Attorney General Keith Ellison has been “doing the bidding of special interest groups” regarding green energy, a lawsuit alleges. The New House Republican Caucus shared on their Facebook page that the oral arguments were heard in the Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday and a decision can be expected within 30 days.
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As the Omicron variant surged across the U.S., retail sales dipped 1.9% during the final month of 2021, according to information released by the Commerce Department on Friday.
Data shows that holiday shoppers took warnings about shipping delays seriously and shifted their holiday shopping schedule up last year. On the whole, consumer demand led sales to grow by 16.9% in 2021.
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Paul Hodgkins, according to Joe Biden’s Justice Department, is a domestic terrorist.
A working-class man from Tampa, Hodgkins committed what Democrats and the media consider a murderous crime comparable to flying a packed jetliner into a skyscraper or detonating a truck filled with explosives under a crowded federal building.
Paul Hodgkins entered the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
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Farmington Hills – The Star News Network’s Neil W. McCabe reported from a Farmington Hills high school, where parents protested the town’s school board over a Critical Race Theory (CRT) initiative.
“Dozens of parents came to the school board meeting held here at the North Farmington High School to protest the schools 21-day equity challenge, which is a Critical Race Theory challenge which includes having the students attend and participate in an event with Black Lives Matter.”
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As Washington, D.C., prepares for its second winter storm in as many weeks, Democrats in Congress are all-in on their bid to pass their voting legislation and, if it fails, to abolish the Senate filibuster to advance it.
Their strategy has almost zero chance of success. Though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has brought his party’s voting bills to the floor throughout 2021, they have faced insurmountable opposition from Senate Republicans every time, who have relied on the filibuster to tank the legislation that they describe as a federal takeover of elections that could invite voter fraud.
In response, Schumer and most Senate Democrats have endorsed scrapping the 60-vote threshold, but in their way stand Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The two centrist Democrats have said time and time again that they will not support abolishing the filibuster, denying Democrats the unanimous support they need to adopt the change even though they support their party’s voting legislation.
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California Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar, vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus and member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said localities have the “authority” to allow non-citizens to vote in certain elections.
Aguilar’s comments come as Democrats move to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which includes federal rules that localities and states would have to follow such as not requiring a photo ID or Social Security number to cast a ballot.
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Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS), an independent watchdog within the Internal Revenue Service, released a 2021 report to Congress stating that tens of millions of taxpayers had a “horrendous” experience with customer service, including the worst phone service “ever” and long delays for refunds.
“Calendar year 2021 was surely the most challenging year taxpayers and tax professionals have ever experienced – long processing and refund delays, difficulty reaching the IRS by phone, correspondence that went unprocessed for many months, collection notices issued while taxpayer correspondence was awaiting processing, limited or no information on the Where’s My Refund? tool for delayed returns, and – for full disclosure – difficulty obtaining timely assistance from TAS,” the report stated.
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The Biden administration advanced a federal review of the impact of leasing public waters for offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday.
The review is part of President Joe Biden’s goal to permit at least 30 gigawatts of offshore wind production by 2030, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced. BOEM will study the environmental impacts of wind farm leases across a 30-million-acre swath of ocean that stretches from the Mississippi River to the U.S.-Mexico border off the coast of Texas.
“The Gulf of Mexico is well-positioned to support a transition to a renewable energy future, as much of the infrastructure already exists to support offshore wind development in the region,” said BOEM Director Amanda Lefton.
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Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna criticized Twitter and Facebook for censoring the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden, saying the story should not have been blocked.
“I thought it was a mistake for Twitter to take down some of this stuff about Hunter Biden, or Facebook to do that,” Khanna said during an interview with Joe Lonsdale on the American Optimist podcast while promoting his book “Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us.”
The New York Post published a story in October 2020 detailing a meeting between Hunter Biden, then-Vice President Joe Biden and a top executive at Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2015, relying on data recovered from a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter. Shortly after the story was published, Twitter blocked users from sharing the link and suspended accounts that attempted to tweet it out.
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A teacher training at a Texas middle school reportedly instructed teachers to not tell parents if a student tells them they identify as transgender or non-binary, according to documents reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“DO NOT contact their parents and out them to their families,” a teacher professional development training at Walsh Middle School (WMS) in Round Rock Independent School District (RRISD), told teachers, according to documents.
