The U.S. announced a $3.1 billion security assistance package for Ukraine on Friday, including for the first time dozens of heavy infantry vehicles.
Of the total, $2.85 billion will come directly from existing U.S. weapons stocks, including 50 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and 500 anti-missiles, according to a press release. Ukrainian officials expect Russia to conduct a second mobilization and renewed offensive in the coming months, according to Reuters.
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The editorial board of a major New Jersey newspaper started the year off with an anti-Second Amendment screed, decrying the right to keep and bear arms as a “curse” perpetuated by a “fanatical” interpretation created by the Supreme Court in 2008.
Among other things, editors at the Newark-based Star-Ledger bemoaned that the Second Amendment keeps the nation from enacting “rational” gun control along the lines of Canada—which is a hair’s breadth away from banning all firearm sales—and called for readers to imagine the possibilities if the Supreme Court would just reinterpret the Constitution according to the justices’ personal perceptions of “reasonable” public policy.
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Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton this week confirmed that he will be mounting a 2024 presidential bid, one meant in part to prevent former President Donald Trump himself from once again claiming the White House.
Bolton told Good Morning Britain that he was planning on entering the race as a legitimate candidate and not merely a spoiler for Trump. “I wouldn’t run as a vanity candidate,” he told the show. “If I didn’t think I could run seriously, then I wouldn’t get in the race.”
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Jonathan Roumie, who plays the role of “Jesus” in the groundbreaking series THE CHOSEN, will keynote the 50th annual March for Life – the first since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – in Washington, DC, the pro-life organization announced Thursday.
In a press release, the March for Life Education and Defense Fund announced actor, director, producer and voice-over artist Jonathan Roumie, who portrays “Jesus” in the fan-supported free streaming series THE CHOSEN, a drama about the life of Jesus and the calling of his first disciples, will keynote the pro-life organization’s Rose Dinner Gala on January 20.
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Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration over its changes to a policy that will allow illegal immigrants to more easily obtain welfare benefits.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implemented changes to the rule Dec. 23 to no longer consider certain nutrition, health and housing benefits when deciding whether a noncitizen can legally stay in the country, according to DHS. Paxton is requesting not just action in a Texas court, but is also asking that the Supreme Court intervene, he announced Thursday.
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The Idaho Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a state abortion law that bans the procedure except in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother, rejecting the claim that the state’s constitution provides a right to abortion.
Idaho’s abortion law went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, but has been challenged in the courts multiple times by pro-abortion advocates. The court ruled 3-2 to uphold the ban, stating that Idaho’s law that bans abortion under most circumstances does not violate due process or the right to privacy.
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An audit released Friday from the Office of Auditor General Doug Ringler marked 11 “material conditions” – the most severe rating – for how the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency operated during the pandemic, which resulted in losing billions of taxpayer dollars.
The audit found the UIA couldn’t support the appropriateness of $10.2 billion in Pandemic Unemployment Assistance payments, mostly because it added invalid eligibility criteria in the PUA application and didn’t require some PUA claimants to certify they met federal eligibility criteria.
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Hopefully, it will prove easier for House Republicans to govern than it has been for them to elect a speaker. There is good reason for such hope because the enemy no longer will be Kevin McCarthy and the Ghosts of Republican Speakers Past but instead Joe Biden, the Ghost of Nancy Pelosi, and the specter of a Diversity-Equity-Inclusionary BIPOC-LGBTQIA+ Kamala-Buttigieg ticket. That should end the GOP divisions and even restore amicable relations between Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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The Biden administration has drawn fire for admitting that killing the Keystone Pipeline cost the U.S. economy thousands of jobs and billions of dollars.
A report from the Department of Energy showed the pipeline would have supported tens of thousands of jobs, though the number is hard to nail down.
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President Donald J. Trump started 2023 with a post on Truth Social which drew the ire of many in the pro-life community. Trump wrote, “It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations . . . It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters.” Trump went on to say, “Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the U.S. Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again.”
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Amid the growing fears of many Americans that their country is slowly disintegrating, a debate about whether or not the United States is being invaded is bubbling to the surface. At stake is something far more than semantics: the future of the country as we know it may hang in the balance.
Ducey v. Moore, currently being litigated in an Arizona federal district court, is a case that is testing states’ rights to defend themselves from invasion by Mexican drug- and human-smuggling cartels. In response to the well-documented influx of foreign nationals entering the country illegally, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey placed shipping containers along the state’s southern border to stem the flow. The federal government now claims that the shipping containers violate various federal regulations that it says apply to the Roosevelt Reservation area near the border, and seeks removal of the containers.
