the U.S. government an “F” grade for its financial condition.
Read More
As Democrats push to expand the federal government’s purview over elections, President Joe Biden has named a former Justice Department official to be a White House adviser on voting issues.
Biden this week tapped Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor, to be his senior adviser for democracy and voting rights.
Read More
The Board of State Canvassers on Thursday deadlocked 2-2 three times on votes whether to certify or investigate further the conservative Unlock Michigan petition to remove Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s 1945 emergency powers before adjourning.
On Oct 2, 2020, Unlock Michigan filed signatures with the Secretary of State’s office. The group gathered roughly 460,000 valid signatures, more than the 340,047 needed. Those petitions are normally handled within 60 days, but this time, 202 days after filing, two Democrat members are refusing to certify the petition.
Instead, Democrat Vice-Chair Julie Matuzak motioned to engage in the Administrative Procedure Act regarding promulgation of a new rulemaking process for petitions and to pause the petition. Matuzak said she didn’t know who would fund that investigation or how long it would take.
Read More
Human smugglers have been transporting migrants into the U.S. illegally in groups of over 100 people, mostly comprised of families and unaccompanied minors, border officials said Thursday.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials encountered three large groups totaling 320 illegal migrants near Edinburg, Texas, over a two-day span, according to the agency. Officials apprehended 229 family members, 86 unaccompanied migrant minors and five single adults.
“Even with the spread of the COVID-19 virus, human smugglers continue to try these brazen attempts with zero regard for the lives they endanger nor to the health of the citizens of our great nation,” CBP said in a statement.
Read More
The United States is historically a Christian country, that is, it was founded by Christians and its population remains largely Christian to this day. The speeches and statements of our presidents, our official holidays, the prayers that are said before the opening of Congress and the Supreme Court, the imagery we see on official buildings all attest to the religious, indeed Christian, foundation of our nation. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court in an 1892 decision declared explicitly that “we are a Christian nation.”
Nevertheless, at least until recent days, Americans have understood that we live in a pluralistic society where Protestants, Catholics, Jews, even atheists, were equal before each other and equal before the law. There was no official church at the federal level that would require belief, assent, or obedience. This is not to say that there have not been dark times in our history when we failed to live up to our ideals. Catholics may recall times when our churches were burned and there were riots against us. But the highest American aspiration has always been that all should be treated equally, that a Jew should get the same treatment in a court of law as a Methodist or a Muslim.
Our twin understanding of our country’s deep religious roots coupled with an ideal of religious freedom grew out of the English tradition of religious toleration. The English had an official state church, but the English also recognized the importance of providing dissenters with some measure of freedom. The Act of Toleration of 1689 provided this freedom.
Read More
Arizona’s Democratic senators called on President Joe Biden’s administration to increase the number of Homeland Security personnel on the southern border to better respond to increasing number of migrants.
In a letter Wednesday, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly also requested that the White House reimburse Arizona for its deploying of approximately 500 National Guard members to better respond to the crisis.
“From recent conversations with local community leaders, law enforcement, and local Department of Homeland Security officials, it’s clear that their resources, staffing and capabilities are strained,” they wrote. “While additional resources were passed in the American Rescue Plan and provided by FEMA and DHS, additional personnel are needed at the border to ensure our communities are protected, and migrants are treated fairly and humanely.”
Read More
One of the most fateful decisions of Donald Trump’s presidency happened just weeks after Inauguration Day.
In March 2017, Republican lawmakers joined Democrats to demand Jeff Sessions, a former Senate colleague and Trump’s new attorney general, recuse himself from anything related to the investigation into alleged Russian election collusion. Sessions’ two brief meetings in 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak—a figure who appeared often in collusion-related drama—amounted to evidence of collusion, collusion perps insisted.
Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) were just a few top Republicans who asked Sessions to step aside—so he did.
Read More
President Joe Biden’s administration filed an appeal Tuesday that seeks to force religious doctors and hospitals to provide transgender surgeries, regardless of religious objections.
