U.S. Attorney John Durham on Friday announced his resignation from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, but he will reportedly be staying on as special counsel in the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
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President Biden has proposed $1.9 trillion in additional COVID-19 spending. He’s asking Congress to authorize another round of checks, more expanded unemployment benefits, a $15 minimum wage, and much, much more. Over the weekend, House Democrats finally released the text of the 600-page bill meant to make Biden’s broad COVID proposals a legislative reality.
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Ever since Ronald Reagan’s 70’s and 80’s campaigns we’ve heard a lot about “Reagan Democrats”. More recently, with the rapid rise of the inimitable Donald J. Trump, the term“Trump Democrats” has also been a common refrain, even among charter members of the establishment media.
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An all new LIVE STREAM of War Room: Pandemic starts at 9 a.m. Central Time on Saturday.
Former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon began the daily War Room: Pandemic radio show and podcast on January 25, when news of the virus was just beginning to leak out of China around the Lunar New Year. Bannon and co-hosts bring listeners exclusive analysis and breaking updates from top medical, public health, economic, national security, supply chain and geopolitical experts weekdays from 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon ET.
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In their prime time news broadcasts last night, five major broadcast networks reportedly neglected to cover the explosive sexual harassment allegations made by a former aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D).
ABC, CBS, and NBC, MSNBC, and CNN all ignored the accusations of Lindsey Boylan, who on Wednesday published an exposé in Medium detailing Cuomo’s inappropriate and harassing behavior toward her, (which Cuomo has denied), according to Newsbusters.
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At least 13.9 million of the nation’s small businesses are at serious risk of shuttering their doors by April 1, a recent industry report found.
Forty-four percent of the country’s 31.7 million small businesses are at risk of closing by the end of the first quarter, according to small business group Alignable. Small businesses on the brink of closure expect to earn less revenue than their owners estimate is needed to stay afloat.
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The founder of a front group for the Chinese Communist Party appeared at an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in May 2016, where he pushed a pro-Beijing argument regarding a decades-long stalemate over control of the South China Sea.
The speech, by Tung Chee-hwa, the founding chairman of the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), was held more than 14 months after William Burns, President Joe Biden’s nominee for CIA director, took over as president of the Carnegie Endowment.
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Democrats aren’t allowed to attach a provision increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour to their coronavirus relief package, a top Senate official ruled, according to reports.
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who oversees the interpretation of the chamber’s rules and precedents, decided Thursday evening that the proposed minimum wage hike couldn’t be included in President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan under budget reconciliation, CNBC reported. MacDonough had held private meetings over the last week with Democrats and Republicans, hearing their arguments for or against keeping the measure.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel says European leaders agree on the concept of a COVID vaccination passport that would allow people to travel more freely through the region amid the ongoing pandemic and continuing health-safety restrictions.
“Everyone agreed that we need a digital vaccination certificate,” Merkel said Wednesday after a meeting with European leaders.
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Former U.S. Olympics gymnastics coach John Geddert has died by suicide at 63 years old after being charged with human trafficking, the New York Post reported.
On Thursday, Geddert was charged with crimes including sexual assault, human trafficking, lying to a police officer and running a criminal enterprise, the Post reported. According to the criminal charges filed by Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel, the former coach could have faced up to a life sentence, ESPN reported.
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Light rail ridership in the Twin Cities metro area was down an average of 59% in 2020 when compared to 2019 numbers.
The Metropolitan Council, which runs public transportation in the Twin Cities metro area, released ridership numbers this week that demonstrate the significant decline in ridership across all modes of public transportation.
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When Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage to deliver a welcoming address at the Conservative Political Action Conference on his home field in Orlando Friday, it will be as a fast-rising force in the conservative movement and an increasingly plausible and popular contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2024.
DeSantis will be followed in the spotlight on the first full day of CPAC 2021 by a succession of marquee GOP names vying to woo the party’s conservative base at the movement’s signature annual gathering of the tribes. Among them will be potential 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls and aspiring heirs to the leadership of their party’s populist conservative wing, including Sens. Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley, of Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, respectively.
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The Biden Administration is facing widespread criticism from local authorities and citizens as its open-border immigration policies have led to hundreds of potentially coronavirus-positive illegal aliens being unleashed into American border towns, as reported by Breitbart.
Juan Mendez, the mayor of Brownsville, Texas, told the New York Times that “if it’s several hundred [aliens] overnight, then that’s something that would become overwhelming for us.” Mendez added that “the administration is very well aware of that. We’ve conveyed that on numerous occasions.”
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The Supreme Court has always been an anomaly in our democratic republic. This now-powerful body meets in secret, wears uniforms, and has life tenure. The nine-member court has issued rulings explaining how Americans need to alter their views about everything from sex to taxes, affecting the rights of presidents and of prisoners. Recent Republican nominees to the court have been the unjustified targets of fierce fights, with Democrats making wild charges and ad hominem attacks. Of course, Joe Biden and his crew have put the court on notice that they will pack it, when given the excuse.
