Theoretically, taxpayers should be able to see how Michigan schools are spending $5.7 billion of taxpayer money to recover from COVID-19-related learning loss.
But an investigation by The Center Square through more than 80 records requests to schools statewide shows how difficult it can be to obtain itemized COVID spending records. Many schools never responded to an initial Freedom of Information Act request.
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The Buckleys family band from Australia is a distinctive, original trio whose music brings hope back to the currently stale popular music scene with their newest EP, ‘Take It As It Comes.’
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That once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.”
The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court – an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept – what the Greeks called isonomia that distinguished classical democratic Athens from its anti-democratic rivals. Isonomia later became enshrined as the central criterion of all Western consensual governments.
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Mortgage rates on Thursday climbed to a 14-year high, with the average 30-year-fixed rate rising above 6% for the first time since 2008.
Mortgage Bankers Association executive Joel Kan says the 6.01%, rate is “essentially double what it was a year ago.”
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President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic is “over” in the United States.
“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s– But the pandemic is over,” Biden said during a pre-recorded CBS “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday.
“As you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it’s changing,” he said.
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The Department of Education (DOE) is giving about $25 million in grants to several universities to help them hire and train a “diverse educator workforce,” according to a Sept. 12 press release.
The DOE partnered with Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP), a group that works on preparing higher education faculty, to provide 22 new five-year grants to several universities, including three historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), according to the press release. The institutions receiving grants will work with TQP to “recruit highly qualified individuals, including individuals of color” for educator positions.
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With the school year underway around the U.S., parents and caregivers are once again faced with the age-old struggle of wrangling groggy kids out of bed in the morning. For parents of preteens and teenagers, it can be particularly challenging.
Sometimes this gets chalked up to laziness in teens. But the main reason why a healthy person is unable to naturally wake up without an alarm is that they are not getting the sleep their brain and body need.
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The Heritage Foundation, a preeminent conservative think tank founded in 1973, is leaning into a new, more populist vision of conservatism that’s focused on domestic and cultural issues and more open to wielding government power to advance the conservative cause.
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A highly contentious vote on a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage at the federal level has been put on hold until after the November midterms, as the legislation struggles to garner 60 votes in support.
Politico reports that the bipartisan group of senators working on the bill, known as the Respect for Marriage Act, made their announcement on Thursday. They had previously been considering a vote on the legislation as soon as Monday of next week, but determined that they could not garner enough Republican support to overcome a possible filibuster that would kill the legislation.
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A dozen Republican state attorneys general are fed up with what they view as the leftward drift and self-dealing of their nonpartisan national association and are asking the organization to change its ways and return roughly $280 million in assets to the states.
The National Association of Attorneys General was created in 1907 as a bipartisan forum for all state and territory attorneys general. Over the last year, several of the group’s Republican members have asserted that NAAG has become a partisan litigation machine that improperly benefits from the many tort settlements it helps to engineer.
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Analysis from the New York Times revealed that 97 current U.S. senators or representatives reported stock trades either they or their immediate families made involving firms working in sectors that overlapped with their committee assignments.
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When is the last time you went to an independent coffee shop? Not a coffee shop run by a church or a charity that does positive things for a community – I mean, a grungy, hipster coffee shop run by Gen Z-ers who dress like they rolled out of a bed in the late ’70s and who believe their knowledge of roasting beans has greater value than rocket science.
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The Defense Department’s inspector general has alerted the secretary of defense to apparent blanket denials of religious accommodation requests (RAR) for exemptions from the military COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which would be a violation of federal law.
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NBC News was criticized after tweeting a quote from an immigration activist who compared the illegal migrants sent by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to “trash.”
The since-deleted tweet included a link to a story titled, “DeSantis sending asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard divides Venezuelan Americans.” The post stated: “Florida Gov. DeSantis sending asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard is like ‘me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there,’ a founding member of a foundation which helps refugees says.”
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Voters overwhelmingly trust Republicans to manage the economy, a new poll ahead of this year’s midterm elections suggests, while also viewing the economy as the most important issue.
Roughly 52% of voters said that they trust Republicans to manage the economy, compared to 38% for Democrats, while only 1% of respondents said they agreed with the proposals of both parties to manage it, according to a poll conducted by the Times and Siena College, which measured the relative strength of both parties in advance of the election scheduled on Nov. 8. The economy has been the most important issue to voters heading into the polls; in a July edition of the same NYT/Siena poll, 20% called it the “most important problem facing the country today,” while roughly 76% said that it would be “extremely important” to them as they vote.
