President Donald Trump vetoed a bipartisan congressional resolution Wednesday that would have curbed his ability to direct military action against Iran.
“This was a very insulting resolution, introduced by Democrats as part of a strategy to win an election on November 3 by dividing the Republican Party,” Trump said Wednesday as he signed the veto. “The few Republicans who voted for it played right into their hands. Congress should not have passed this resolution.”
Read More
With many state and local governments starting to relax stay-at-home orders, it’s instructive to examine just how concentrated the spread of COVID-19 has been in the U.S.
Although all U.S. states have reported cases of COVID-19, the distribution of the cases and deaths has remained heavily concentrated in a small number of states, and among a small number of counties within all states.
Read More
A 57-year-old man from El Salvador became the first individual in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody to die from COVID-19 complications.
Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia passed away early Wednesday morning after being hospitalized and on a ventilator for roughly a week, The San Diego Union-Tribune first reported. Escobar Mejia, a detainee at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, was one of hundreds of individuals in ICE custody who have contracted the novel coronavirus.
Read More
Stacey Abrams said she hasn’t been pitching herself to be the vice presidential nominee, despite repeatedly touting her bona fides to media outlets and reports that she has pressured Joe Biden’s inner circle to choose her.
Abrams walked back the notion that she has been “pitching” herself to be Biden’s vice presidential running-mate in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. The former Georgia state representative and failed gubernatorial candidate described the idea as a “mischaracterization.”
Read More
More than 600,000 Minnesotans have filed for unemployment since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), the state has had 633,405 applications for unemployment insurance since March 16. That number represents a little more than 20 percent of the state’s workforce, Fox 9 reported Wednesday.
Read More
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a motion on Thursday to dismiss its case against Michael Flynn.
“The United States of America hereby moves to dismiss with prejudice the criminal information filed against Michael T. Flynn pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a), the motion reads. “The Government has determined, pursuant to the Principles of Federal Prosecution and based on extensive review and careful consideration of the circumstances, that continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice.”
Read More
The Texas Supreme Court has ordered the release of Shelly Luther, the Dallas salon owner who was sent to jail for violating the state’s coronavirus stay-at-home order.
State District Judge Eric Moyé on Tuesday sentenced the owner of the Salon A La Mode to seven days behind bars for “disobeying a judge’s temporary restraining order prohibiting her from operating her salon,” according to CBS-DFW.
Read More
Even as a handful of states have made tentative steps back to normalcy in recent days, new jobless claims continue to flood in across all 50 states, driving the number of unemployment claims to 33.5 million over the past seven weeks.
According to data released Thursday morning by the U.S. Department of Labor, 3.17 million Americans filed for new unemployment benefits for the week ending May 2. That was down 677,000 from the previous week’s revised level of 3.85 million but still well above the numbers seen before the coronavirus outbreak led to the shutdown of most of the national economy.
Read More
A CBS News crew pulled medical professionals off the floor at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and asked them to line up their vehicles outside a COVID-19 drive-through testing site, a new report from Project Veritas claims.
James O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas, said an insider “witnessed the whole thing and came to Project Veritas because he knew we would protect him.”
Read More
New documents appear to show that the FBI was intent on setting up former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in a perjury trap to help keep the Justice Department’s then-ongoing investigation into President Donald Trump going in Jan. 2017 on false allegations he was a bought and paid for Russian agent that themselves were bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Read More
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been discharged from the hospital following a brief stay for a non-surgical gallbladder treatment, according to CNN. “She is doing well and glad to be home,” a short statement from the Supreme Court read. “The Justice will return to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in…
Read More
A panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has overruled a lower court’s order to reduce the detention population of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility by the hundreds.
Read More
A salon owner in Frisco, Texas has been arrested after defying the government shutdown to reopen her salon, according to the New York Times.
Read More
Few people in history have seen more jobs up close than Mike Rowe, the longtime host of the Discovery Channel’s hit TV show Dirty Jobs.
Read More
Rep. Adam Schiff said Wednesday he will soon release dozens of transcripts from the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, ending a lengthy partisan standoff over publication of the documents.
Read More
The propaganda arms of the Chinese Communist Party have set their sights on Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist and vocal critic of China’s Communist regime.
Bannon now hosts a popular radio show called “War Room: Pandemic” and has dedicated numerous segments and even whole shows to exposing the evils of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Read More
Palestinian organizations with ties to terror groups spearheaded an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into alleged war crimes by the United States in Afghanistan, a report by a Jerusalem think tank found.
Read More
The economic shutdown has turned Minnesota’s projected $1.5 billion budget surplus into a $2.4 billion deficit, state officials announced Tuesday.
Read More
The owner of a St. Paul barbershop reopened for business Monday in defiance of Gov. Tim Walz’s stay-at-home order.
Read More
The editors at Harvard Review must be surprised at the reaction they provoked with their magazine’s recent article, “The Risks of Homeschooling.” For an issue that concerns “roughly 3 percent to 4 percent of school-age children,” the great profusion of responses from every corner of the internet would convince a person that it is really 96 percent to 97 percent who are homeschoolers—which might currently be the case since nearly every school has closed down for the year to prevent the spread of the Wuhan virus.