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Sacramento
The little-known Oakley Union Elementary School District, in the sprawling suburbs 50 miles east of San Francisco, isn’t accustomed to national attention. The school board’s hot mic moment, however, during a video call earlier this month created widespread and justifiable anger because it captured the arrogance, stupidity, and condescension that’s typical on some school boards — especially as officials drag their feet on reopenings.
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Changes in Mexican asylum laws and modifications to U.S immigration policy combined with exploitation by smugglers are causing an increase in migrants at the southern U.S. border seeking entry, according to reports.
The Biden administration suspended the ‘remain in Mexico’ program allowing some asylum seekers to enter the U.S. and ended a policy preventing unaccompanied minors from coming into the U.S., The Washington Post reported. Mexico implemented laws banning migrant families from returning if facilities are full and smugglers in Guatemala are exploiting people saying the administration is taking a softer approach towards asylum seekers.
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Republicans Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Joe Wilson reintroduced the National Right to Work Act on Wednesday, which would prohibit unions from coercing private sector employees from paying dues.
The National Right to Work Act is a one-page bill that doesn’t add to existing labor law, but removes language from past legislation, South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson said Wednesday. The bill was originally introduced in 2019 with widespread Republican support on Capitol Hill, but never received a vote.
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The number of Americans filing new unemployment claims decreased to 730,000 last week as the economy continued to suffer the effects of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to the Department of Labor.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics figure released Thursday represented a decrease in the number of new jobless claims compared to the week ending Feb. 13, in which there were 841,000 new jobless claims reported. That number was revised down from the 861,000 jobless claims initially reported last week.
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Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst is introducing a bill that would criminalize any sterilization or abortion procedure performed without informed consent from the patient.
The Iowa Republican’s legislation builds off a September 2020 whistleblower complaint that alleged mass hysterectomies were performed on immigrant women by Dr. Mahendra Amin without their consent while they were being held at Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia. Amin, a rural gynecologist, has denied any wrongdoing.
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At least 160 Confederate symbols including statues were removed from public spaces following the death of George Floyd in 2020, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Of the symbols removed 94 were Confederate monuments, including a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that was removed from the U.S. Capitol building after 111 years, according to Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) data. The left-leaning SPLC keeps track of around 2,100 public parks, buildings and statues devoted to the Confederacy through a database called “Whose Heritage?”
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by Craig Klein Salesforce has shut down the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) ability to send emails through their platform. Salesforce.com is a Silicon Valley-based giant in the enterprise software space with over $13 billion in revenue. The company was founded by Marc Benioff in 1999, who acquired Time Magazine…
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During the 2019 shareholder season, Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, tabled a shareholder proposal at Amazon’s annual meeting. “Diversity in board composition is best achieved though highly qualified candidates with a wide range of skills, experience, beliefs, and board independence from management,” it read. Uncontroversial, one might think, but Danhof was booed and heckled throughout his presentation. Afterward, a representative for Arjuna Capital (which “works with high net-worth individuals,” its website says) told Danhof that he was simply trying “to protect white males.” A representative of the Nathan Cummings Foundation (with $424 million of cash and investments, on its most recent balance sheet) made clear that Danhof was unwelcome and should hasten, lest he be late for his next Klan meeting or book burning.
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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has introduced a plan to “reorganize” ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations to the point where it will no longer be about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, the Washington Times reported.
The Cuba-born Mayorkas floated this plan to essentially “abolish ICE” last week during a telephone conference call with agency personnel in Texas, according to the Times’ sources, who claimed Mayorkas proposed “taking members of the country’s 4,000-strong deportation force off the streets and converting them into criminal investigators.”
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A new facility to hold unaccompanied migrant children was opened in Texas this week because the Biden administration is encouraging illegal immigration, a former border official said Wednesday.
The Carrizo Springs facility was not opened to comply with COVID-19 regulations as the Biden administration has said, according to former Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Mark Morgan in an interview with Fox Business.
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Dozens of Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to National Institutes of Health Acting Inspector General Christi Grimm on Tuesday demanding a “prompt and thorough investigation” into the NIH’s relationship with a Chinese lab that studied coronaviruses.
The 28 lawmakers demanded Grimm investigate the total amount of funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has received from the NIH, as well as whether any NIH officials communicated with the lab or its U.S. sponsor at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to quell debate surrounding the theory that the virus could have accidentally escaped from the lab.
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Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine is effective in preventing severe and fatal coronavirus cases, and may reduce the virus’s transmission among vaccinated people, the FDA said in new analyses Wednesday.
The drug maker announced in January that its vaccine was 72% effective against the virus in the United States and 64% effective in South Africa, where a mutated, more transmissible strain has become dominant. Its vaccine was 86% effective in preventing severe virus cases in the U.S., meaning that a vaccinated individual is at a far smaller risk of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19.
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It’s official. Last month, the College Board announced that it would discontinue the essay-writing section of the SAT. It’s the latest in a series of recent decisions to reduce the use of standardized testing in college admissions. Proponents of the decision cited claims of racism and bias against underrepresented groups. But those claims don’t hold water. And ditching the writing portion of the SAT is unlikely to help anyone.
