The number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims totaled 220,000 in the week ending on Nov. 27 as employers fight to retain workers heading into the holiday season, the Department of Labor reported.
The Labor Department figure shows a 28,000 claim increase compared to the number from the week ending on Nov. 20, when jobless claims dropped to a 52 year low of 199,000.
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Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee vowed to continue promoting nuclear energy during an industry conference Wednesday.
Both Energy Committee Chairman Joe Manchin and Ranking Member John Barrasso reiterated their support for nuclear energy during the American Nuclear Society winter conference in Washington, D.C., arguing that an economy-wide transition to clean energy would be impossible without it. The Senate leaders added that the U.S. must produce more energy and avoid reliance on foreign entities.
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President Joe Biden lost three federal challenges to his vaccine mandates in just two days this week, with judges ruling the mandates are executive branch overreach and likely unconstitutional.
Federal judges in Missouri, Kentucky and Louisiana issued rulings on Monday and Tuesday in separate cases filed by multiple states, handing primarily Republican attorneys general sweeping victories and ensuring workers wouldn’t be fired for refusing to take the COVID-19 shots.
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Major League Baseball (MLB) owners locked out players Wednesday night after negations failed to produce a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the players association for the first time since 1995.
The two sides failed to reach an agreement during negotiations to renew the previous CBA, which expired Wednesday night, according to a letter from MLB commissioner Robert Manfred. The lockout suspends all offseason transactions and may affect spring training and the beginning of the season in March 2022.
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It’s calculated that somewhere north of 45 million Americans have run up $1.73 trillion worth of college debt. The numbers may surprise a lot or a little, which is really not the point.
The main thing is that debt now measured in the trillions is in a sense a logical midpoint to the federal government’s unfortunate involvement in the financing of college education. “No one spends the money of others very carefully” is a truth as old as humanity (or money) is, and the trillions worth of federal student loan debt vivify this truth. We know this because the hangovers (literal and figurative) from time spent on campus continue to grow.
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It’s nearly impossible to select the most maniacal comment made by Dr. Anthony Fauci in his nearly 70-minute interview with “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan that aired over the weekend. Joe Biden’s chief coronavirus advisor and miniature global menace spent more than an hour denying responsibility for his documented mistakes, bragging about his self-appointed role as the world’s doctor, hogging credit for the vaccines, and attacking anyone who has challenged his unrivaled ego and track record of failure.
Portraying himself as a victim rather than the cruel, megalomaniacal tyrant he is, Fauci took aim at Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Congressional co-sponsors of the “Fire Fauci Act,” which would zero-out the salary of the federal government’s highest-paid bureaucrat and audit Fauci’s correspondence and financial transactions during the pandemic.
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The willful avoidance of facts and deliberate obscuring of what happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin is a low point in American journalism nationally.
It is stunning how much the propaganda media distorted and misreported the massacre at the Christmas parade last week.
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After intense negotiations, the United Auto Workers secured a new agreement with Ford, General Motors, and their suppliers that effectively prohibits a vaccine mandate for employees by requiring only “voluntary” disclosure of vaccination status for union members. This hard-won validation for workers points to a larger opportunity for the America First movement and organized labor to acknowledge that they are natural allies.
On critical issues ranging from medical privacy to border security and foreign trade, the emerging populist and nationalist consensus of the New Right creates an obvious home for unionized Americans. The America First cause can, in turn, help revitalize private-sector unions and guarantee a more prosperous society for our country, with a stronger middle class through a better diffusion of economic and political power.
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Riccardo Simonetti, LGBT ambassador to the European Union Parliament, dressed as a transgender Virgin Mary for the cover of a Berlin-based queer magazine.
The photos show a bearded Simonetti in a tunic and veil, holding a baby who is presumably representing Jesus. In another photo he is holding the baby with another man, who appears to represent Joseph, wrapping his arms around Simonetti.
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Michigan State Senator Aric Nesbitt (R-Lawton) on Thursday introduced legislation to cut the state’s income tax rates.
The measure, Senate Bill 768, would reduce the personal and corporate income tax rates to 3.9% from 4.25% and 6%, respectively.