Former President Barack Obama’s administration issued a mandate in 2016 requiring doctors and hospitals to provide transgender surgeries upon a mental health professional’s referral. The transgender mandate, an interpretation of an Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination clause, did not include conscience or religion exemptions.
An association of over 19,000 healthcare professionals, several religious organizations, and nine states challenged the mandate in two different courts, according to a website on the mandate run by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
Read More
President Joe Biden hosted a virtual climate summit with dozens of world leaders Thursday, the same day the White House released a set of aggressive climate goals. Critics say the plan could jeopardize the economy at a time it is recovering from record-breaking unemployment because of the pandemic and governments’ response to it.
First among those priorities is a pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by the year 2030.
“The United States is not waiting, the costs of delay are too great, and our nation is resolved to act now,” the White House said in a statement. “Climate change poses an existential threat, but responding to this threat offers an opportunity to support good-paying, union jobs, strengthen America’s working communities, protect public health, and advance environmental justice.”
Read More
Chicago police officers may have to check with their supervisor before chasing suspects on foot, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Tuesday. The mayor promised to announce details of a new policy “soon,” Fox 32 Chicago reported.
“No one should die as a result of a foot chase,” Lightfoot said.
Chicago law enforcement’s use of force faced new scrutiny after an officer chased and fatally shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo on March 29. Video of the incident released last week shows Toldedo dumping what appears to be a firearm a split-second before he turns and raises his hands. Allegedly, he was handed the gun by Ruben Roman, who allegedly had just used it to fire eight rounds at a passing vehicle. Apparently, no one was hit, according to Fox32.
Read More
The governor of Kansas has vetoed a bill that would have banned biological males from participating in women’s sports.
Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the “The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” Thursday, saying in a news release that the legislation “sends a devastating message that Kansas is not welcoming to all children and their families, including those who are transgender — who are already at a higher risk of bullying, discrimination, and suicide,” according to local outlet KMBC.
“As Kansans, we should be focused on how to include all students in extracurricular activities rather than how to exclude those who may be different than us,” Kelly said. “Kansas is an inclusive state and our laws should reflect our values. This law does not do that.”
Read More
Citing the “grave threat posed by Enbridge’s unlawful operation of its pipelines in the Straits of Mackinac,” 28 entities filed friend of the court briefs in support of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s motion to remand in State of Michigan, et al v Enbridge Energy, et al.
Four Native American tribes, the attorneys general of 16 states and the District of Columbia, six environmental organizations and the Great Lakes Business Network, and two state governors filed briefs expressing support of the attorney general’s efforts to ensure the lawsuit her office filed last November remains in Ingham County Circuit Court.
Read More
The intersection where George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, which has since been converted into an informal memorial, has signs posted with special instructions for how White people are supposed to behave in the area, according to Fox News.
Having since been unofficially renamed “George Floyd Square,” the intersection of E. 38th Street and Chicago Avenue has become the epicenter for Black Lives Matter and other far-left protests, with numerous memorials built to Floyd and other black people who have allegedly been murdered by police. At one of the entrances to the area, a sign has been erected declaring it to be “a sacred space for community, public grief, and protest.” The sign also falsely claims that Floyd “took his last breath under the knee of” Officer Derek Chauvin, even though footage revealed that Chauvin’s knee was actually on Floyd’s back and shoulder blade, not his neck.
Further down, the sign contains special instructions for how White people are to act upon entering the area. White people, the sign says, are to “decenter” and “come to listen, learn, mourn, and witness. Remember you are here to support, not be supported.” The sign goes on to order White people to “contribute to the energy of the space, rather than drain it,” providing no specifics on how exactly this is supposed to be done.
Read More
Tuesday afternoon the Democrats and the Left at large got exactly what they said they wanted from the trial of Derek Chauvin. The jury found him guilty of all three counts — second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter — with which he had been charged in the death of George Floyd. Yet prominent Democrats who commented on the verdict seemed slightly bewildered and disappointed. Their collective response was captured in this statement from Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison: “I would not call today’s verdict justice, because justice implies restoration.” This is an odd assertion coming from the man who orchestrated Chauvin’s prosecution and secured an unequivocal conviction.
