Medical Officials, Experts Criticize Biden Admin for ‘Reckless’ Handling of Pandemic

The federal agencies in charge of COVID-19 response are taking hits from former officials and high-profile medical professors for “sidelining experts,” not conducting basic research, and mischaracterizing evidence related to vaccines and masks for young people.

The Biden administration is getting a pass for “extreme political pressure” that “appropriately” prompted outrage against its predecessor, two FDA alumni wrote in The Washington Post Thursday.

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Chinese-Backed Hackers Are Exploiting One of the ‘Most Pervasive’ Cybersecurity Flaws

Hackers backed by China are using a recently-discovered vulnerability in a common software tool to gain access to data and systems belonging to internet infrastructure companies.

The vulnerability, known as Log4Shell, was discovered by Chinese cybersecurity researchers from Alibaba last week and is found in an open-source software tool called Log4J used by enterprise software companies and cloud infrastructure providers. If exploited, the flaw allows hackers to gain access to a company’s data and internal networks.

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Biden, Influential Climate Scientist/Activist Use Deadly Tornado to Push Climate Change Narrative

President Joe Biden surveyed the damage from a deadly weekend tornado in Mayfield, Ky., on Wednesday and said, “We’ve got $99 billion worth of damage just this year — just the year — because of foul weather and climate change.”

In Dawson Springs, Ky., he reiterated the cost of damages and then, in a possible reference to his Build Back Better Act, he said: “I promise you: You’re going to heal. We’re going to recover. You’re going to rebuild. You’re going to be stronger than you were before. We’re going to build back better than it was.”

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Frat House Cannot Hang Its Own Christmas Wreath, University Insists

Christmas wreath on an oak door

Fraternity and sorority students at Emory University are not allowed to hang their own exterior Christmas decorations.

That policy was news to members of the Atlanta university’s Alpha Tau Omega (ATO) fraternity when Josh Gamse, assistant director of sorority and fraternity life, informed the chapter Dec. 3 that its wreath was violating school policy.

“Since this is the second violation of the policy, an incident report will be submitted to the Office of Student Conduct,” Gasme wrote in an email obtained by Campus Reform. 

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Parents Group Claims Two Schools Discriminated Against Students Based on Race

A parents group has filed complaints with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, claiming that two schools are discriminating against students on the basis of race.

Parents Defending Education (PDE) alleges that a monthly playground night reserved for non-white families at Centennial Elementary School in Denver, Colorado, and a field trip advertised to non-white students at Downer’s Grove South High School in Downer’s Grove, Illinois, violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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Texas School Board Doubles Down On Efforts to Censure Two Mothers Who Objected to District Policies

Two conservative Texas school board members are embroiled in a legal battle against their fellow trustees fighting their attempts to investigate and censure them, they told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Mary Bone and Danielle Weston are up against the other five members of Round Rock Independent School District’s (RRISD) Board of Trustees, who are attempting to investigate and censure them for opposing their COVID policies and use of its police force to keep the public out of a Sept 14. board meeting, the two women told the DCNF. If the censure resolution passed, it would strip them of their powers and duties, restrict their access to school property and hinder their ability to do their job.

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Commentary: Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law

silhouette of Statue of Liberty

I have been looking back over Alexis de Tocqueville’s unfinished masterpiece, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. It is full of piquant observations, for example this from the end of the preface: “a man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” How much contempt do you suppose emanates from the apparatchiks who inhabit the D.C. swamp and control our lives? How slavish is their devotion to the unfettered prerogatives of the idol they serve, the state?

That dialectic between adulation of the sources of power and contempt for those subject to it may in one sense be perennial, a sentiment captured by the old Latin tag: Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris: “it is part of human nature to hate those whom you have injured.” But Tocqueville translated that psychological characteristic into the realm of politics in which the question of liberty is paramount. Like Edmund Burke, Tocqueville was a supreme anatomist of the ways in which power co-opts the passion for liberty in order to counterfeit liberty’s essence. Describing the habit of “governmental paternalism,” Tocqueville notes that “Almost all the rulers who have tried to destroy freedom have at first attempted to preserve its forms.”