The training also provided teachers with advice if they “misgender someone,” advising them to “correct students” if they use the wrong pronouns, the documents show.
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A group of environmentalists voiced opposition to potential Massachusetts solar projects that could generate at least 250 kilowatts of electricity.
The majority of those who attended a public hearing hosted by the Amherst, Massachusetts, Community Resources Committee said they supported a moratorium on such projects that would expire in May 2023, the Daily Hampshire Gazette reported. The proposed moratorium would prohibit surrounding municipalities from green lighting any solar project that exceeds the 250-kilowatt-capacity threshold.
The moratorium was proposed by three town councilors after an 11-megawatt solar farm was proposed in the area, the Gazette reported. A solar field that produces 250 kilowatts of electricity would power 71 households while one that produces 11 megawatts would power more than 3,000 homes, according to a federal estimate.
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The U.K.’s domestic spy service, MI5, informed the House of Commons speaker that a woman is suspected to have been used by China to exert influence over British lawmakers, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.
The suspect, Christine Lee, is a London-based solicitor who “knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party,” authorities said Thursday, AFP reported.
House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle confirmed to AFP he had informed lawmakers of the incident through an email, AFP reported. “The Speaker takes the security of members and the democratic process very seriously, which is why he issued this notice in consultation with the security services,” a spokesperson for Hoyle told the outlet.
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Jim Gaffigan said on Joe Rogan’s program, “I’d still take Biden’s corpse over Donald Trump.” Congratulations, elites! You’re now being governed by a political corpse. Elites will be fine with a dead president governing a zombified American economy and society. Working and middle-class Americans? Not so much.
How dead is Joe Biden’s political life? Joe Biden is so toxic politically that Stacey Abrams, governor of the Georgia of her mind, refused to stand with him in the state she ostensibly governs about the legislation that is her signature issue: codifying the ability to commit election fraud at the federal level. Abrams was absent while a bunch of masked black people stood stoically behind the bellicose president. The optics were bad in every aspect. The content was worse.
Did Biden address the distress of the 1982-ish 7 percent inflation numbers crushing the lower and middle class? No. Did the president encourage people in the face of year three enduring the out-of-control omicron variant? No. Did the president discuss job innovation? No.
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COVID-19 vaccines allow breakthrough infections. Their duration “appears to be limited.”
On top of that, wealthy countries caused harm by bidding up vaccine prices to hoard the “limited supply” available last year.
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Hennepin County Jail is reportedly refusing to book suspects with warrants from other counties. In audio from the local police scanner, obtained by Crime Watch Minneapolis, the dispatcher can be heard announcing that “for the next two weeks, Hennepin Jail is not taking anyone with just warrants from outside Hennepin County.”
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A Wisconsin judge has ruled that the absentee ballot drop boxes widely deployed during the 2020 election are not allowed under state law, a decision that could dramatically impact voting ahead of the swing state’s midterm elections.
Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren ordered on Thursday the Wisconsin Elections Commission to retract its instructions to election officials on how to use drop boxes. Bohren declared that the WEC had overstepped its authority in issuing the guidance in the first place.
Bohren called the WEC’s guidance a “major policy decision that alter[s] how our absentee ballot process operates,” that was significant enough that it should have required approval by the Legislature.
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The year 2021 saw the highest number of police officers killed in the line of duty in modern history, with 458 officers dying over the course of the year.
As reported by Fox News, the number is the highest since record-keeping first began, surpassing the previous high of 1930, which saw 312 officers killed on the job. The report was released on Tuesday by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), pointing out that the numbers reflected an increase of 55 percent over the 2020 total of 295 deaths. The comprehensive report includes officers at every level, including municipal, county, state, and federal, as well as military, territorial, campus, and tribal law enforcement.
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From the moment COVID-19 appeared, the pandemic became inseparable from politics.
Political frenzy was inevitable since the SARS-CoV-2 virus likely escaped from a level-4 security virology lab in Wuhan, China.
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The Biden administration is returning migrants in small numbers to Mexico as it rolls out the resumption of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), it fought for months to end.
The policy requires border officials to return asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while waiting for immigration court hearings.