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Far-left media outlets and commentators have tied the deadly shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan to former President Donald J. Trump, all while denying that the massacre in Waukesha, Wisconsin could have had political motivations.
“Comprehensive coverage of the Oxford High School shooting here, from the gunman’s chilling videos to his parents’ outspoken political views,” Daily Beast’s Rachel Olding bragged on Twitter.
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The Michigan Independent Citizen’s Redistricting Committee’s (MICRC) legal team advised it to continue hiding documents from the public in the same letter it touted transparency.
The Nov. 30 letter follows a nonbinding opinion from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel that the committee “must” release memos discussed in a controversial closed-door session.
The MICRC has also denied Freedom of Information Act requests for the memos, claiming attorney-client privilege protected the communications. Despite the Constitutional mandate stating, “The commission shall conduct all of its business at open meetings,” the MICRC held a closed-door session in October to discuss two legal memos. It’s still unclear what commissioners discussed behind closed doors.
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When the U.S. Supreme Court takes up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization today, it will be asked to overrule Roe v. Wade, the court’s 50-year-old precedent that created a constitutional right to abortion. Legions of commentators are turning out to defend Roe, claiming that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy depends on reaffirming it. They are wrong.
The majority’s opinion in Roe has undermined the court’s legitimacy for nearly a half-century. Roe relied on dubious reasoning to remove a contentious policy issue from the reach of the American people, placing all abortion policy in the hands of the unelected and unaccountable judiciary. As a result, Roe has politicized the court and poisoned the judiciary. The most legitimate thing the Supreme Court can do is overrule Roe.
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A top general with the United States Space Force says that other nations often threaten and even outright attack American satellites in space, as reported by the New York Post.
General David Thompson revealed the alarming developments in an op-ed with the Washington Post, published on Tuesday. In the article, Thompson says that “the threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time.”
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Documents obtained by human rights activists from the People’s Republic of China show that Xi Jinping, the country’s president, ordered the implementation of measures to persecute Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang Province in “top secret” speeches during the 2010s.
Xi reportedly gave the orders in a series of speeches and statements, Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow with Victims of Communism, claimed in a Twitter thread on Nov. 29, citing 317 pages of documents leaked to the Uyghur Tribunal this past September.
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Joe Biden’s approval numbers remain abysmally low in a new nationwide survey, dragging his presidency and congressional Democrats down.
According to a Trafalgar poll published Wednesday, just 36.3 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s performance in the White House, and 59.1 percent disapprove.
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RIO GRANDE VALLEY — The alarm clock sounded at 3 a.m. local time. It was dark and the skies were clear from the storm that had just passed. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Lt. Craig Cummings, who was driving me around the valley, joked that we may face a more dangerous situation than the border had in store for us because of the tornado-like winds and torrential downpour that had swept through the area just hours before.
We decided the early morning would be the best time to capture suspected human smuggling attempts. Texas troopers with DPS supporting Operation Lone Star, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s initiative to combat nefarious activity from entering his state, dotted the roads making their presence known.
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Coffee prices soared to a 10-year high on Monday, with experts projecting the high costs to last well into 2023, CNBC reported.
Coffee contracts for December hit $2.34 per pound at the end of Monday’s trading day, CNBC reported. Coffee futures on the New York Intercontinental Exchange soared to $2.46 on Thursday, recording the highest price since 2011.
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When it comes to blaming the masses, no one seems to take the fall more than young people: Weird food trends, the “baby bust,” and now, a labor shortage all seem to be attributed to Millennials and Gen Z. Now, following “The Great Resignation” comes a new phrase, “antiwork.” It’s a movement pointing out the flaws in work and employment. The subreddit grew from 76,000 to 1,019,000 subscribers from January 2020 to November 2021, according to Vice. And they planned a “Blackout Black Friday” strike. So, what’s this movement, and how far will it go?
What is antiwork?
This isn’t simply a lazy act of defiance. The antiwork movement has to do with burnout, mental health, wages, benefits, employer treatment, and many other factors. The pandemic saw many people working themselves to the bone but for low pay under toxic management. Then came The Great Resignation, where millions voluntarily left their jobs. Nearly 40% of those were service jobs— restaurant, hotel, bar, and health care workers, and others—also known as those who are famously underpaid. Now, employees from nearly every workforce sector in the U.S. are coming forward to expose poor treatment and overworking, among other issues.