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Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch obtained evidence that a computer contractor working under the direction of Hillary Clinton’s legal team destroyed subpoenaed records that the former secretary of state stored on a private email server she originally kept at her New York home, and then lied to investigators about it. Yet no charges were brought against Clinton, her lawyers, or her paid consultant.
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China announced sanctions against CEOs of two major U.S. defense contractors Friday for their role in an arms package the State Department approved for Taiwan on Sept. 2.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the sanctions against Raytheon CEO Gregory J. Hayes and Boeing Defense CEO Ted Colbert will “defend China’s sovereignty and security interests” against U.S. “military contact” with Taiwan. The Biden administration notified Congress of its intent to transfer $1.1 billion worth of military equipment to Taiwan earlier this month, including 60 anti-ship missiles Boeing Defense agreed to produce and 100 air-to-air missilescontracted with Raytheon.
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Transit agencies could turn to taxpayers for more money when federal COVID-19 money runs out.
With federal money dwindling, some mass transit agencies are preparing to seek more tax dollars at a time when fewer people are riding, according to a report from a credit rating agency.
Some workers never plan to return to the office, creating uncertainties for mass transit agencies and the taxpayers who fund them, especially those more dependent on riders for fare revenue. A new report from S&P Global Ratings said transit systems could seek additional tax dollars when federal COVID-19 money runs dry in 2025.
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Hispanic and Latino voters, especially among the working class, are gradually shifting their support to Republicans after once being a heavily Democratic constituency, according to several surveys analyzed by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
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President Joe Biden doesn’t want Republican officials interfering with his immigration policies, saying their initiative to send people north from the border is “playing politics” and “un-American.”
Speaking at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala in Washington, D.C., Thursday night, he said, “Instead of working with us on solutions, Republicans are playing politics with human beings using them as props. What they are doing is simply wrong. It’s un-American. It’s reckless.”
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by Ross Pomeroy For people sleeping in close proximity to someone else, the first yawn in the morning can be chemical warfare. “Yuck, your breath reeks!” Yes, morning breath can be quite foul. Decreased saliva levels during sleep prevent normal flushing of oral bacteria. As you lie immobilized at night, they…
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Denmark has just tacitly admitted that the risks of mRNA injections outweigh the benefits for healthy people under 50.
The Nordic country will no longer offer COVID-19 boosters and vaccines to persons under 50 who are not at high risk of becoming ill from the virus, the Danish Health Authority (SST) announced on Tuesday.
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Former President Donald Trump leveled a blistering attack Saturday night against the man who succeeded him in the White House, telling a rally in Ohio that Joe Biden’s Justice Department was waging unprecedented “political repression” against MAGA supporters while his inflationary economic policies were “incinerating trillions of dollars of middle-class wealth.”
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Christians may become a minority in the United States within the next several decades, according to a projection from Pew Research Center.
As of 2020, 64% of Americans identified as Christian, 30% were religiously unaffiliated and 6% were another religion.
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Democrats and their media allies have sought to stigmatize Republicans concerned about 2020 voting irregularities as “election deniers,” yet scores of leading Democrats have themselves raised concerns about elections won by Republicans since 2000, including claiming elections were stolen and attempting to change the outcome of presidential elections by objecting to the certification of state electoral college votes.
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Top Republicans in the U.S. House are pursuing an investigation into reports that federal tax dollars designated for COVID-related learning loss were spent to promote “equity warriors,” critical race theory programming and more at local schools.
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Wokeism is conventionally traced back through progressivism and Marxism to the fake liberalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The histories of wokeism have failed to focus on Maoism, even though some observers noticed the similarity between Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the West’s cultural revolution of the late 2010s.
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The ridership of the two largest Detroit Metro public transit systems has plummeted post-pandemic and one expert says it might not return this decade.
In 2020, the Detroit Department of Transportation and the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation provided free fares and reduced operations during some of COVID. The systems later revived fares and added more routes, but many people didn’t return.
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NASHVILLE, Tennessee- As part of a five-city tour to promote their new branded non-profit Music Will (formerly known as Little Kids Rock) founder Dave Wish spoke to me about their latest adaptation.
