A U.S. government report released Monday estimates that there could have been more than $60 billion in unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic. The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office says that figure is an estimate spread over the entire unemployment system and should be “interpreted with caution.”
Read More
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called for “immediate” relief to some Michiganders from rising prices in her State of the State address Wednesday evening.
Whitmer, the Democrat who won a second term in November, said three proposals will make a “real difference” to many residents who are “facing the pinch right now” at the grocery store and with medical bills and prescription costs.
Read More
Donald Trump for now certainly seems to have had more documents labeled classified at Mar-a-Lago in Florida than did Joe Biden at his various homes in Delaware. Yet otherwise, the comparisons between the two cases, contrary to popular punditry, hardly favor Biden.
Read More
Some of our nation’s politicians seem to know very little about basic economic principles despite constantly proposing legislative action on economic issues. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.) now want federal regulators to impose rent control on the entire nation. In their letter to the Biden administration, which was signed by 50 members of Congress, Warren and Bowman request that the administration “pursue all possible strategies” to control high rents. These politicians portray themselves as fighting for the average American, but, if they get their way, the results will be catastrophic.
Read More
NASHVILLE, Tennessee- Before I got the email, I thought it was about time for some new Chris Janson music because it had been a few years since he put new music out. Fueled by Mountain Dew®, Janson’s high-octane show puts this human hummingbird right at the top of my all-time favorite live performers.
Read More
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is releasing a book that accuses Pope Francis of giving “privileged status” to his friends that are accused of sexual abuse in the church, according to Catholic news website LaCroix International. The Roman Catholic Church has suffered multiple sexual abuse scandals over the years after several reports from the Vatican found that the clergy, particularly in France, had abused thousands of victims. While Müller says that France’s Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE) 2021 report was “inflated and exaggerated,” the cardinal claims in his new book, “In Good Faith: Religion in the 21st Century,” that Francis has helped protect those close to him by granting them a special “status,” citing the case of Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who was convicted in March 2022 of sexual abuse of two victims during seminary, as an example, according to LaCroix International.
Read More
Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed former Trump campaign attorney Harmeet Dhillon in her challenge to Ronna McDaniel for Republican National Committee chair. “I think we need a change. I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC,” DeSantis told Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice in an interview aired Thursday, one day before the vote for RNC speaker.
Read More
The government’s campaign to fight “misinformation” has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts.
Read More
A company behind the manufacturing of a pill used in chemical abortions filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning challenging state bans on the abortions, The New York Times reported. GenBioPro, which makes the abortion pill mifepristone, filed the lawsuit in a West Virginia federal court to argue that Federal Food and Drug regulations (FDA) take priority over state laws regulating abortion, according to the NYT. The lawsuit argues that the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill trumps state laws and that abortion bans violate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which protects interstate commerce.
Read More
Pope Francis I said in an interview with the Associated Press that “homosexuality is not a crime” and encouraged bishops to stop practicing forms of conversion therapy. Francis has come under scrutiny in the past for his statements regarding the LGBTQ community, including his perceived endorsement of same-sex civil unions in 2020. The pope stated during the interview that while homosexuality is considered a sin, it should not be a “crime.”
Read More
Fiscal hawks in the Senate reiterated their demands for fiscal reforms and spending cuts Tuesday as they voiced their support for House Republicans to lead the heavy-lifting on addressing the nation’s debt ceiling crisis. “We have an opportunity to stop the madness, and it’s incumbent on the Republican majority in the House and Republicans in the Senate to use every lever point we have,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) at a press conference on the debt ceiling and runaway spending.
Read More
The Michigan Department of Transportation has commissioned a study about enacting highway toll roads to raise revenue to fix roads.
The study follows a growing tax revenue hole from increasing fuel efficiency that leads to fewer fillups at the pump and more electric vehicles whose drivers don’t pay state or federal fuel tax.
Read More
The College Board announced Tuesday that it will be updating its framework for its Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies (APAAS) course following its rejection by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and his state’s Department of Education (FDOE). The College Board said in a statement its final framework for the course will be released on Feb. 1, reported WESH.