Read MoreNashville officials told local residents last Friday that surrounding counties had suddenly surpassed the city in its COVID-19 count, but they could only claim that because prisoners two counties away contracted the virus.
Read More
A lawsuit seeks to stop Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom from doling out roughly $75 million in taxpayer funds to foreign nationals living unlawfully in the country.
Read More
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, wants FBI Director Christopher Wray to review the bureau’s investigation into whether former national security adviser Michael Flynn acted as a Russian agent.
Read More
After a two-month trial, researchers are collecting early outcomes of the Great American Social Distancing Experiment of 2020.
Read More
Roughly $800 million was allocated to the country’s top 25 universities and colleges that have endowments totaling $350 billion, according to OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit watchdog organization.
Read More
A new, internal government report projects coronavirus cases will expand to 200,000 per day within a month, while the number of daily deaths will nearly double during that time, The New York Times reported.
Read More
Three of the largest oil companies in the United States are feeling the pain amid historically low crude prices, economic lockdowns and a pandemic that has killed tens of thousands of Americans.
Read More
Trump at the Lincoln Memorial President Donald Trump told Fox News anchor Brett Baier and Martha McCollum he expects a COVID-19 vaccine before the end of the year at Sunday night’s virtual town hall held at the Lincoln Memorial. “Look, a vaccine has never gone like it’s gone now,”…
Read More
The city of Lakefield, Minnesota will no longer direct any resources to the enforcement of Gov. Tim Walz’s stay-at-home order issued in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Read More
One of the most important principles of epidemiology is weighing benefits and harms. A failure to do this can make virtually any medical treatment seem helpful or destructive. In the words of Ronald C. Kessler of the Harvard Medical School and healthcare economist Paul E. Greenberg, “medical interventions are appropriate only if their expected benefits clearly exceed the sum of their direct costs and their expected risks.”
Likewise, a 2020 paper about quarantines published in The Lancet states: “Separation from loved ones, the loss of freedom, uncertainty over disease status, and boredom can, on occasion, create dramatic effects. Suicide has been reported, substantial anger generated, and lawsuits brought following the imposition of quarantine in previous outbreaks. The potential benefits of mandatory mass quarantine need to be weighed carefully against the possible psychological costs.”
Read More
If we lived in a fair and just world, most of the current media would simply go away and try something else.
The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well.
We also expect officials to leak one-sided stories and then the media to print them without edits. These are all things baked into the media cake and the public understands, even if it does not quite accept them.
Read More
President Donald Trump on Monday endorsed Lacy Johnson, a GOP congressional candidate running to unseat Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.
“And I’m Endorsing you also Lacy, you truly deserve it. You are doing a great job, and Omar is a disaster who wants much higher taxes, hates our Military & our Vets, demands Open Borders, and is fighting to take away our great 2nd Amendment,” Trump tweeted on Monday.
Read More
Larry Kudlow, the director of the U.S. National Economic Council, won’t rule out the possibility of prohibiting bailout funds to states that have sanctuary cities.
Appearing Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Kudlow spoke about a possible “Phase Four” of a coronavirus stimulus bill to help Americans struggling economically from the COVID-19 pandemic. The top White House economic adviser also was asked if a Phase Four would include funds for state and local governments.
“There may be additional legislation,” Kudlow began, noting the federal government has already green-lighted more than $3 trillion in “direct federal assistance” for individuals and struggling businesses in the country. “We probably will have some ideas.”
Read More
The Daily Caller News Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on Monday through government watchdog group Judicial Watch against the Department of Health and Human Services for communications regarding the World Health Organization, the Chinese government, and the novel coronavirus.
The lawsuit seeks the communications of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. H. Clifford Lane, the director and deputy director, respectively, of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci is the top scientist on the White House coronavirus task force. Lane was the U.S. government’s top official on a WHO-sponsored fact-finding mission to China in February. World health officials investigated the origins of the coronavirus outbreak and monitored the Chinese government’s response to the pandemic.
Read More
The professor who resigned in 2019 after telling a local news outlet, “I am Antifa” just got a sizeable payout from the college that let him go.
As Campus Reform reported in August, Kirkwood Community College professor Jeff Klinzman posted on his personal social media messages in support of the far-left extremist group Antifa, which President Donald Trump was considering at the time labeling a domestic terror organization. When a local television station contacted Klinzman, he replied, “I affirm I am Antifa,” unleashing nationwide backlash eventually leading to the college making the “decision to remove” him from the classroom.
Read More
An internal Chinese report warns Beijing officials that backlash from the coronavirus pandemic risks tilting China into a full bore armed conflict with the United States, Reuters reported Monday.
Anti-China sentiment hasn’t been this white-hot since the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than three decades ago, sources familiar with the paper told Reuters. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the report, which the sources say was presented to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other officials in April.