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More than 50,000 illegal immigrants released into the U.S. by Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to report to their deportation proceedings during a five-month period analyzed last year, according to a report provided by the Department of Homeland Security to U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin. The report also states that ICE doesn’t have court information on more than 40,000 individuals it’s supposed to prosecute.
“Between March and August 2021, as a result of the Biden Administration’s failed border policies, over 270,000 illegal aliens have been dispersed into the United States with little chance for removal,” Johnson said in an announcement accompanying the report, which didn’t include data from the other seven months of the year.
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President Joe Biden’s approval rating continues to drop as voters grow increasingly dissatisfied with his handling of key issues, according to the results of a new poll.
Biden’s approval rating dropped to a new low of 33%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, with 53% of Americans saying they disapprove of the president’s performance. The rating is down 3% since November 2021, when Biden held a 36% approval rating.
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The Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures inflation at the wholesale level, surged to 9.7% on a year-over-year basis as of December 2021, marking the highest rate in history, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced Thursday.
The BLS reported that the PPI grew 0.2% in December as prices continued to soar amid growing supply chain disruptions and COVID-19 concerns. As of November, the measure grew 9.6% on a year-over basis and 0.8% in that month alone.
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Thousands of federal employees will peacefully march in protest of President Biden’s vaccine mandate, Defeat The Mandates DC organizers announced in a press release Thursday.
Over 6,000 members of Feds For Medical Freedom, a national grassroots coalition consisting of federal workers, announced that they would join firefighters, first responders, medical professionals and more in the March to Defeat the Mandates in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, the press release said.
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There’s an old saying that we should invest in land because there’s a limited amount of it, so it won’t lose its value.
But when it comes to farmland in the United States, there could be a more pressing reason to invest these days – national security.
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State Representative Jeremy Munson (R-Lake Crystal) responded to Minnesota’s new COVID vaccine incentives for kids, calling it bribery and coercion. The State of Minnesota and Gov. Tim Walz (D) announced that they will be giving every family of 5 to 11 year old children $200 for getting fully vaccinated in the months of January and February.
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Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA) and the Job Creators Network (JCN) praised the ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court that prohibited President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for private businesses.
The mandate, which would have been enacted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, could have forced businesses with 100 or more employees to mandate the vaccine or weekly testing.
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In a Thursday afternoon ruling, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s OSHA vaccine mandate that would apply to American workers.
The court allowed a separate policy, that requires vaccinations for most health-care workers at facilities that receive Medicaid and Medicare funding, to stand.
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Timothy Chmielewski, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Deputies Association Union President, announced a COVID vaccine mandate for his union’s employees on an internal email with a subject line that read, “You will be terminated.”
John Gilmore posted a screenshot of the email on Twitter, which was from Chmielewski. It is unclear if the mandate applies only to those within the sheriff’s office or if it is a county-wide requirement.
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A tiny administrative agency in the District of Columbia announced a new policy Tuesday that will likely serve as a model for a whole-of-government push to assemble lists of Americans who object on religious grounds to a COVID-19 vaccine.
The Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia—a federal independent entity that assists officers in the District of Columbia courts in formulating release recommendations and providing supervision and services to defendants awaiting trial—announced a new records system that will store the names and “personal religious information” of all employees who make “religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement.”
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A TikTok influencer who frequently posts anti-white screeds and LGBT content on social media is a middle school teacher at a New Jersey charter school, The Star News Network can reveal.
Nairobi Colon teaches at KIPP Whittier Middle School in Camden, New Jersey. KIPP, which stands for Knowledge is Power Program, is a nationwide nonprofit network of charter schools, funded in part by private donors.
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In a new bombshell report, Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona appears to have solicited the infamous letter from the National School Board Association (NSBA) which falsely described conservative parents as “domestic terrorists.”
According to the New York Post, newly-uncovered emails from October featured NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett explicitly saying that then-interim CEO Chip Slaven “was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.” The email, dated October 6th, was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the nonprofit watchdog group Parents Defending Education.
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Democrats across the country are pushing to continue allowing private money to fund public elections as Republicans try to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage in his victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.
So far at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.
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President Joe Biden’s administration plans to provide millions of COVID-19 tests to K-12 schools each month, the White House said in a Wednesday statement.