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Is the United States becoming like the old Soviet Union in a way that people fail to see because of the noise and the distractions of electoral politics, mass entertainment masking as news, and mass indoctrination masking as entertainment?
We are becoming a meritocracy that punishes merit and rewards folly. We have all the disutility of a meritocracy—the snobbishness, the restless ambition, the inclination to see merit only in what can be measured or paid for; even the tendency to pull intelligent people out of their native regions and set them down, like gilded tumbleweeds, in places without memory or character. But we get none of the benefits. We punish truth-telling and intelligence, and reward stupidity.
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Judicial Watch filed a motion on Nov. 23 on behalf of The Daily Caller News Foundation and reporter Thomas Catenacci, asking the court to depose Chicago Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot to discuss her allegedly racist interview policy under oath.
Lightfoot failed to comply with court-ordered deposition in August after a representative refused to answer a series of questions of the Democrat’s policy to interview journalists of color, according to the Judicial Watch press release.
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A liberal nonprofit that accused President Donald Trump of unleashing a “surge in white supremacy and hate” donated $85,000 last fall to election administrators in Georgia’s largest county as part of a campaign to turn out black votes in the 2020 election. Auditors now want some of that money returned.
The Fulton County Auditor declared this month that county election officials failed to spend all of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s grant for buying absentee ballot drop boxes and did not comply with one of the grant’s primary requirements to publicly disclose how many ballots were collected in the boxes.
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A freelance photographer and his NBC contact were caught on camera trying to squirm their way out of trouble in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last month, when the freelancer was stopped for running a red light while trying to keep up with the Rittenhouse jury van.
Kenosha police on Tuesday released the body camera video of the November 17 stop. James Morrison, the driver of the vehicle, identified himself as an NBC producer.
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In a recent article, John J. Mearsheimer traced America’s post-Cold War policy of engagement with China and the goals the U.S. hoped to achieve:
“Washington promoted investment in China and welcomed the country into the global trading system, thinking it would become a peace-loving democracy and a responsible stakeholder in a U.S.-led international order.”[1]
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If Rep. Ilhan Omar wants white Americans to apologize for the sins of their ancestors, she should be transparent about her father’s apparent leadership role inside a genocidal Marxist regime.
Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, passed away last year from COVID-19 complications. Upon his death, Minnesota’s progressive, Omar-friendly Sahan Journal praised “his climb in the military hierarchy, eventually becoming a colonel.” Yusuf Ismail Faraton, another colonel who served alongside Omar Mohamed, told Sahan Journal (which was founded in partnership with and using money from Minnesota Public Radio) that Omar’s father “played a significant role in the war” Somalia waged with Ethiopia from 1977-1978 (the Ogaden War). Other outlets like the Blaze have also reported that Omar’s late father served during the 1982 Somali-Ethiopian Border War.
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Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Tuesday withdrew a federal lawsuit against Enbridge, a Canadian company that owns the Line 5 pipeline.
Instead, the Democratic governor detailed that the state is “shifting its legal strategy,” to use a state lawsuit filed by Attorney General Dana Nessel to shut down the pipeline.
Whitmer called for Line 5 to be terminated “as soon as possible.”
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is trying to use federal funds from a recently-signed infrastructure package to accelerate the replacement of lead service lines.
Whitmer signed an executive directive (ED) for the Legislature to work with the State Budget Office to spend federal funds to accelerate the replacement of lead service lines (LSL).
“Right now, we have an incredible opportunity to put Michiganders first by using the funds we will be getting under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to ensure every community has safe drinking water,” Whitmer said in a statement. “With this executive directive, we are accelerating the timeline to replace 100% of lead service lines in Michigan, prioritizing communities that have been disproportionately impacted, fostering enhanced collaboration across departments, and ensuring that the projects are built by Michigan workers and businesses. I look forward to working with the legislature to invest these dollars and get the job done.”