This has been seen from Augustus down to our own day. Rulers flatter themselves that they can combine the moral strength given by public consent with the advantages that only absolute power can give. Almost all have failed in the enterprise, and have soon discovered that it is impossible to make the appearance of freedom last where it is no longer a reality.

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Zuckerberg-Funded Nonprofit Heavily Favored Democrats in Allotting Millions in Election Aid: IRS Filings

A Chicago-based nonprofit funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to local election offices in what critics charge was a bid to elect Democrats in the 2020 elections, newly released IRS filings show.

The Center for Technology and Civic Life’s IRS Form 990 filing for 2020, which Just the News obtained, reveals thousands of grants to election offices across the country. IRS 990s detail where organizations received and spent money.

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California Teachers Accused of Coaching a Student on Clandestine Gender Transition

Two teachers in a California school district are accused of coaching a student into coming out as transgender behind the backs of the student’s parents, according to video footage circulating on social media.

School staff reportedly changed the student’s name and pronouns and also called Child Protective Services (CPS) when the parents objected to the transition, according to a twitter thread by LibsofTikTok posted early Thursday morning, which included video of the parents addressing the school board of the Spreckels Union School District on Wednesday.

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Buzzfeed’s Holiday Party Becomes Super-Spreader Event Despite Company’s Vaccine Mandate

Buzzfeed’s holiday party appears to have become a super-spreader event, despite a company-wide vaccine mandate that required partygoers to present their vaccination cards in order to get into the event.

Three BuzzFeed staffers were reportedly infected with COVID-19 following the company’s Christmas party in Manhattan last week, and about six others are awaiting test results after becoming ill.

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Border Agents Encountered a Five Percent Increase in Migrants Last Month

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported Friday that agents encountered 173,620 migrants at the southern border in November.

The number is a 5% increase from October’s encounters. Over 50% of those encountered were processed under a Trump-era public health order for expulsion, CBP said.

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Commentary: Democrats Promised An Insurrection But All They Got Was a Lousy Obstruction Case

Former President Donald Trump

History, it appears, is repeating itself—at least when it comes to the latest crusade to destroy Donald Trump and everyone around him.

For nearly three years, the American people were warned that Donald Trump had been in cahoots with the Kremlin to rig the 2016 presidential election. Trump-Russia election collusion, the original “stop the steal” campaign—that is, until questioning the outcome of American elections was designated a criminal conspiracy after November 2020—dominated the attention of the ruling class and the entirety of the national news media.

Every instrument of power—the FBI, a secret surveillance court, congressional committees, a special counsel—was leveraged to uncover the “truth” about the Trump campaign’s alleged dirty dealings with Mother Russia.

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University Ordered to Pay Almost $2 Million After Students Win Religious Freedom Lawsuit

A federal judge ordered the University of Iowa (UI) to pay $1.9 million in fees and damages after two student groups won a series of religious discrimination lawsuits against the university. 

The Becket Fund, which represents Business Leaders in Christ, will receive $1.37 million while Intervarsity Christian Fellowship will get $533,000, Crux reports. 

Eric Baxter, a senior VP and counsel at The Becket Fund, told Campus Reform targeting students of faith “comes at a price.” 

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Minnesota GOP Calls on Sheriff to Resign, Police-Reform Democrats Silent

Dave Hutchinson

The Republican Party of Minnesota has called on Hennepin County Sheriff Dave Hutchinson to resign after he drunkenly crashed his county-owned vehicle outside of Alexandria earlier this month.

“As Hennepin County faces serious challenges with violent crime, residents need a sheriff who is laser-focused on public safety. Sheriff Hutchinson should step down and focus on his health so residents can have a top law enforcement officer better able to focus on fighting crime,” the party said in a statement.

Hutchinson rolled his vehicle off the road while traveling home to Minneapolis from a sheriffs’ conference. After the accident, his urine revealed a blood alcohol content of .13 — nearly twice the legal limit of .08.