Read More
Last June a firebomb ripped through the CompassCare crisis pregnancy center in Buffalo, causing extensive damage but no deaths. Amid the rubble and soot, the words “Jane was here” were written on the wall, suggesting that the militant abortion rights group Jane’s Revenge was responsible. Almost immediately, authorities all the way up to the FBI assured the pro-life enterprise they would bring the perpetrators to justice.
Read More
No reasonable person would deny the importance of protecting the environment. The accomplishments of the environmental movement over the past 50 years are undeniable: cleaner air and water, protected wildernesses, and more efficient use of resources. The list is endless and illustrious. Environmentalist values are an integral part of any responsible public policy agenda. But the pendulum has swung too far.
Read More
A top Department of Justice (DOJ) official who has criticized pregnancy resource centers, which she called “fake clinics,” is responsible for overseeing the prosecution of two individuals indicted for attacking pregnancy resource centers, according to the DOJ. The DOJ indicted Caleb Freestone and Amber Smith-Stewart this week for various FACE Act violations after they allegedly spray-painted threats on pregnancy resource centers such as “If abortions aren’t safe than niether [sic] are you” and “WE’RE COMING for U,” according to the DOJ. Kristen Clarke, the Assistant Attorney General heading the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which will be prosecuting this case, condemned the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to strike down a California law requiring pregnancy resource centers to offer information about state-funded abortions, as previously reported by The Washington Free Beacon.
Read More
Lawmakers and their spouses would be prohibited from using privileged information to trade stocks, under legislation introduced Tuesday by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Hawley’s bill follows news last year that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, traded between $1 million and $5 million worth of semiconductor stocks shortly before Congress allocated $52 million to the industry.
Read More
Social media giant Meta announced Wednesday that it would reinstate former President Donald Trump’s accounts on both Facebook and Instagram. The former president was suspended from both platforms in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2022, Capitol Riot. Other social media platforms such as Twitter acted likewise, prompting Trump to create Truth Social, a digital platform similar to Twitter that practiced looser content moderation than its competitors.
Read More
The work of a Planned Parenthood sex educator whose viral TikTok videos instruct children and young teens to use “spicy toys” and fruits and vegetables for sexual pleasure has been condemned by a former sex educator also trained by the abortion industry giant. Monica Cline, who, prior to her conversion, educated children as young as middle schoolers to engage in sex acts “safely,” said in comments sent to The Star News Network that Planned Parenthood sex educator and digital creator Mariah Caudillo is engaged in a “crime against children” paid for by American taxpayers.
Read More
Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board member Allysia Finley took to task both the federal government and the pharmaceutical giants profiting from the sale of their COVID mRNA booster shots for a “deceptive advertising” push for Americans to continue taking boosters without proof of their safety or effectiveness. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its health and regulatory agencies are engaged in a “deceptive advertising” campaign, wrote Finley Sunday, suggesting the pressure tactics “shouldn’t come as a surprise,” since the federal government “took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.”
Read More
The Vermont Supreme Court ruled in favor of a law permitting noncitizens to vote in local, municipal elections. In 2021, the state Legislature backed bills to change the local charters of Montpelier and Winooski to permit noncitizen voting in local elections. Though Republican Gov. Phil Scott vetoed those measures, the Democratic Legislature overrode his objections, the Associated Press reported.
Read More
A recent report found that Catholic churches have suffered 118 attacks since the leak of the Supreme Court draft majority opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center in May 2022. Churches and pregnancy centers across the United States came under attack after the opinion was leaked to Politico, indicating that the Supreme Court intended to overturn Roe v. Wade. CatholicVote (CV) updated its tracker Sunday that keeps track of assaults on Catholic Churches and found that 118 churches had reported attacks since May 2022.
Read More
The Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company has an unfair dominance over the digital ad market. As reported by the New York Post, the federal lawsuit could be filed as soon as Tuesday against Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. The suit will target Google’s lucrative advertising business, which accounts for 80 percent of Google’s overall revenue; in 2023, Google is projected to make at least $73.8 billion from advertising alone.
Read More
The Michigan Court of Claims has entered an order certifying the $20 million class-action settlement against the Unemployment Insurance Agency.
The settlement resolves a class-action lawsuit against the agency claimed in 2013 it falsely accused unemployment recipients of fraud and seized private property without due process.