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If Steve Bannon can be indicted for “contempt of Congress,” and the approval rate for Congress at about 21 percent, the Biden Justice Department should probably just go ahead and indict the other 270 million Americans who also have contempt for Congress. The specious indictment of our friend Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress is just another demonstration that Democrats consider the process to be part of the punishment and are using it to harass and bankrupt another conservative enemy.
Bannon, to his credit, is having none of it and has decided to fight back in the court of public opinion as well as in the court of law.
Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein of POLITICO report the Justice Department on Sunday night accused Steve Bannon’s defense team of lodging “frivolous” legal complaints in order to cause a public dust-up with prosecutors as he battles criminal charges for attempting to thwart the House’s Jan. 6 select committee.
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Vandals broke into a Michigan office of Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell and trashed some of her personal possessions including those belonging to her deceased husband, who held the congressional seat she now occupies.
The congresswoman told the Detroit Free Press on Monday that a plate glass window and objects belonging to late-husband John Dingell were destroyed at the district office in Dearborn, west of Detroit.
“The motive for today’s incident is unclear, but what I can tell you is that the disrespect, violence & division need to end in this country. We need to practice civility and kindness, not divisiveness and anger,” Dingell said.
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A California congressman is facing backlash for a series of tweets slamming unvaccinated Americans and parents who choose not to vaccinate their children.
“I’m losing my Covid patience [thread]. I’ve tried to reason with the unvaxxed. I’ve directed some to medical pros. I don’t judge but hear them out and steer them to facts. The unvaxxed love to say it’s about choice. But you know who doesn’t have a choice? My 3 kids under 5,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA-15) said on Twitter.
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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Congressional Democrats to investigate the ties between the Chinese Communist regime and the Biden family during an impassioned speech Monday.
The senior-most Senate Republican, together with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), released more evidence earlier this month showing Hunter Biden’s ties to Chinese businessmen affiliated with the Communist government.
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Republican lawmakers are raising concerns that Twitter’s new Chief Executive Parag Agrawal may threaten conservative political speech on the social media platform.
Agrawal, Twitter’s former chief technology officer who was announced as CEO following Jack Dorsey’s decision to step down early Monday, has previously highlighted the perceived threat of online “misinformation,” calling to depart from free speech considerations in favor of other concerns in an interview with MIT Technology Review in November 2020.
“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” Agrawal said. “The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”
Agrawal previously oversaw development efforts on Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform intended to “better control abusive and misleading information.”
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Most voters say companies should not speak out on social issues, while most corporate executives think they should, a new opinion survey has found.
While 63% of corporate executives “agree unequivocally that companies should speak out on social issues,” only 36% of voters feel the same, according to a poll conducted by the Brunswick Group.
“As the data show, the organizational impulse to weigh in on any and every social issue is disregarded by audiences, disconnected from what people want, and even diminishing to corporate reputation,” the advisory firm explains.
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The Federal Reserve concluded that weather disasters are “not very” bad for financial institutions despite the Biden administration’s warnings that climate change is an “emerging” threat to banks.
“We find that weather disasters over the last quarter century had insignificant or small effects on U.S. banks’ performance,” the report, published in November by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, stated. “This stability seems endogenous rather than a mere reflection of federal aid.”
The report added that extreme climate events “actually boosts profits” for larger banks because of increased loan demand. In addition, smaller banks are adept at avoiding mortgage lending in flood prone areas using local knowledge of the region they are based.
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Republican Al Schmidt, who is the only GOP member with a seat on Philadelphia’s election board, announced on Tuesday that he will resign from his position.
Schmidt, who has received harsh criticism from former President Donald Trump, is accepting a position as president and CEO of The Committee of Seventy.
The commissioner will step down in the middle of his third term.
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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordered a new unionization election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, ruling that the company violated federal labor law during the first election.
“Today’s decision confirms what we were saying all along – that Amazon’s intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace – and as the Regional Director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal,” Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) President Stuart Appelbaum said in a statement Monday.
“Amazon workers deserve to have a voice at work, which can only come from a union,” he continued.