It is particularly odd considering that the city of Minneapolis agreed in March to pay $27 million to settle a civil suit brought by George Floyd’s family pursuant to his death. Neither that settlement nor Chauvin’s conviction will restore George Floyd’s life, of course, but it is all one can reasonably expect from the legal system. That, unfortunately, is the rub. When Ellison deploys words like “justice” and “restoration,” he isn’t talking about what most Americans think of when they hear such terms. He is claiming they are meaningless in a structurally racist legal system that is itself the root cause of tragedies like George Floyd’s death. This is what renowned legal scholar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) means by this obloquy:
I don’t want this moment to be framed as this system working. Because it’s not working. We saw a murder in front of all of our eyes, and yet we didn’t know if there would be a guilty verdict — it tells you everything. Verdicts are not substitutes for policy change…. and there are way too many people including my colleagues that think that’s the case…. This one case and this one verdict, we still have people getting killed by police every single day on average in the United States…. We’re willing to accept violence against some communities as a necessary cost for “safety.”
Read More
Twitter is refusing to address whether a tweet by Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James violated the platform’s terms of service.
James tweeted, then deleted, a picture Wednesday of Ohio police officer Nicholas Reardon who shot 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant as she attempted to stab another girl, body cam footage showed.
“YOU’RE NEXT,” James tweeted to his millions of followers with the hashtag #ACCOUNTABILITY. He has since deleted the tweet.
Read More
Abill that was set to strengthen election integrity in Arizona by cracking down on voter fraud failed in the Republican-led State Senate, after a Republican member went against the party and voted it down, as reported by ABC News.
The bill, SB 1485, would have made it easier to remove inactive names from the state’s early voting list by removing the word “permanent” from the state’s definition of said list. Following this change, anyone on the list who did not vote in the state’s elections after a certain period of time could have their names removed completely. Inactive names remaining on a state’s voting rolls, such as in Arizona, can lead to a greater chance of voter fraud when those names are used to sway an election in a crucial swing state.
But a single Republican state senator, Kelly Townsend (R-Ariz.), voted with the Democrats against the bill. Her reasoning, ostensibly, was to wait for the results of a GOP-led audit of all 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County from the 2020 election.
Read More
Chinese government officials and state-controlled media agencies have recently ramped up their rhetoric against the United States on the issue of climate change, portraying the U.S. as not doing enough to limit greenhouse emissions even though China is by far the world’s biggest polluter.
One shot fired in the propaganda war came this week in the form of an interview that CGTN America, the U.S. affiliate of the Beijing-controlled China Central Television (CCTV), conducted with retired Army Lt. General Russel Honoré.
Honoré, who is founder of the environmental group Green Army, decried in the CGTN interview that a “large part” of the population in his native Louisiana denies the existence of climate change.
Read More
With classrooms finally reopening and hundreds of billions of federal dollars earmarked for public schools, the issue of teacher pay will soon re-emerge. Before the pandemic, public school teachers were fighting against a widely perceived “teacher salary penalty.” President Biden vowed to “correct this wrong,” promising a dramatic increase in federal education funding to “give teachers a raise.” But what causes these pay differences? New Census Bureau data suggest that most teachers are paid roughly what they’d receive in other jobs. But if public schools wish to attract the best-qualified graduates to teaching, they need to stop paying the physics teacher the same as the gym teacher.
The Economic Policy Institute, a teacher-union-affiliated think tank, reports that public school teachers receive salaries about 20 percent lower than non-teachers with equal levels of experience and education.
But what does it mean for education to be “equal”? College graduates attended different institutions, majored in different fields, and received different GPAs, leading to different salaries later in life. That’s why parents encourage their children to attend more competitive colleges and, increasingly, to favor STEM fields over liberal arts majors.
Read More
An all new LIVE STREAM of War Room: Pandemic starts at 9 a.m. Central Time on Saturday.
Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon began the daily War Room: Pandemic radio show and podcast on January 25, when news of the virus was just beginning to leak out of China around the Lunar New Year. Bannon and co-hosts bring listeners exclusive analysis and breaking updates from top medical, public health, economic, national security, supply chain and geopolitical experts weekdays from 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon ET.
Read More
A group of Republican U.S. senators have unveiled a $568 billion plan that would look to rebuild and expand infrastructure nationwide and counter a more expensive proposal by President Joe Biden.
The GOP plan includes $299 billion for roads and bridges, $61 billion for public transit systems and $65 billion for broadband infrastructure. Also included in the plan is $20 billion for rail, $35 billion for drinking water and wastewater, $13 billion for safety, $17 billion in ports and inland waterways, $44 billion for airports and $14 billion for water storage.
Emphasized in the bill is the expediting of projects through regulatory processes and several measures to minimize new spending. The plan calls for repurposing federal COVID-19 relief funds that have remained unused, along with ensuring the federal debt is not increased.
Read More
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced the state will increase state-owned facility renewable energy by 85% by 2025, up from the current 15%, but didn’t explain how.
The governor announced the goal on April 22 to coincide with Earth Day.
Whitmer cited a partnership between the state and energy providers DTE, Consumers Energy, and Lansing Board of Water and Light. Energy purchased from the utilities will expand those companies’ renewable energy portfolio in Michigan.
Read More
The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims dropped to 547,000 last week as the economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Department of Labor.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics figure released Thursday represented a decrease in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending April 10, when 586,000 new jobless claims were reported. That number was revised up from the 576,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
Read More
Any nation’s well-being—as Americans know from their own illustrious history—hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom, and stability depend on its constitutional and political stability.
A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.
Read More
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the Justice Department launched a sweeping investigation into practices of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Garland’s announcement came one day after a jury convicted ex-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin of the murder of George Floyd.
Read More
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) said Wednesday the agency is canceling oil and gas lease sales for the second quarter, drawing criticism from Wyoming’s governor.
The announcement marks the second quarter in a row that the agency, which manages energy development, recreation, grazing and conservation on 245 million federal acres, halted lease sales after President Joe Biden signed an executive order in January that included a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands.
Read More
Democrats in the House of Representatives passed legislation Thursday that would make Washington, D.C. the 51st state in the union, a move that would almost certainly strengthen the Democrats’ Senate majority and bolster their ranks in the House.
The bill passed, 216-208, without any Republican support.
Read More
The U.S. Postal Service’s law enforcement division is running a covert operation tracking and collecting Americans’ social media posts, Yahoo News reported.
The postal service’s Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored social media accounts for “inflammatory” posts and protest plans, according to an internal document obtained by Yahoo News. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) investigated Parler and Telegram accounts that referenced protests that were supposed to occur on March 20 for the so-called International Day of Protests, the document showed.
Read More
Basketball player LeBron James posted, then deleted, a tweet attempting to single out an officer from the recent police shooting in Columbus, Ohio, in which he tried to rally his supporters to dox and retaliate against the officer in question, as reported by Fox News.
James, who plays on the Los Angeles Lakers, posted a tweet featuring a screenshot from the bodycam footage of the incident, which took place on Tuesday. The footage showed the entirety of the chaotic scene as police arrived to break up a fight between two black teenage girls. One of the girls, 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, was armed with a large knife and was preparing to stab another girl after shoving her up against a car. After multiple verbal warnings from police to drop the knife, the officer wearing the bodycam fired several shots, killing Bryant and saving the other girl’s life.
Read More
Nearly 500 attacks targeted asylum seekers waiting or stranded in Mexico since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Human Rights First reported Tuesday.
Migrants waiting at the U.S.-Mexico border reported at least 492 instances of violent attacks including kidnapping, rape and assault, according to Human Rights First. Over 16,000 asylum-seeking migrants at the Mexican border were on a “metering” waitlist to request protection in the U.S. as of February.
Read More
According to a the most recent quarterly censorship report card from the Media Research Center (MRC), most of the major Silicon Valley tech titans are failing to protect freedom of expression.