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Manchin Says He Won’t Vote for Mass Spending, Climate Bill, Dealing Blow to Biden

Senator Joe Manchin speaking

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., declared Sunday he won’t vote for President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act, saying he feared the bill’s mass spending and climate provisions may worsen inflation.

“This is a no,” Manchin told Fox News Sunday, “I have tried everything I know to do.”

The West Virginia Democrat’s decision all but dooms Biden’s signature legislation in an evenly divided Senate.

Manchin said he was concerned about the continuing effects of the pandemic, inflation, and geopolitical unrest. His decision came after an intense lobbying campaign by the president and fellow Democrats failed to change his mind.

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Minnesota Seeks to Lower Sentencing Guidelines, Major Pushback from Republican Lawmakers

Anne Neu and Erik Mortensen

Minnesota is seeking to lower sentencing guidelines with a new proposal that gets rid of the points system that Minnesota has operated on. The current guidelines give each perpetrator points based on the type of crime and how many previous crimes have been committed. The more points a convicted criminal has, the longer the sentence.

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Commentary: The Kavanaugh War and the End of Honor Culture

In the 2000 political drama “The Contender,” an opposition research attack is launched against a woman named Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) who has been nominated for the vice presidency. Part of the assault is a rumor, supposedly confirmed with actual videotape, that Hanson partook in group sex while she was in college. It turns out that the oppo was faked, part of a conspiracy not just to derail Hanson politically, but also to destroy her life. Still, Hanson will not go out and refute or deny the rumors even after they have been exposed as fake. In a key scene, Hanson is confronted by an irate president (Jeff Bridges) via his staffer (Sam Elliot), who demands she deny and debunk the rumors.

Hanson explains why she won’t address the scandal. It’s not just the questions they wanted to ask, she says. It’s that they felt it was OK to ask them in the first place. And it’s not. To respond to them is to forfeit dignity and honor. Hanson was not willing to do that.

It’s a remarkable scene because it is so rare these days that anyone in Hollywood or on the Left defends the concept of honor. 

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Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson Kick Off Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2021 Conference in Phoenix

Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk

Turning Point USA is holding their annual AmericaFest 2021 conference this weekend in Phoenix, where they are based. Founder Charlie Kirk and Fox News personality Tucker Carlson spoke Friday on opening night. 

Kirk opened the event, hitting on a lot of social and cultural issues during his speech. He told the attendees not to let it bother them when the left calls them names for saying something true. He acknowledged that it’s so bad that if you speak out, “you might not be able to get a job in your field.” 

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Wisconsin Mom Says Five-Year-Old Child Accessed Porn Website, ‘Inappropriate Content’ with School iPad

Students at a Wisconsin school district were able to access pornography on their school’s iPads for months due to a lack of “working” filters, according to the mom of a student who accessed the material and spoke during the public comment portion of the district’s school board meeting Tuesday.

Kindergarteners at Burleigh Elementary School at Elmbrook Schools in Brookfield, Wisconsin were exposed to pornography and “other inappropriate content” on a school-issued iPad, because it had “no working filter” outside of the school environment between September 2021 and Nov. 22, 2021, mother Elizabeth Theis said during the public comment portion of the school board meeting.

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Commentary: Christmas Movies Without the Hollywoke Scrooge

Christmas tree, TV playing The Grinch and stockings on chimney

Hollywoke may be spearheading the War on Christmas, but three cable channels are mounting a far more effective counteroffensive, running traditionalist Christmas movies 24/7. And one of them, Lifetime, is a surprising beachhead. While HBO Max is showcasing the insufferable Seth Rogan’s latest bomb, Santa, Inc. (angry elf girl wants to succeed white male Santa Claus), the once male-bashing Lifetime “for Women” now boasts such romantic “heteronormative” fare as My Sweet Holiday, A Sweet Christmas Romance, and A Christmas Village Romance. Lifetime has joined the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies and Mysteries to reflect a realistic rather than fantastical vision of and for women, and their genuine desire for true love over a feminist-fueled man-light career pursuit.