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A Republican senator introduced a bill Wednesday aimed at blocking health care providers from administering or recommending medical transitions to patients under age 26.
The legislation, pre-filed ahead of Oklahoma’s 59 legislature, would ban gender transition procedures including puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries, while also imposing felony conviction and revocation of medical license, should the law be broken, according to the legislation. The legislation would also ban public funding from being used to fund any services related to gender transitions for people under 26.
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House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy captured the House speakership in dramatic fashion early Saturday, winning enough votes on a historic 15th ballot that saw 20 renegade Republicans changing their votes under enormous pressure after winning significant concessions about how Congress will operate going forward.
The final vote was 216-212-6.
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The House of Representatives convened on Friday for the fourth day of voting for speaker and House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has picked up 15 votes from GOP holdouts but he’s still short of the simple majority needed to win.
The House passed a motion to adjourn until 10pm. McCarthy told reporters he’s confident he will have the votes to win Friday evening.
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Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin is breathing on his own after having a breathing tube removed by doctors, his team said on Friday.
The Bills said in a statement posted to their website that “per the physicians at [University of Cincinnati Medical Center], Damar’s breathing tube was removed overnight. He continues to progress remarkably in his recovery.”
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Members of Congress raked in profits from defense contractor stocks after voting to send billions in military aid to Ukraine, according to financial disclosures and voting records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Congress approved more than $20 billion worth of military aid to Ukraine between Jan. 24, a month before Russia invaded, and Nov. 20, including $12.7 billion in direct drawdowns from existing U.S. weapons stocks, according to data compiled by the Council on Foreign Relations. To make up for that aid, top defense companies have boosted production, and lawmakers trading on company stocks saw a financial windfall as a result, according to publicly available stock trading data.
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A new study from the University of North Carolina shows children and teens who frequently check social media may become more sensitive in the long term to “social feedback” in the form of “likes” and “dislikes” at a time when the brain is experiencing significant developmental changes.
In the study, published at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, researchers Maria Maza, et al, investigated whether the frequency with which middle-school age children check their Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat social media accounts is associated with long-term changes in brain development as they mature further into adolescence.
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President Joe Biden said Thursday that he will visit the southern border Sunday.
The announcement came in a speech on illegal immigration, where Biden promised more border security and pushed for increased legal immigration.
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South Carolina’s Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the state law restricting abortions at around six weeks, finding that it violated the state constitution.
Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill into law in February 2021 barring abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can happen at around six weeks into a pregnancy. The state can limit a woman’s privacy rights with regard to abortion decisions, but only after she’s been given “reasonable” time to pursue an abortion legally, the court found.
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The Capitol Police chief who handled the Jan. 6 riot says political bureaucracy under Speaker Nancy Pelosi put optics over safety and hampered his department from crafting an appropriate security plan to protect the home of Congress that fateful day.
Steven Sund, who resigned as the head of the $600 million a year Capitol Police Department after the tragedy, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show on Wednesday that significant lapses occurred inside his department, inside the political leadership of Congress and across federal law enforcement and security agencies in the days before the Capitol riot.
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Democratic U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow on Thursday said she won’t seek reelection to the office she’s held since Jan. 3, 2001. Her current term ends Jan. 3, 2025.
Stabenow, 72, said she’s stepping down to “pass the torch” to a younger generation of Democrats.
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Did someone or something seize control of the United States?
What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?
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Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov this week rejected the idea that Kyiv would engage in peace talks with Moscow as the Russian invasion of Ukraine rages on.
“There’s no way to have conversations with them; you can’t talk with terrorists,” he told NatSec Daily, adding that Ukraine would not end the war until it had reclaimed all of its territory, including Crimea.”
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Americans can’t seem to agree on much of anything anymore. We’re deeply divided on a wide range of issues: abortion, illegal immigration, gun rights, and so-called climate change, to name a few. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a major political issue on which Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly agree.
Political polarization is nothing new: Many countries experience it at one point or another. In America, we once could put our differences aside and settle things at the ballot box. Our electoral system, when functioning as intended, transcends partisan politics. Things are different today, though. COVID-era voting policies need to be reversed in order to restore faith in our electoral process.
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A letter signed by leaders of more than 40 pro-life organizations has been sent to every Republican member of Congress, urging action on eight related bills.
“We write to urge you to exercise Congress’s constitutional authority to legislate abortion policy at the federal level and pursue a robust pro-life agenda,” reads the letter to House and Senate Republicans authored by organizations ranging from March for Life and Live Action to The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
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Far-left billionaire George Soros has increased his financial support for a radical group that is determined to pack the Supreme Court of the United States, continuing to wage a war in favor of a policy that is widely unpopular with the American people.