“By almost any measure, the first three months of 2021 were the worst ever for online freedom. Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube and others proved to the world that the Big Tech censorship of conservatives is a reality,” the group said. “And they did so in disturbing, authoritarian ways that highlight their unchecked power over information and our political process.”
Read More
During World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower liked to remind his troops of the adage, “plans seldom survive initial contact with the enemy.” Today, the corollary is that the truth seldom survives initial contact with woke fascism.
Woke fascism—the unholy alliance between the Democratic-controlled national government, corporate leftist media, Big Tech, and globalist corporations loyal to profits over our republic—is now attacking the state of Georgia for wanting to ensure that elections in the Peach State are free, fair, and accurate.
Read More
The saga over the departure and confidential settlement agreement between Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and the former head of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) continued Thursday.
Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Steve Johnson (R-MI-72) announced in a press release that his committee has subpoenaed former MDHHS Director Robert Gordon, who received a $155,000 severance package from the state and signed a non-disclosure agreement after he left his post under murky circumstances late February.
Read More
President Joe Biden’s border policy will include an increase in the number of people approved for refugee and visa status, his administration announced Tuesday.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has repeatedly asked the Biden administration to answer questions about who is transporting individuals and families to the Texas-Mexico border and what the administration is doing to prevent crimes and human and drug trafficking. He says he has still received no response. He also called on Biden to label Mexican cartels as terrorists because, Abbott said, they are committing crimes and wreaking havoc in Texas, and has also received no response.
Read More
Big labor suffered a significant loss in its attempt to unionize employees at Amazon’s warehouse facility in Bessemer, Alabama. Of the workers eligible to vote, an embarrassingly small 16% voted to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. It was the most recent in a series of high-profile losses for labor including failed attempts to unionize factories for Volkswagen, Nissan Motors, and Boeing. In each case, union leaders bet that they could convince workers it was in their best interests to be enrolled in a union that would stand up to management over wages and working conditions. In each case, they lost.
Read More
Columbus Division of Police released body camera footage Tuesday night showing the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant that occurred earlier in the day. Wednesday afternoon, police released additional body cam recordings and two 911 calls.
Interim Chief of Police Michael Woods said it’s uncommon for information to be provided this soon, but officials understand the public’s need, desire and expectation to have transparency about what happened.
Read More
A public school district in New York state is facing criticism after it promoted a children’s book that falsely claims that police target black people instead of White people, and that black people are more likely to be shot, as reported by Fox News.
In the city of Binghamton, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) denounced the city’s school district for their promotion of the book “Something Happened In Our Town.” The book, which was selected by the school as the “Book of the Month” for April for MacArthur Elementary School, was read aloud to students.
Read More
For better or worse, California often leads the nation’s political discourse. Central to that discourse at the moment is the expected recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom; a recall of Los Angeles County’s district attorney, meanwhile, is building steam. Each reveals something telling about the Golden State and its voters.
First Newsom. The announcement is imminent — insiders expect the recall to qualify for the ballot with an October election.
Read More
Twitter defended its decision allowing users to share articles that cite hacked information about people who donated to the 18-year-old accused of killing protesters in Wisconsin last summer.
The content did not violate the company’s distribution of hack materials policy because it does not directly link to the hacked information, a Twitter spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The content in question would have been removed if hacked materials were shared in a tweet or in an image tweeted, according to Twitter.
Read More
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee sparred with Stacey Abrams Tuesday during a hearing on Democrats’ voting rights bill and election reforms that Republicans have introduced in states across the country.
The hearing consisted of testimony from officials on opposite sides of the issue, including Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, Utah Republican Rep. Burgess Owens and Jan Jones, the Republican speaker pro tempore of the Georgia House, but most questions from lawmakers on both sides were directed towards Abrams. Democrats largely focused on GOP-led policies that they likened to those from the Jim Crow era, while Republicans blasted the comparison and said that the bills’ goals were to make it harder to cheat, not to vote.
Read More