Some Grinches criticize the films as bland, corny, and predictable. They’re certainly not on par with Yuletide classics by Ernst Lubitch (The Shop Around the Corner) or Leo McCarey (An Affair to Remember), and they do stress a secular more than spiritual Christmas magic. But normal viewers gleam from them values no longer found in the tiresomely “dark, edgy” mainstream series and feature films, such as beauty, sensitivity, warmth, uplift, and niceness.

Start with beauty. The movies are gorgeously photographed to resemble, yes, Hallmark cards. Many depict Robert Frostian villages and valleys in holiday winter, but even major cities like San Francisco in A Christmas Village Romance, Chicago in A Kiss Before Christmas, and New York in the majority appear as lovely metropoles instead of the crime-ridden progressive hellholes the Left has made of them.

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Senate Parliamentarian Blocks Immigration Reform from Democrats’ Spending Bill for Third Time

U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the McAllen station encounter large group after large group of family units in Los Ebanos, Texas, on Friday June 15. This group well in excess of 100 family units turned themselves into the U.S. Border Patrol, after crossing the border illegally and walking through the town of Los Ebanos.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough rejected another Democratic effort to include immigration reform in President Joe Biden’s spending bill.

MacDonough’s ruling, which came late Thursday, is Democrats’ latest setback in their bid to overhaul the nation’s immigration system via the reconciliation bill. She rejected two bids earlier this year to include a pathway to citizenship in the package, ruling that the provisions did not meet the criteria to be included in the filibuster-proof legislation.

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Boeing Suspends Vaccine Mandate for Employees

Boeing Friday said it has suspended its requirement that U.S.-based employees be fully vaccinated or face losing their jobs.

The announcement comes as several attempts by President Joe Biden to require vaccinations for workers in various settings have been blocked by courts in recent weeks.

“Boeing is committed to maintaining a safe working environment for our customers, and advancing the health and safety of our global workforce,” a company spokesperson told KOMO News. “As such, we continue to encourage our employees to get vaccinated and get a booster if they have not done so. Meanwhile, after careful review, Boeing has suspended its vaccine requirement in line with a federal court’s decision prohibiting the enforcement of the federal contractor executive order and a number of state laws.”

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Commentary: As Biden Courts Unions, Poll Shows Voter Split on Labor

Staff were still finding their desks at the White House when the new first lady hosted a summit to celebrate educators. There were just two guests invited on that first full day of the new administration: the leaders of the two largest public teacher unions in the country. And not that there was ever any confusion, but Jill Biden assured them both that organized labor “will always have a seat at the table.”

That has been true throughout the 46th president’s first year. For the Bidens, unions aren’t a casual part of some coalition. Labor is family. The first lady is a card-carrying member of the National Education Association. It is personal when Joe Biden promises to govern as “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.”

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Cereal Giant Reaches Deal with Union Group After Months of Labor Strike

Kellogg announced Thursday that it reached a tentative agreement with employees, potentially ending a 10-week labor strike at the company.

The agreement between the cereal giant and The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ (BCTGM) International Union and four other unions representing 1,4000 workers would cover five years, and two parties will vote on the terms by Monday, according to a Kellogg press release.

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Commentary: The Collapse of Yellow School Bus Transport

Between 2012 and 2019, student ridership on school district buses declined nationally by 3.8 million riders. The drop is owed to various factors, especially increased demand for drivers in private industry. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the trend, via a combination of even more demand for drivers with Commercial Drivers Licenses and reluctance of older drivers to return to work after the shutdown. A nationwide bus driver shortage has been in the headlines this fall, with stories focusing on stranded students and; most dramatically, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker called out the national guard to drive buses.

The decline of the yellow bus system presents an equity challenge for students. In a choice-based education system, lack of bus transport in certain areas means that children in those areas will have fewer schooling options. The problem will require an urgent effort to modernize. Nationwide, only about a third of students took buses to school in 2017, but in some states the figure is considerably lower – such as Arizona, where it had 23% by 2019.