Read More
A Democratic California congressman this week weighed in on President Joe Biden’s classified-document scandal, characterizing the president’s housing of restricted records in his University of Pennsylvania office and his Delaware home as indefensible. A member of the House Oversight and Armed Services committees, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) told Fox News that Biden warrants scrutiny for keeping numerous records he obtained during his earlier service as a U.S. senator and later as vice president. Khanna noted that the law requires classified federal documents to be kept in “sensitive compartmented information facilities” (SCIFs). While presidents can sometimes temporarily designate rooms within their personal properties as SCIFs, Biden has never suggested any spaces in his home or office were deemed to be such areas.
Read More
Last week, CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman why President Biden would dispatch his personal attorney, who didn’t have proper security clearance, to his Delaware home to search for classified documents. Presumably, Brennan believed that when searching for classified documents, one should have the credentials to actually read them. Brennan’s focus on who was reviewing Biden’s papers touched on a potentially interesting line of inquiry. The question hanging in the air, however, relates to the discovery that started this whole process: Why would lawyers be “packing up” Biden’s office in the Penn Biden Center in the first place?
Read More
As Congress and the courts delve deeper into federally sanctioned censorship by Big Tech, a troubling revolving door has emerged between the U.S. intelligence community and the Big Tech giants on the front lines of one of the fiercest battles over free speech in modern American history. A Just the News review of LinkedIn employment histories of senior Big Tech executives found that at least 200 former workers of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, National Security Council and Homeland Security Department have landed Silicon Valley jobs, many within content moderation units regulating supposed “disinformation” and disproportionately throttling news and opinion deviating from approved, left-tilting norms.
Read More
Fewer than 3% of likely Hispanic voters support amnesty for illegal immigrants as they continue to overwhelm authorities stationed on the southern border, according to a poll conducted by Convention of States Action and The Trafalgar Group. Just 2.8% of Hispanic likely voters believe that both individuals with pending asylum cases and those who entered the country illegally should be granted amnesty and eventual citizenship, according to the Tuesday poll. The findings come amid a record surge in illegal migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded more than 250,000 migrant encounters in December alone and more than 2.3 million in fiscal year 2022.
Read More
Two of the largest left-wing nonprofit organizations in the country collectively sent at least $39 million to China in 2021, according to IRS tax filings. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sent a total of $30 million to various Chinese organizations and government entities, which included $2.5 million to China’s National Health Commission and $1.4 million to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. The Ford Foundation sent another $9.3 million, which included donations to at least three universities that are under the direct supervision of the government’s defense industry agency.
Read More
A former senior FBI counterintelligence official involved in the Trump-Russia probe was arrested and charged over the weekend for money laundering and violating sanctions against Russia while secretly working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who the U.S. government sanctioned. Charles McGonigal was the special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the FBI’s New York Field Office until he retired in 2018. McGonigal was arrested Saturday afternoon at JFK Airport, following travels in Sri Lanka, according to Fox News sources.
Read More
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, commemorated National School Choice Week by filing two bills to advance school choice, one of which his staff said would be the most significant educational reform since the GI bill. “We need to provide students with a variety of educational options to fit their needs,” Cruz told The Daily Signal in an email statement Tuesday. “I have often said that school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, and I believe no differently today than I did when I began serving in the Senate a decade ago.
Read More
America is overpopulated. Unchecked population growth over the last 70 years, driven by immigration rather than a healthy birth rate, now poses a serious ecological threat in the American West and a monumental social and political challenge in the rest of the country. Since the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965, which radically overhauled American immigration policy to favor third-world migrants, tens of millions of additional human beings legally and illegally entered the country. Pew Research estimates that without the Hart-Cellar Act, the United States would have had 72 million fewer people as of 2015. That would have been a much better America.
Read More
A group of 20 Republican-led states are suing the Biden administration over its migrant program that allows a set monthly amount of migrants to enter the U.S. from select countries. Texas, supported by 19 other states and America First Legal, filed the suit asserting that the Department of Homeland Security had effectively created a visa program without congressional approval “by announcing that it will permit up to 360,000 aliens annually from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to be ‘paroled’ into the United States for two years or longer and with eligibility for employment authorization.”
Read More
Former Vice President Mike Pence informed Congress on Tuesday that his team has discovered document in his Indiana home that from his time in the Trump White House and marked as classified.