The former first-grade teacher started Little Kids Rock because his students didn’t like their current music program. He asked them what they wanted to play and at the time, they said, “Ricky Martin” and “Selena.” He began to teach the kids to play the music they wanted to hear and eventually it led to teaching other teachers to do the same.
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A Christian university is being sued over its policy prohibiting the hiring of LGBTQ teachers.
Students and educators filed a lawsuit against Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington, alleging that the university violated its fiduciary duty and engaged in fraud by enacting a religious-based hiring policy which hinders educators in same-sex relationships from getting hired. The lawsuit targets the leaders of the board of trustees, calling them the “rogue board” and asking for their removal from their positions, as well as demanding a jury trial.
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New York City officials are thinking about flying illegal immigrants out of the Big Apple to Florida after officials in Texas bussed 11,000 border crossers to the sanctuary city, the Daily Mail reported on Friday.
Manuel Castro, NYC’s Commissioner of Immigration Affairs, said that most of the migrants are from Venezuela, and they want to go to the Sunshine State because it has a large community of Venezuelans.
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There has been broad recognition of late that the American Left projects their own flawed proclivities onto their political opponents. They accuse the Right of not caring about the American worker, but the functional consequence of every policy they devise has been destructive to American workers. They accuse the Right of being corporate puppets, when every major corporate special interest caters to the Left. They accuse the Right of having no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, while they attempt to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, ignore the First and Second Amendments, and refuse to prosecute criminals. They accuse the Right of being fascist, yet their allies in Antifa and Black Lives Matter have cells operating in every major city.
Maybe the biggest projection of all is the common leftist accusation that the Right is dominated by white supremacists. The first thing to observe here is that the American Left – its leadership, its donors, and its corporate partners—“diversity, equity and inclusion” notwithstanding—is itself dominated by whites. And apart from their rhetoric, they certainly aren’t doing anything to help nonwhites. From welfare to affirmative action to avoidable cost-of-living increases, every policy the Left implements has the effect of disproportionately marginalizing and impoverishing nonwhites.
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Many American voters head into midterm elections wearied by political polarization. Subjects that might have merely led to an uncomfortable dinner table conversation yesterday are more likely to be relationship-ending today.
It’s often assumed that political positions come with a Democrat or Republican party label. But beneath many of the most divisive issues of our time – think the COVID-19 pandemic response, the 2020 election, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade – lies an issue that is neither red nor blue. Would you believe me if I said religious liberty is not actually a partisan issue?
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Illegal migrants Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, were informed of their destination prior to boarding flights to the island, according to documents exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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A group of 47 members of Congress are urging the Secretary of the Department of Defense to “immediately revoke” the COVID-19 vaccine mandate he issued last August for all service members, civilian personnel, and contractors. They’ve also asked him to re-instate those who’ve already been discharged for noncompliance.
In a Sept. 15 letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, they wrote “to express our grave concern over the effect of the Department of Defense’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the readiness of our Armed Forces, particularly the U.S. Army.
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In Philadelphia 235 years ago today, 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the U.S. Constitution. Eleven years had passed since the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and this historic event marked an important milestone for our remarkable experiment in self-government.
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Army leaders have seen a 13% drop in qualification test scores from the most recent high school graduating class compared to pre-pandemic performances, Defense News reported.
Disqualification rates for potential recruits also shot up from between 30% and 40% to about 70% because of obesity, drug use and failing to meet academic standards, Lt. Gen. Maria Gervais, second in command for Army training, said at a conference Thursday, according to Defense News. The Army is projected to fall short of its recruiting goal for the year ending Sept. 30 by 25%.
Gervais, deputy commanding general of Army Training and Doctrine Command, said the Army has been in a “nosedive” since July 2021, but that the service may be seeing a steady revival, according to Defense News.
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My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, announced Thursday that he is suing the U.S. government and the FBI after he said agents seized his phone earlier this week.
Lindell said the lawsuit “isn’t just to get the phone back,” but he filed it because his “First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights were broken.”
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A new diversity hire at the Biden Administration’s Department of Defense (DOD) has a long and documented history of racist statements against White people on her social media.
As reported by the New York Post, Kelisa Wing is an Army veteran and the new chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at the DOD’s Education Activity. Her Twitter account in particular contains numerous anti-White statements, including her declaration in June of 2020 that she was “exhausted with these white folx in these [professional development] sessions.”
