Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) is reorganizing agencies providing services to the elderly, as an auditor general report on coronavirus-related nursing home deaths looms.
The new Health and Aging Services Administration will reportedly provide better communication between agencies with the goal of increasing efficiency.
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Amid growing bipartisan agreement that increased regulation of social media platforms and their content moderation policies is needed, the path forward remains murky. Should Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act be discarded or strengthened? Should companies be broken up using antitrust laws? Should government set speech rules for the web? Should users decide them? Or should there be no rules at all?
There is no shortage of solutions being put forth to solve the challenge of social media censorship. The problem is that without a better understanding of how social platforms invisibly shape the public square of democracy today, we don’t know which of these possible solutions might have the greatest impact. In short, to fix social media, we first need a better understanding of its ills: Section 230 must be amended to legislate social platform transparency.
A new RealClearFoundation report, “Transparency Is the First Step Toward Addressing Social Media Censorship,” outlines the public data sets we need to usher in transparency and better understand the challenges we face.
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The Federal Reserve said in September that it would begin taking steps to combat growing inflation in the U.S. economy, according to notes from a Sept. 21 and Sept. 22 Open Market Committee meeting first obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
The Federal Reserve will be scaling back its $120 billion monthly purchases of U.S. Treasury and mortgage securities due to the growing surge in inflation and strong consumer spending leading to heightened demand, according to minutes from a September meeting released Wednesday by the WSJ. The reduction in spending, commonly referred to as tapering, will begin in mid-November, and experts believe it could end by June, according to the meeting notes.
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On Thursday, the United States Navy announced its intentions to discharge any and all sailors who have not yet taken the coronavirus vaccine, according to Fox News.
The Navy’s press release on the matter declares that November 14th is the final deadline for sailors to receive the vaccine, while the deadline for reservists is December 14th. In addition to being discharged, sailors who refuse to get the vaccine may also lose some of their veterans’ benefits.
“Those separated only for vaccine removal,” the statement reads, “will receive no lower than a general discharge under honorable conditions. This type of discharge could result in the loss of some veterans’ benefits.” In addition, the statement said that the Navy “may also seek recoupment of applicable bonuses, special and incentive pays, and the cost of training and education for service members refusing the vaccine.”
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The Marine whose outspoken social media posts criticizing military leaders for the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan received a final judgement in his case Friday.
Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller was given a letter of reprimand and ordered to forfeit $5,000 of pay for one month, Fox News reported.
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The 25-year-old knifeman who killed British MP Sir David Amess Friday is believed to be a “British Muslim of Somali descent,” according to the Daily Mail.
Earlier, Essex police announced they were keeping an open mind on whether the stabbing was a terror incident, but the investigation is now being run by counterterrorism police, according to British reports.
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Climate envoy John Kerry applauded climate actions made by the U.S. and other countries, but refused to single out China for not setting substantive goals for cutting emissions.
“We have a lot of things to still come across the transom and that will sort of decide where we are overall and which countries have neglected to do what is responsible,” Kerry told the Associated Press in an interview.
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Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee urged the Biden administration to lay out its plans for tackling the looming energy crisis.
The representatives noted that the federal government was responsible for protecting U.S. energy security and ensuring Americans have access to affordable energy, in a letter Thursday addressed to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. They added that energy prices are directly tied to particular sectors of the economy and could further push inflation higher.
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The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Thursday that it has received over 500 pages of documents from the D.C. Metropolitan Police regarding the fatal police shooting of protester Ashli Babbitt during the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
Judicial Watch obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in May after District officials failed to respond to requests made in April to the city’s police department and its Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for information related to Babbitt’s death.
The 35-year-old Babbitt was fatally shot trying to enter a secured area inside the U.S. Capitol Building. The 14-year Air Force veteran was unarmed at the time, as she tried to climb through a broken door window near the House chambers.
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CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta came woefully unprepared for his interview with podcast host Joe Rogan Wednesday, and was forced to concede several key points that counter the COVID narrative of his network.
During Wednesday’s installment of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Gupta admitted that is was wrong for his network to falsely claim that Rogan had taken “horse dewormer” as a COVID treatment, conceded that very few children have died from the virus, and agreed that Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded high risk coronavirus ‘gain of function’ research in the Wuhan lab.
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The Biden administration is planning to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy in November, CBS News reported on Friday.
A federal judge ordered the Biden administration to reinstate the policy in August after requests by the Texas and Missouri attorneys general, according to CBS News. The Biden administration criticized the “Remain in Mexico” policy that left 70,000 migrants who weren’t from Mexico to wait in Mexican border towns until their U.S. asylum hearings.
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If Black Lives Matter were a civil rights organization, one would reasonably expect its patron figure to be Martin Luther King, Jr., and its aspiration to be King’s vision of a race-free America where individuals are judged on their merits and not by their skin color. Instead, the revered figure and inspirational icon for Black Lives Matter activists is a designated terrorist and convicted cop killer: Assata Shakur.
In the 1970s Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army, a group that robbed banks and murdered police officers to achieve a Marxist revolution. Shakur is still wanted for the 1973 murder of Werner Foerster, a New Jersey state trooper who stopped her for a broken taillight on her car, whereupon she pulled out a gun and shot him. The 34-year-old officer and Vietnam vet was lying wounded on the pavement pleading for his life when Shakur walked over and finished him off, execution-style. Foerster left behind a wife and two young children. Shakur was convicted of the murder but escaped from prison in 1979 with the help of left-wing terrorists, including Susan Rosenberg. With the help of Rosenberg and others, Shakur fled to Communist Cuba, where she has lived as a fugitive for nearly 40 years. After being pardoned by Bill Clinton, Rosenberg went on to become board vice chair of Thousand Currents, the left-wing nonprofit organization that served as Black Lives Matter’s fiscal sponsor from 2016 to 2020.
The dedication page of Patrisse Cullors’s memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, contains these lines written by Shakur, which allude to the most famous incitement from Marx’s Communist Manifesto:
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
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Home foreclosures across the U.S. are starting to spike as COVID-19 pandemic benefits begin to expire, CNBC reported.
Private mortgage lenders started the foreclosure process on 25,209 homes in the third quarter of 2021, a 32% increase from the previous quarter and a 67% increase from the third quarter of 2020, according to mortgage data firm ATTOM, CNBC reported.
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DC Comics recently revealed that in an upcoming issue titled “Superman: Son of Kal-El,” the son of Lois Lane and Clark Kent would be bisexual, and that he’s going to fight “real-world problems” such as climate change, that he’ll protest the deportation of refugees, and date a “hacktivist.”
What exactly is a “hacktivist”? Isn’t hacking illegal? Is Superman supporting criminal activity? It’s a chore to keep up with all the different iterations of the current superheroes, but DC Comics is calling it a “bold new direction” for the character. I see nothing “bold” about it.
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has vowed to veto an election integrity bill that would require a voter casting an absentee ballot to prove their identity.
Senate Bills 303 and 304, approved by the Michigan House of Representatives, would “require anyone who casts an absentee ballot or votes in person on Election Day to provide identification.” A related piece of legislation, House Bill 5007 removes the current $10 fee to obtain a state ID
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