As the Washington Free Beacon reports, Soros’ Open Society Foundation donated $4.5 million in 2021 to the group Demand Justice, which “supports policy advocacy on court reform.” Open Society had previously donated $2.5 million to the same group in 2018, the year Demand Justice was first created out of opposition to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the high court.
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The man accused of stabbing four University of Idaho college students to death was identified through DNA evidence left on a knife sheath at the crime scene and cellular data showed his phone was in the area of the Moscow, Idaho, crime scene at least a dozen times before the murders, officials said in an affidavit released Thursday.
The Idaho State Lab discovered DNA on a knife sheath left on the bed next to victim Madison Mogen, Moscow Police Department Cpl. Brett Payne said in the affidavit.
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The House of Representatives has adjourned for the evening after California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy failed to win the speaker’s gavel for the 11th time.
The speaker election started Tuesday but McCarthy has fallen short of reaching the simple majority threshold needed to win in the 222-212 GOP-led House.
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Doctors treating Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin said Thursday his neurological condition and function appears “intact” and that he’s made “remarkable improvement” after having gone into cardiac arrest three days earlier on the football field after making a tackle.
The doctors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, where Hamlin was taken Monday night after being injured in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, gave an update early Thursday through the Bills, then in a news conference.
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Although about half the states ban private dollars from funding local governing of elections as a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial grants in 2020, a tech-aligned group will dole out individual $500,000 grants to jurisdictions for future elections.
The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, established in April, will award individual grants of $500,000 to at least two local jurisdictions out of 10 that the organization accepted into the program.
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On Tuesday, the eleventh and twelfth installments of the Twitter Files highlighted the role that Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) played in censoring conservative accounts on the platform.
As reported by Fox News, the two back-to-back threads posted by journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter “received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned.” One example was in November of 2020, when Schiff’s office emailed Twitter demanding the banning of several “QAnon conspiracists” on Twitter, which they claimed were responsible for “harassment” against Schiff aide Sean Misko.
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Parents Defending Education (PDE), a grassroots parental rights organization, filed three complaints Tuesday with the Biden Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that allege discrimination in schools that formed “racial affinity” groups or “community circles” to separate students based on their race.
The complaints allege that discrimination occurred in schools in Oregon, Maine, and Vermont where students were organized according to their race, which, the complaints argue, is in violation of the 14th Amendment.
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December was another record month for Border Patrol agents tasked with apprehending foreign nationals illegally entering the U.S. through the southwest border.
Agents apprehended at least 226,050 people and reported at least 87,631 who evaded capture by law enforcement last month. Combined, they total at least 313,681 – an increase from November’s record breaking number of 306,069.
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Alex Shilkrut has deep roots in Manhattan, where he has lived for 16 years, works as a physician, and sends his daughter to a public elementary school for gifted students in coveted District 2.
It’s a good life. But Shilkrut regretfully says he may leave the city, as well as a job he likes in a Manhattan hospital, because of sweeping changes in October that ended selective admissions in most New York City middle schools.
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A judge on Tuesday placed a hold on a portion of Oregon’s recently passed gun law that enhances background check requirements for firearm purchases, leaving the legislation completely blocked.
The ruling is another setback for the law, Ballot Measure 114, which is now entirely paused as legal challenges to various portions of the law make their way through Oregon’s court system. The judge determined that the law’s heightened background check requirement could not be implemented while the court continues to debate the other portions of the law, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting, as plaintiffs argue the law violates the state’s constitution.
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An Irish data privacy regulator has issued fines totaling €390 million — roughly $410 million — against Facebook and Instagram parent Meta over practices related to its monitoring of users’ behavior on its services in order to create targeted ads, according to a Wednesday press release by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC).
Meta had previously argued to the commission that it had the right to tailor ads to users based on their online activity because the Terms of Service that users agreed to to use the service amounted to a contract, and that gathering this personalized data was a core part of that contract, according to the DPC. Although the DPC originally agreed with this argument, it reversed its position after other European regulators challenged this view during a standard peer review process, finding that Meta was “not entitled” to consider the Terms of Service agreement as sufficient legal basis for its actions.
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The uproar over George Santos and his crude fabrications has given official Washington an opportunity to do what it does best: moralize and deflect. It is all a little amusing to watch. Who are these scoundrels to hold forth on truth and transparency? Are we meant to be astonished that a politician lied to secure public office? The freshman congressman from New York is distinguished only by the chutzpah of his act. His dishonesty, in an ironic way, is more truthful than the posturing of the preening hypocrites denouncing him.