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Before the Donald Trump-inspired challenges of the 2020 presidential election, Democrats and liberals alleged fraud and formally contested the results of the 2000, 2004, and 2016 Republican-won presidential elections. Those earlier challenges spurred the creation of a network of election litigators on the left — what J. Christian Adams, a conservative ex-Justice Department attorney pitted against them, calls a “linear build-out” of “some 30 groups” responsible for a lot of sudden changes in election law last year amid the pandemic.
For the closely fought 2020 presidential election, 29 largely Democrat-controlled states and the District of Columbia loosened voting laws, most expanding access to mail voting, according to the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. In response, after former President Trump’s efforts to contest his narrow loss, 19 largely conservative states tightened their voting laws, the Brennan Center reports. The latest changes have provoked a wave of litigation, overwhelmingly from the left.
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In an unprecedented move, the Biden White House still has not yet released an official total of the number of illegal aliens who are currently occupying the United States, the Washington Free Beacon reports.
Although the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has given those numbers to Congress in a report, that report has not yet been made public. Common practice dating back to the Obama Administration has been to release the report publicly shortly after the Congressional briefing, with a focus on the number of possible visa overstays. Congress has warned that “the large number of annual in-country alien overstays threatens national security and the integrity of legal immigration.”
The report in question is formally called the “Entry/Exit Overstay Report,” and documents foreigners who were originally approved to stay in the United States with a visa, but whose visas have since expired. The report is compiled using travel data across multiple agencies, including DHS and the State Department.
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Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Education approved a grant application for a summer research program whose “core feature” was introducing student fellows to “critical race theory.”
The feds approved a five-year extension of the original grant for the Research Institute for Scholars of Equity (RISE) this year, with one notable and unexplained omission: the term “critical race theory.”
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Empower Oversight, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization with the goal of enhancing oversight of government, won an appeal for six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, allowing the group to access documents previously undisclosed.
The organization sought documents related to multiple reports of misconduct in the Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General (FHFA-OIG).
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Everything has gone so terribly wrong for the Biden Administration, and in the ways that were widely predicted, that it is hard to believe Joe Biden could be perceived as a successful or at least potentially successful president if only he had avoided being such a tool of the Democratic extreme Left. On the afternoon of his inauguration, he killed the Keystone XL Pipeline and curtailed fracking and offshore oil and gas exploration, and ordered the end of construction of the southern border wall. The consequences have been over 200,000 illegal migrants entering the United States across the southern border most months and the rise in the price of gasoline from approximately $2 a gallon to $5 a gallon across the country.
As practically everyone outside his immediate entourage saw and predicted, these were disastrous errors. The excuse regularly given in the case of the wall was that Biden had inherited a “broken” immigration policy. In support of this outrageous falsehood, all that could be offered was the tear-jerking fabrication about children being separated from their parents and confined to cages that reminded that eminent authority on modern European history, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of “Auschwitz.”
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The Duke Student Government (DSG) recently “chartered” a chapter of Students Supporting Israel (SSI), only to uphold its president’s veto of the organization days later.
The Chronicle reported that the Nov. 10 approval followed SSI’s stated intention to be “clear and confident pro-Israel voice on college campuses and to support students in grassroots pro-Israel advocacy.”
Five days later, however, the outlet reported that the DSG president, Christina Wang, vetoed the body’s approval of SSI over a now deleted social media interaction reportedly between the group and an individual that did not conform to expected conduct for a student organization.
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The need for loans has arguably never been greater in America following the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2020 study conducted by Bankrate.com shows that just 39% of Americans can cover a $1,000 emergency cost without taking out a loan. In a time of economic uncertainty, lenders offer a last resort option for many who are struggling to make ends meet and support themselves and their families.
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Three students were killed Tuesday in a shooting at Oxford High School in Oakland, Detroit. A suspected teen shooter has been taken into custody, and officials have recovered a handgun. Several others also have been injured in the attack, according to authorities.
Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe said in addition to the three deceased, eight people were shot, including a teacher. He estimated that 15 to 20 shots were fired in total. Officers conducted a third search of the high school to ensure there were no other victims.
The students who lost their lives have been identified as 14 and 17-year-old girls, in addition to a 16-year-old boy.
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