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Two Airline CEOs Challenge Mask Mandates on Planes

Mask mandates do little, if anything, to make the air safer inside airplanes, two major airline CEOs argued before Congress Wednesday.

“I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” Gary Kelly, chief executive of Southwest Airlines, told lawmakers. Being inside a plane “is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting,” Kelly said. The air filters on planes turn over clean air every three minutes, eliminating nearly all airborne pathogens, he explained.

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New York Can Force Photographer to Take Pictures for Same-Sex Weddings, Court Rules

A federal district court ruled that the state of New York can force a photographer to take pictures depicting same-sex weddings.

In the decision issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci, Jr. dismissed the First Amendment claims of Emilee Carpenter, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Geraci was appointed to the federal bench in 2012 by former President Barack Obama.

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Amid Rising Crime, Twin Cities Boost Police Funding

With two 30-year veteran police chiefs retiring amid surging record violent crime, Minneapolis and St. Paul are increasing police funding.

Both cities have either surpassed their record homicide numbers or are single digits from it with 15 days left in 2021. The Pioneer Press reported a Dec. 2 fatal stabbing over a parking dispute pushed St. Paul to its record 35th homicide in one year.

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6th Circuit Ruling Restoring Employer Vaccine Mandate Falsely Claims ‘Options Available to Combat COVID-19 Changed Significantly’ When ‘FDA Granted Approval to One Vaccine on August 23, 2021’

The majority opinion released on Friday by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which restored the Biden administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) requiring employers with more than 100 employees to mandate that all employees take a COVID-19 vaccinefalsely asserts that Pfizer’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully approved vaccine is currently available and in use among the general public.”

“At the same time, the options available to combat COVID-19 changed significantly: the FDA granted approval to one vaccine on August 23, 2021, and testing became more readily available,” the majority opinion asserts on page 24 of the ruling.

The majority opinion was written by Obama-appointed Judge Jane Branstretter Stranch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

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Kentucky Congressman Massie: Comirnaty Not Available in United States

A Kentucky congressman Saturday said that Pfizer’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved COVID-19 vaccine is not available in the United States after The Ohio Star spent a week reporting on that subject. 

“Your first sentence, ‘Comirnaty is available in the US,’ is false. Show us one location it’s available to prove otherwise. The FDA requires Pfizer to disclose to other countries BioNTech is ‘subject to an EUA and is not approved or licensed by the FDA,'” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-04) said on Twitter. 

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Minnesota Woman Who Lost Job After School Board Comment Files Lawsuit Alleging First Amendment Violation

Shakopee High School

A Shakopee woman, Tara McNeally, who was fired from her job after questioning her children’s school board, has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court against the school and her former employer. The lawsuit filed by McNeally reportedly asks for “compensatory and punitive damages,” and seeks to prohibit the defendants from “engaging in wrongful conduct.” McNeally is requesting a jury trial for those involved.

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Commentary: Democrats Promised an Insurrection but All They Got Was a Lousy Obstruction Case

History, it appears, is repeating itself—at least when it comes to the latest crusade to destroy Donald Trump and everyone around him.

For nearly three years, the American people were warned that Donald Trump had been in cahoots with the Kremlin to rig the 2016 presidential election. Trump-Russia election collusion, the original “stop the steal” campaign—that is, until questioning the outcome of American elections was designated a criminal conspiracy after November 2020—dominated the attention of the ruling class and the entirety of the national news media.

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Biden’s Air Force Opens Strategic Tanker Contract to Airbus Less Than a Year After $4B DOJ Sanction for Hiding China Ties

President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration opened up a significant chunk of a new Air Force tanker contract to the Leiden, Netherlands, based Airbus less than a year after the company paid a nearly $4 billion fine for corruption and despite its history of technology transfers to China.

“Airbus engaged in a multi-year and massive scheme to corruptly enhance its business interests by paying bribes in China and other countries and concealing those bribes,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in a statement released at the end of January.