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The Biden administration will increase the costs for legal immigrants to apply for permits, visas and green cards to help mitigate the backlog of asylum cases due to record surges of illegal immigration at the southern border, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced Tuesday.
The recent surge in illegal immigration has contributed to the years-long asylum backlogs, where applicants wait an average of 4.3 years nationwide to appear in court, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Under the proposed new rules, H-1B application fees for skilled workers will jump from $60 to $780, fees for non-agricultural workers will jump from $460 to $1080 and fees for green card applicants will jump from $1,140 $1,540, USCIS said.
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The House of Representatives has adjourned without a new speaker after two days of voting.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy lost in the 6th round of voting for House speaker on Wednesday.
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Florida Republican Rep. Greg Steube confirmed on Wednesday that the party’s competing wings have entered negotiations to reach a compromise on choosing the next Speaker of the House.
California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the party’s lead contender for the post, has failed six times thus far to secure the support of a majority of lawmakers. The House voted three times on Wednesday and no candidate received the necessary 218 votes.
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made a regulatory change that allows independent and chain drugstores, as well as mail-order companies, to offer a drug that induces abortion, making it easier for women and girls to conduct their own abortions at home or in college dorms.
The New York Times reported Tuesday evening the FDA’s regulatory change, which apparently came without an official announcement to the public, officially removes the requirement for the patient to have an in-person doctor’s visit for the prescription of mifepristone, the first drug used to induce an abortion.
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The S&P Global U.S. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell at the fastest rate since May 2020 in December, a continuing sign that the manufacturing sector is on the decline, S&P Global reported Tuesday.
The U.S. Manufacturing PMI posted a 46.2 in December, down from 47.7 in November and solidly below 50, which signals that the sector is contracting, according to S&P Global. Production levels contracted in back-to-back months, with new sales plummeting at the end of December at the fastest pace since 2007, as companies cited weakening demand amid “economic uncertainty” and inflation weighing on customers.
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U.S. News & World Report is modifying its law school ranking system after several top schools pulled out of the rankings altogether, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The ranker will give dean, faculty, lawyer and judge “reputational surveys” less weight and will no longer consider per-student expenditures which critics have said favor the wealthiest schools during the ranking process, according to the WSJ. The announcement comes after top law schools Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, Columbia, the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford pulled out of the rankings, saying the report hurts schools that admit students with lower test scores because they could not afford tutoring and academic services.
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After the FBI declared the popular Chinese video app TikTok a national security threat, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer continues to post on the platform.
Whitmer posted three videos in three days to her 186,000 followers. The most recent post is video of her second inauguration on Jan. 1.
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Karl Marx once famously commented that Hegel wrote that history repeats itself. Marx then supplemented this by noting that this happens the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. And it is perhaps ironic that this is nowhere more true than among some of Marx’s own progeny, the critical theorists. Critical theory’s first coming was as a sophisticated reappropriation of Hegel for Marxist thought in response to the tragedies of the early 20th century — the Russian Revolution, the failure of the German Spartacist uprising, and the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. Its founding fathers were deeply immersed in the Western philosophical tradition and men of substantial intellect. Its second coming — that of our own day — is as the theoretical part of the farce that is postmodern identity politics, often in a form that feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock has declared to be “adolescently, simplistically monotonic.” From tragedy to farce, as Marx would say.
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Entering the new year, it is traditional to set goals and pronounce resolutions to improve ourselves and our lot in life during the coming 12 months.
Although these resolutions are more often honored in their breach than their fulfillment, they are nonetheless a useful tool to focus our attention on our weak points, whether we have the fortitude to correct them or not.
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Americans are not optimistic about the economy this year.
A new poll from Gallup found that about 80% of those surveyed expect higher taxes, a higher deficit, and a worse economy in 2023.
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Employee turnover has surged since the pandemic, and the need to replace and train new employees at high volume has hampered productivity for businesses, according to The New York Times.
More than 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs in November 2021, the highest since the government began tracking this data 20 years earlier, and the turnover rate remains significantly higher than it was before the pandemic, according to the NYT. Businesses are struggling with the costs of high turnover; new employees take time to become productive, and existing employees lose productivity because of the time they spend training others.
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California Republican Kevin McCarthy failed Tuesday to get enough support in the first three votes as his bid for Speaker of the House struggles to cross the finish line.
The U.S. House adjourned with no debate after the third vote and is scheduled to reconvene at noon Wednesday. Until a new speaker is elected, the House cannot conduct other business.
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Rep. Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday failed in the first round of balloting to secure enough votes to become the chamber’s next speaker.
McCarthy unofficially got 203 votes, about 16 short.
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