This month, the Biden administration will start shipping five million rapid COVID-19 tests each month to K-12 schools across the country in an effort to keep schools open amid a spike in COVID-19 cases and the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant, according to White House officials. The new tests will allow schools to double the “volume of testing” from November 2021.
The administration also plans to expand lab capacity to provide an additional five million tests per month so schools can “perform individual and pooled testing in classrooms nationwide.”
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A top official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly refused to disclose how many FBI agents and informants were involved in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning, Jill Sanborn, executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, cited privileged protocols as to why she would not tell Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) the number of FBI assets that “actively participated” in the protest. “Sir, I’m sure you can appreciate that I can’t go into sources and methods,” Sanborn, who served as assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division when the protest erupted on January 6 and would have full knowledge of FBI undercover operations, told Cruz.
The Texas senator also demanded to know if FBI agents committed any violent crimes or incited any violent crimes on January 6. Sanborn again declined to answer. Presenting photos of Ray Epps, a man caught on video on both January 5 and 6, imploring people to “go into the Capitol” but has not been charged with any crime, Cruz asked Sanborn whether she knew Epps. “I’m aware of the individual, sir, I don’t have the specific background to him,” Sanborn replied.
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The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that students in the state have no constitutional right to learn about civics while in school.
The ruling, written by U.S. Judge Denise Casper, denied an appeal from the group, upholding a decision rendered from a lower court.
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One of the first questions I ask an artist is if they come from a musical family. Since Anthony Nix was a foster kid who got adopted at age seven, his answer to that question was “I don’t know.”
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A North Carolina court Tuesday upheld the state’s new congressional and state legislative lines, rejecting claims from Democratic groups that it was an unfair gerrymander giving Republicans in the state a big win.
While the case may be appealed, the decision as it stands now could impact the 2022 midterm elections, where Republicans are seeking to reverse Democrats’ narrow House majority. North Carolina is gaining a 14th seat, and the new congressional lines could give Republicans an 11-3 advantage, up from the 8-5 split now.
The Democrats’ lawyers argued during last week’s trial that the map chosen was an extreme outlier that Republicans picked solely for political gain. Republicans, however, said that the new lines were drawn legally and that the court was incapable of determining whether it was too partisan to stand.
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Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Tuesday proposed a tax cuts omnibus in her fourth Condition of the State speech.
“Under these high ceilings, next to this marble, among these columns and portraits, it’s tempting to believe that nothing good happens unless we legislate it, regulate it, or fund it. But in the small towns, around kitchen tables, in the fields and back-offices, Iowans understand that we in this building don’t fund anything. They do,” the Republican governor said. “And right now, they’re paying too much.”
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After House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) proposed possible new legislation to limit the practice of insider stock trading among members of Congress, even some within his own ranks have anonymously voiced their opposition to such a plan.
As reported by the New York Post, McCarthy first made the suggestion to Punchbowl News, suggesting such a bill as one of many things he would want to see introduced if the GOP retakes the majority in November. Among other things, his proposal would restrict members to only holding professionally managed funds, as well as prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks in companies that are overseen by committees they serve on.
McCarthy pointed to the example of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has a net worth of over $100 million, and whose husband was found to have traded millions more worth of tech stocks. “I just think if you’re the Speaker of the House, you control what comes to the floor, what goes through committee, you have all the power to do everything you want,” McCarthy said on Tuesday. “You can’t be trading millions of dollars.”
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The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 0.5% in December, bringing the key inflation indicator’s year-over-year increase to 7%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported.
The CPI soared to 7% on a year-over-year basis in December, the highest level in almost four decades, the BLS reported Wednesday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal projected the index would soar past 7.1% in December.
“There’s still a lot of scarcity in the economy. Consumers and businesses are in great financial shape, and they’re willing to pay up for more goods, more services and more labor,” Sarah House, director, and senior economist at Wells Fargo, told the WSJ.
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Amazon employees in Bessemer, Alabama, are set to hold a second union vote after the first election was deemed illegal, a federal labor agency said Tuesday.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced that workers at the Bessemer warehouse would vote again on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) on Feb. 4. The second vote comes almost a year after the first election in which Amazon employees overwhelmingly rejected the proposal to join the RWDSU.