“This coordinated resolution was possible thanks to the dedicated efforts of our foreign partners at the Serious Fraud Office in the United Kingdom and the PNF in France,” Benczkowski said.

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Founder of Zuckerberg’s Election Group Took China-Funded Fellowship at Harvard Think Tank

The founder of the controversial, Mark Zuckerberg-backed election group Center for Tech and Civic Life was a fellow at a Harvard University think tank which receives funding from Chinese Communist Party-linked firms.

The CTCL was founded in 2012 by Tiana Epps-Johnson, a 2015-16 Technology and Democracy Fellow at Kennedy School of Government’s Ash Center, which is partly funded by several Chinese Communist Party-affiliated enterprises, according to the National Pulse.

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CDC Announces ‘Test-to-Stay’ School Policy for Students Exposed to COVID

The CDC on Friday announced it will allow children who have been exposed to COVID-19 to remain in school if they test negative at least twice in a week, after interacting with an infected person.

The goal of the policy is to keep as many children in school as possible, given the actual risk of them contracting and spreading the illness.

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Report: Democrats Strike Offshore Drilling Ban After Manchin Opposition

Democratic lawmakers reportedly eliminated a proposed measure to ban offshore oil and gas drilling along the U.S. coastline from their sweeping spending package after Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin announced his opposition.

The provision was absent from an early draft of the roughly $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act that was circulated on Capitol Hill by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee which Manchin chairs, congressional aides toldThe New York Times and The Washington Post. The restriction would have applied to all drilling rigs located in the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean as well as the Gulf of Mexico.

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Report: Inflation Costs Families Around $3,500 This Year

A new report estimated the annual cost of elevated inflation this year will be around $3,500 per household.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s leading business schools, released the report, which estimated much higher costs for American families because of inflation that has risen this year at the fastest rate in decades.

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War Room Pandemic: Steve Bannon Talks to The Star News Network CEO and Editor in Chief, Michael Patrick Leahy About OhioHealth’s Distribution of Not Fully Approved COVID-19 Vaccine

  Stephen K. Bannon welcomed The Star News Network’s CEO and Editor in Chief Michael Patrick Leahy on Thursday’s War Room: Pandemic to discuss The Ohio Star’s breaking story by Peter D’Abrasco regarding the unapproved COVID-19 vaccines being distributed by OhioHealth. Bannon: Michael Patrick Leahy from The Ohio Star, you’ve…

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Biden White House Offers Bonuses for Doctors Who Mandate ‘Anti-Racism Plans’

The Biden Administration is planning to offer bonuses to any doctors who “create and implement an anti-racism plan” in their medical facilities, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The directive was issued under new rules from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which aim to update Medicare in order to “reflect changes in medical practice.” As of January 1st, doctors involved in Medicare can increase reimbursement rates by holding “clinic-wide reviews” of their facilities’ “commitment to anti-racism.” HHS notes that, in such surveys, race must be defined as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one.”

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Appeals Court Reinstates Biden Vaccine Mandate for Businesses

A federal appeals court on Friday night reinstated President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private companies with more than 100 workers, reversing lower court rulings and setting up a likely showdown before the U.S. Supreme Court.

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration had the authority to Impose the mandate due to take effect Jan. 4.

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Fentanyl Overdoses Leading Cause of Deaths in America in 2020

The government has reported that, since the year 2020, fentanyl overdoses have become the new leading cause of death for American adults between the ages of 18 and 45, as reported by Fox News.

The analysis from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) shows that nearly 79,000 Americans died from the drug between 2020 and 2021. Of those, just over 37,000 died in 2020 while almost 42,000 died in 2021. Fentanyl is an opioid that is sometimes laced with other drugs such as meth and heroin when used by addicts, but can also be deadly on its own in even small doses. The primary foreign sources for imports of the drug are China and Mexico.