Read More
Americans have come together in the fight against the invisible enemy, but this situation has been made worse by some politicians who seek to take advantage of this pandemic and our recovery while so many are suffering. President Trump has been working around the clock to slow the spread of the Wuhan virus and get the economy going again, but Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have used this crisis to push their radical socialist agenda and grow the size of government. Twice now, Nancy Pelosi held American families, workers, and businesses hostage for days by delaying relief funding in the name of securing tens of millions of dollars for the Kennedy Center, pushing her Green New Deal, changing voting laws, and growing government to advance her radical socialist agenda.
Even more recently, there have been calls to give handouts to failing state and local governments, not because of the coronavirus, but because these states have been mismanaged and run irresponsibly. The American taxpayer should not bail out state and local governments for the reckless fiscal decisions made before the coronavirus.
Read More
Long-term care facilities continue to account for 80 percent of all COVID-19 deaths reported in Minnesota.
The Minnesota Department of Health reported nine new deaths Monday, bringing the total number of deaths in the state to 428. Of those 428 fatalities, 345 (80 percent) were people who resided in long-term care or assisted living facilities.
Read More
When Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation he was criticized by abolitionists for not issuing a more sweeping order. He refused to do so, asking “If I take the step, must I not do so . . . without any argument, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right? Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism? Could this pass unnoticed, or unresisted?”
Read More
Several small business owners called for reopening the economy during a Monday press conference at the Minnesota Capitol.
“We desire to honor our God, and our government and governor. We think we can do both. But we have no idea how to get a plan approved, to whom to submit it, or if anyone needs to or will consider it. The church needs to gather, we are more the church when we gather than at any other time. Please, Gov. Walz, help us by providing clear ways for plans to be approved and for us to meet,” said Rory Martin, pastor of the Liberty Baptist Church in Eden Prairie.
Read More
A new report indicates that the coronavirus pandemic could wipe out more than half of Minnesota’s craft breweries.
“With the closure period extended, breweries continue to see a decline in revenues despite their ability to sell curbside and delivery. The biggest hurdles to continued revenue are a lack of off-sale options as well as a drop in orders from distributors and retailers given the inability for bars and restaurants to serve draught beer,” states an April 26 report from the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild.
Read More
Parents the world over are dealing with massive adjustments in their children’s education that they could not have anticipated just three months ago. To one degree or another, pandemic-induced school closures are creating the “mass homeschooling” that FEE’s senior education fellow Kerry McDonald predicted two months ago. Who knows, with millions of youngsters absent from government school classrooms, maybe education will become as good as it was before the government ever got involved.
Read More
The Small Business Administration and the U.S. Treasury revealed Sunday that the second round of the Paycheck Protection Program has issued 2.2 million loans, totaling $175 billion.
PPP loans are forgivable loans for small businesses to offset some of the losses experienced by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The loans are meant to provide a direct incentive for small businesses to keep their workers on the payroll.
Read More
The Department of Education sent a letter to the University of Texas requesting all records pertaining to its dealings with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Department of Education’s Office of the General Counsel sent a letter to University of Texas Chancellor James Milliken on April 24 requesting records related to the University’s dealings with Chinese state-owned companies and universities.
Read More
Warnings of the possibility of coming meat shortages have left many Americans wondering whether we will see the meat and poultry cases in grocery stores just as barren as the toilet paper shelves.
Read More
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees in Massachusetts rushed officers, barricaded themselves inside the facility and caused more than $25,000 worth of damage after being told they would be transferred to a medical wing of the facility and tested for coronavirus, authorities said.
Roughly 10 inmates at an immigration detention center in Dartmouth, Massachusetts reported symptoms of COVID-19 to medical personnel, according to a press release from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office.
Read More
by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch There is an old Puritan hymn (based on the apocalyptic Old Testament book of Daniel for the less-than-biblically literate) we grew up singing. Perhaps you recall it: Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone; Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to make…
Read More
by Chris White Americans are venturing out more to fast food restaurants, gas stations and public places even as health experts and government officials demand extending economic lockdowns, location data show. People are back to visiting gas stations and fast food restaurants at pre-COVID-19 levels, according to location data…
Read More
Some governments are using smartphone tracking to make sure people are following social distancing rules in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Google announced it will use its massive collection of mobile location data to measure how closely people across the globe are following government directives to remain at home.
Read More
Congressional candidate Kendall Qualls just launched a plan to end the production of important pharmaceuticals in China. Qualls is running in the 3rd Congressional District and – assuming Qualls wins the nomination – will run as a Republican come November against incumbent Democrat Dean Phillips.
The issue of America’s reliance on pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment (PPE) made in China has been a growing concern. America relies on Chinese production for the vast majority of its antibiotics, and China has cut supplies of PPE to the United States during the coronavirus crisis. Not only that, China lied to the world about the coronavirus when it was first spreading in Wuhan, China, wasting precious time that the world had to respond to the virus. China’s ability to exert control over the World Health Organization (WHO) – to the point where the WHO helped China shape its false narrative about the virus and its origins – has only added to these concerns.
Read More