Read More
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s questionable work leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and his equally questionable actions in managing the pandemic have raised a lot of eyebrows. Now, a majority of voters believe congress should investigate the former longtime medical adviser to the White House and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to a new poll by Convention of States Action.
Read More
A taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that drew the conclusion that teens who receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have greater life satisfaction has come under fire. The study, published at the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), states researchers from the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago sought to investigate the psychosocial functioning of 315 transgender and nonbinary young people, aged 12-20 years, over a period of two years after “gender-affirming hormones” (GAH), i.e., testosterone or estradiol, had been administered for gender dysphoria.
Read More
Audio streaming platform Spotify is laying off 6% of its staff, becoming the latest in a series of tech firms to make major cuts, the company announced Monday. The cuts come less than a week after Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet both laid off more than 10,000 employees each as Big Tech firms cut costs following pandemic-related spending sprees. Spotify had roughly 9,800 employees through September 2022, so the company will likely cut less than 600 staffers Monday, according to Reuters.
Read More
After being sued for violating the First Amendment, Eastpointe Mayor Monique Owens spent 15 minutes at Tuesday’s council meeting airing her grievances against the public. Owens complained that at a previous meeting, her daughter heard a member of the public criticizing her.
Read More
The last time racial reparations made the major news was on the eve of September 11, 2001 attacks. The loss of 3,000 Americans, which for a time fueled a new national unity, quickly dispelled the absurdities of the reparation movement, and turned our attention toward more existential issues. Now the idea is back in vogue again. Here are 10 reasons why the nation’s—and especially California’s—discussions of reparatory payouts are dangerous in a multiracial state, and why reparations are not viable either in an insolvent state or a bankrupt nation at large.
Read More
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ (ATF) recently implemented pistol brace final rule could classify millions of gun owners as felons should they fail to comply with the updated requirements, according to the gun rights advocacy groups. The rule, announced in January, will void all previous guidance on pistols braces, opting to redefine “rifle” as any weapon “designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder,” forcing pistol brace owners, many disabled, to register their pistols as short barrel rifles (SBR) with the federal government. The ATF has allowed 120 days for gun owners with pistol braces to adjust the barrel longer than the required 16 inches, file a Form 1 to “make” the pistol a SBR, remove the brace, surrender the firearm or destroy the firearm.
Read More
Former Western Kentucky University English instructor Ryan Hall said he was fired after canceling his classes in protest of his school’s political bias to embrace and enforce diversity, equity and inclusion above free speech and academic freedom and discourse. Hall, who describes himself as a liberal who has never voted for a conservative, said he risked his two-decade career in academia to defend the principles of classical liberalism the university “abandoned” in its pursuit of a DEI dogma.
Read More
Prices for electricity in the United States soared well above overall inflationary levels last year, putting an added squeeze on consumers already reeling from significantly inflated costs of most consumer goods. The Consumer Price Index Summary released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics this month showed the 12-month average price of electricity last month jumping a whopping 14.3 percent, more than double the 6.5 percent of overall price increases.
Read More
A coalition of 18 state attorneys general, all Democrats, on Wednesday submitted an amicus brief in support of New York’s firearms industry accountability law.
Read More
As readers of this space know, former President Donald J. Trump is suing CNN for defamation.
Read More
Former White House COVID-19 czar Jeff Zients is expected to replace President Joe Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain, according to multiple media reports.
Read More
The Prostasia Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization that claims to work to prevent child sex abuse, has fought against measures cracking down on fetish activities involving sexually fantasizing about children, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
Read More
At least 225,797 people were apprehended entering the U.S. illegally nationwide in December, according to official U.S. Customs and Border Protection data released late Friday.
Read More
With the nation stuck at its $31.38 trillion debt limit and the Department of the Treasury imposing “extraordinary measures” to keep the government running, one GOP lawmaker is floating a new proposal to default federal spending to current levels to avert recurring standoffs over raising the debt ceiling.
Read More
As the number of electric vehicles grows in Michigan, so does the revenue hole from missing gas taxes that fix the damn roads.
Read More
Sales of existing homes fell 17.8% in 2022, marking the weakest sales performance since 2014 as interest rates climbed. Interest rates rose quickly last year, a factor that weighed on the residential real estate market. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.15% as of Jan. 19, down from 6.33% last week, but up from 3.56% a year ago, according to Freddie Mac.
Read More