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Commentary: Robbing America of Her Core Values

Portland anarchists crowned a season of monument destruction in October 2020 when they pulled down the city’s Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln statues and attacked the nearby Oregon Historical Society—despite its having been so woke and feminist for years it could be called the Oregon Hysterical Society. This occurred on what Antifa organizers billed as an “Indigenous Day of Rage” (something that was about as genuinely “indigenous” as the Boston Tea Party) and coincided with Portland’s official (anti-) holiday refuting Columbus Day—Indigenous People’s Day—which promises to grow more strident and violent, if no more indigenous, annually.

Last October, the nation and the city weren’t as far gone as they are now. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler felt compelled to stand with the police chief and denounce the rioters’ actions. But in doing so, he followed the same pattern he and the city used to acquiesce to anarchist and Black Lives Matter political terror over the summer of 2020: denouncing the violence, affirming the anarchists’ right to speech, even sympathizing with the goals of anti-police rioters, and conspicuously not defending their targets—then it was the police, in this instance, it was our history.

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Ex-Defense Contractor Charged for Allegedly Leaking Classified Information to Russia

A former U.S. defense contractor was arrested earlier this week on criminal charges in connection with espionage, according to the Justice Department.

John Murray Rowe Jr., a 63-year-old resident of Lead, South Dakota, allegedly attempted to provide classified national defense information to the Russian government.

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Gun Manufacturers Sue New York over Law Allowing Gun Stores to Be Held Liable for Armed Crimes

On Thursday, a lawsuit was filed against New York Attorney General Letitia James (D-N.Y.) over the state’s “public nuisance law,” which allows private citizens to sue gun stores and gun manufacturers if their weapons are used in an unrelated crime, CNN reports.

The law, signed into law in July, is the first of its kind in the nation, making gun stores and manufacturers liable in any civil suits that may result from firearms being used to commit crimes, even if the distributors had no role in the crime itself. It was deliberately signed as an attempt to circumvent the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a federal law which specifically granted immunity to arms manufacturers and distributors in such cases.

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Commentary: The Russia-Ukraine Crisis, the History Our Media Got Wrong

Russia’s looming invasion of Ukraine presents a clear and present danger to the safety of the European Union and a direct challenge to the NATO alliance, but only now are our major media waking up to this dire threat to Western security. We must now confront urgent questions: Did the United States strengthen Russia, did it weaken Ukraine, and did it do so under the nose of these media?

First, a quick run-through of American actions that strengthened Russia. In his 2009 inaugural address, Barack Obama promised to approach adversaries with an open hand, not a closed fist. For this, he won a Nobel Peace Prize, an oxymoronic name, equivalent to the Affordable Care Act.

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Former Officer Kimberly Potter Breaks Down on Stand in Trial over Daunte Wright Killing

Ex-Brooklyn Heights Police officer Kimberly Potter broke down in tears on the witness stand twice Friday, as she testified about her fatal shooting of Daunte Wright more than eight months ago.

“Officer Lucky started to say something about ‘don’t do that, don’t tense up, stop doing that'” Potter said, describing the moments leading up to the shooting. “And then it just went chaotic.”

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Five Governors Request Defense Department Withdraw Vaccine Mandate for National Guard

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is joining four other state governors in requesting the Department of Defense withdraw vaccine mandate directives to National Guard members in Title 32 duty status.

U.S. National Guard members’ deadline to be vaccinated was Dec. 2. Nearly 50,000 military members across all branches have declined to get vaccinated, Reynolds’ office’s news release said.

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Commentary: The Left Is All of a Sudden Worried About the End of Democracy

What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict the democracy downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.” 

To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts. 

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Nike Executives Funneled Money to Democrat Who Blocked Uyghur Forced Labor Bill

Several top Nike executives funneled more than $60,000 to the re-election campaign of Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden over the course of just 16 days in September.

On Wednesday evening, Wyden blocked the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which the House passed unanimously Tuesday and the Senate was expected to overwhelmingly approve. President Joe Biden vowed to sign the bill once passed by both chambers and work with Congress to “ensure global supply chains are free of forced labor,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.

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