Following the unsuccessful unionization bid, labor organizers demanded a new vote, alleging that Amazon improperly placed the election ballot box on company property, which the union argued was a form of intimidation. The union also alleged that Amazon threatened warehouse workers with messages saying the facility might close or they might lose benefits if the union vote succeeded.
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Out of dozens of lines showing millions of dollars for Missouri’s supplemental budget, one sticks out in House Bill 3014.
There are 25 lines, each representing a department or office in Missouri government, requesting a 5.5% cost of living adjustment for all state employees. Gov. Mike Parson announced the increases and a base pay of $15 per hour in December.
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Minnesota House Republicans responded to the formal announcement that the Minnesota School Board Association (MSBA) withdrew from the agreement with the national affiliate, the National School Boards Association (NSBA).
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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (D-CA-23) vowed to remove a Minnesota congresswoman from her House Foreign Affairs Committee assignment if Republicans take back the lower chamber of Congress in 2022.
“The Democrats have created a new thing where they’re picking and choosing who could be on committee. Never in the history have you had the majority tell the minority who could be on committee,” McCarthy told Breitbart.
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Almost no one seems to grasp the colossal irony of the current American political condition. The uniquequality of it is that the country is divided between two political forces which, in the tedious hyperbole of contemporary political jargon, view each other as an “existential threat to democracy.” The Democrats can’t sell the bunk that January 6 was an “insurrection;” they can’t wish away concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election. All they have is the tired claim that Trump is a threat to democracy, and in their advocacy of that falsehood, they have made themselves the threat to democracy.
Trump emerged politically in 2015 to universal mockery. Nothing could have been more certain than that this vulgar and sleazy huckster (as he was portrayed,not without some reason), would bomb out trying to recalibrate his downmarket celebrity brand to catapult him into the White House.
As Trump cleaned up in the 2016 Republican primaries, the Democratic strategists reached to the bottom of their campaign bag of tricks. Late in the campaign came the 11-year-old Billy Bush tape, in which Trump had made some inelegant locker-room macho comments about how a celebrity could take almost unlimited liberties with women. This failed to kill him. It was stale, dated, and not exactly a startling revelation.
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A former member of the women’s swimming and diving team at the University of Minnesota has sounded the alarm against the inclusion of biological men in women’s athletics.
On Dec. 19, Jenna Stocker published an article in National Review that called transgender athletes an “affront to the fairness of sports.”
“Nothing has threatened the future of sports more than transgender integration,” she said.
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A Brooklyn Park man was sentenced to over two years in prison and over $30,000 restitution for his participation in the May 2020 riots and arson. According to the District of Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, “Samuel Elliott Frey, 20, and co-defendant McKenzy Ann DeGidio Dunn, 21, joined other individuals who had gathered near the Great Health and Nutrition store located at 1360 University Avenue West, in St. Paul.”
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David Sassoli, president of the European Union’s parliament, died in a hospital on Tuesday at the age of 65 after months of poor health, the Associated Press reported.
Sassoli, a socialist and former Italian journalist, had been hospitalized since late December 2021 due to abnormal immune system functioning, his spokesperson said, the AP reported. He had been struggling with poor health since he became ill with pneumonia due to the legionella bacteria in September.
European Council President Charles Michel said Sassoli was a “sincere and passionate European. We already miss his human warmth, his generosity, his friendliness and his smile,” the AP reported.
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When U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd went on “NBC Nightly News” to tell his side of shooting and killing unarmed Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt, he made a point to note he’d been investigated by several agencies and exonerated for his actions that day.
“There’s an investigative process [and] I was cleared by the DOJ [Department of Justice], and FBI and [the D.C.] Metropolitan Police,” he told NBC News anchor Lester Holt in August, adding that the Capitol Police also cleared him of wrongdoing and decided not to discipline or demote him for the shooting.
Byrd then answered a series of questions by Holt about the shooting, but what he told the friendly journalist, he likely never told investigators. That’s because he refused to answer their questions, according to several sources and documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) is planning to form a special unit focused on the threat of domestic terrorism, a top official told lawmakers Tuesday.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen announced the creation of the new unit in his opening remarks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.
“I decided to establish a domestic terrorism unit to augment our existing approach,” Olsen said. “This group of dedicated attorneys will focus on the domestic terrorism threat, helping to ensure that these cases are handled properly and effectively coordinated across the Department of Justice and across the country.”
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