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Most voters support banning abortions at 15 weeks or earlier, a poll from WPA Intelligence found.
The poll comes after Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced federal legislation that would ban abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for for rape, incest and the life of the mother. A combined 62% of registered voters, including 48% of Democrats, believed abortion should only be allowed up to 15 weeks or earlier, the WPA Intelligence poll found.
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The long-awaited trial of the most high-profile January 6 case will begin later this month. Five members of the Oath Keepers, an alleged “militia” group involved in the Capitol protest, face charges of seditious conspiracy and other serious felonies. It is the first trial in a multi-defendant prosecution that has dominated the attention of the Department of Justice, the January 6 select committee, and the national news media.
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One of the biggest social media platforms in the world has allegedly been spying on the private messages and personal data of users who believe that voter fraud took place in the 2020 election, and has subsequently been handing this information over to the FBI.
According to the New York Post, the alleged surveillance operation by Facebook and its coordination with the government was confirmed by several anonymous sources in the Department of Justice (DOJ). The sources allege that employees at Facebook have been red-flagging any suspicious private messages over the last 19 months, sending the information directly to the FBI’s domestic terrorism operational unit in Washington, D.C. These actions have been carried out without the use of an official subpoena.
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In an extremely imaginative problem-solving (or problem-highlighting) move, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday flew two planeloads of illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. A Martha’s Vineyard lawmaker tweeted that “our island jumped into action,” and that “these immigrants were met with compassion, not chaos.” In another tweet, however, he accused Republicans of using human lives as “political pawns,” calling it “evil and inhumane.”
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While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is only one example of an administrative federal agency run by unelected bureaucrats, it is one charged with ensuring Americans receive truthful health and safety information, a daunting role for an organization now engulfed with concerns about its credibility.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky wrote in a letter made public this week her agency did not conduct a type of analysis on reports made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) regarding COVID shots during 2021. Her agency, however, indicated otherwise in its documents and through some of its other representatives.
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The Biden education department announced Thursday it was awarding more than $7 million in competitive grants to eight organizations that have worked to achieve what the department calls “the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing efforts to enhance and increase parent and family engagement in local education.”
Grants from the Statewide Family Engagement Centers (SFEC) program, the announcement states, “provide financial support to organizations that offer technical assistance and training to state educational agencies and school districts that effectively engage families over policies, programs, and activities that lead to improvements in student development and academic achievement.”
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Michigan won a $105 million federal grant to replace the I-375 freeway in Detroit with an accessible boulevard. Work is expected to start in 2025.
Almost 60 years ago, government officials approved a plan that bulldozed through the mostly minority-populated neighborhoods Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in order to build I-375, displacing more than 130,000 people. The new project will replace it with a boulevard to reconnect the split communities.
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A half century ago, Americans held grave concerns that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies had abused civil rights, improperly targeted enemies and illegally gathered evidence, so Congress set out on a great cleansing mission. It formed a special committee chaired by Idaho Sen. Frank Church that laid bare the wrongdoing, overhauled the bureau and created new guardrails to protect civil liberties.
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School districts that resorted to remote learning during the pandemic took a large learning loss hit, according to Thursday study by a Brown University economist.
K-12 school districts who stayed with remote learning the longest during the pandemic saw a 13% sharper drop in learning losses than schools that returned to in-person learning sooner, according to study by a Brown University economist Emily Oster. The study notes that while there were other factors that resulted in learning losses, remote learning was a “significant contributing factor.”
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Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong are leading a multistate, bipartisan effort urging President Joe Biden to classify illicit fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).
“I first called for President Biden to take swift action in July and call fentanyl what it is – a weapon of mass destruction,” Moody said. “Now, I am leading a bipartisan coalition of 18 attorneys general demanding the president take action now, declare fentanyl a WMD and join us in our fight to prevent the death and destruction caused by this highly-lethal substance from getting even worse.”
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GOP Rep. Jim Jordan says the FBI is not responding to his concerns about a whistleblower report claiming the agency has classified an emergency-preparedness group started by a former Green Beret as a “domestic violent extremism” organization.
Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, addressed his concerns in a letter sent Wednesday to FBI Director Christopher Wray — following one he sent in July about whistleblower allegations that the agency is “padding its domestic violent extremist data.”
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