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It’s not every day that the subject of Soviet anti-Semitism—something my family experienced firsthand—is broached in the American media. When it does happen, however, unpleasant comparisons to certain trends in the United States are tough to avoid.
In a fascinating piece for Tablet Magazine, Julia Schulman and Michael Hsieh profiled several prominent Jewish scientists and mathematicians who encountered racial bias in admission to leading institutes in the old USSR. The subjects of their investigation defied the long odds, eventually rising to the top of their fields despite official policies excluding Jews from Soviet universities.
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A new frontier in “cancel culture” is looming on the horizon: Banking and financial services firms could ban conservative customers and others from industries targeted by the left, warns North Carolina Republican Rep. Ted Budd, a member of the House Financial Services Committee.
The targets appear to include Republican members of Congress who voted to challenge the 2020 election results (just as some Democrats did in 2017, 2005 and 2001 without facing financial backlash). Additional possible targeted industries range from fossil fuels and firearms to for-profit colleges and payday lenders.
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Government facilities that host unaccompanied migrant children are rapidly reaching capacity due to COVID-19 operational restrictions, causing the Biden administration to rely on a privately operated Trump-era facility in Texas.
An emergency temporary facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, was reopened Monday and around 200 migrant children were transported to the facility that will hold up to 700 migrant teenagers due to permanent facilities reaching maximum capacity and increasing apprehensions of unaccompanied children, CBS News reported. U.S. Border Patrol encountered over 5,700 unaccompanied minors in January 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
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For the legacy media, the story of Democrats’ recent wins in Georgia is the story of Stacey Abrams. According to this narrative, after Abrams lost the 2018 gubernatorial race, she launched Fair Fight to stop Republicans from allegedly engaging in voter suppression and to register thousands of new voters.
When Georgia turned blue in 2020, Abrams received much of the credit. The story goes Democrats are now winning because they are making democracy better.
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Employees at Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, donated at least $15.1 million to President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to Open Secrets.
The donations eclipsed the amount given from employees in the banking and legal sectors, according to The Wall Street Journal. The five companies were also the largest fundraising sources for Biden’s campaign.
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Amazon has removed from its cybershelves a book with “thoughtful answers to questions” about transgenderism—without informing the author and without explanation.
“When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” by Ryan T. Anderson, a former senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and now president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, contends that ideology is more of a factor than biology in American society’s acceptance of transgenderism.
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Senate confirmation for Neera Tanden, President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, is becoming increasingly unlikely after one Democrat and key Republicans announced that they would vote against her.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Rob Portman and Pat Toomey all said that they would vote against Tanden’s confirmation, joining West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin who announced his opposition Sunday. Without Manchin, Tanden would fall one vote short of confirmation, assuming that every Republican votes against her.
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A New York Times essay by columnist Kevin Roose frets that the U.S. is suffering from a “reality crisis” and proposes this solution: President Biden should set up a “truth commission” to combat the “scourge” of “hoaxes, lies and collective delusions” that lead to “violent unrest and civic dysfunction.”
Yet, the Times’ idea of “truth” often consists of falsehoods that cause violent unrest and civic dysfunction.
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The Biden administration aims to avoid a humanitarian crisis at the southern border as the number of migrant children seeking asylum increases.
Over 5,700 unaccompanied minors reached the border in January and government shelters are quickly reaching capacity, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shelters for migrant children are operating at 60% capacity to maintain COVID-19 guidelines and were 93% full as of Friday.
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Thucydides recalls a scene from the Peloponnesian War when the Athenians, fleeing before their enemies, come to the Assinarus River. They stop to drink from its flowing waters even as their foes bear down on them.
The Syracusans, Thucydides writes, “showered missiles down upon the Athenians, most of them drinking greedily and heaped together in disorder in the hollow of the river.” Then the Peloponnesians “came down and butchered them, especially those in the water which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it.”
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Tiger Woods was injured Tuesday morning in a rollover car crash, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Multiple news reports say Woods was removed from the vehicle with a “jaws of life” device, he was the only person in the vehicle and the extent of his injuries are unknown. But later multiple reports corrected the part about the “jaws of life,” and say that it was not used to extricate him.
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by Debra Heine The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Republican challenge over absentee ballots received up to three days after Election Day in Pennsylvania. Republicans in the Keystone State had sought to block a state court ruling that allowed the Nov. 6 deadline extension in the 2020…
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The Framers left us a Constitution that gives powers and authority both to the national government and to the states. But the Constitution does not systematically expound on the nature and extent of those powers, nor does it offer a clear-cut rationale for what the states are supposed to do beyond checking national power – a theoretical deficiency rooted in political reality.
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, is vowing to confront the “hard truths of Chicago’s racial history,” which will include public input about the future of 41 statues in the city.
Four of the statues honor former U.S presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley and George Washington.
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The leading advocacy organization for small businesses in the U.S. is focusing its legislative efforts on defeating a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
The minimum wage is the biggest issue the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) has lobbied on recently, the group told the Daily Caller News Foundation. After a series of pandemic-related victories on Capitol Hill, capped off by the December stimulus package that included $284.5 billion for small businesses, NFIB decided to lobby Congress to “do no harm.”
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Joe Biden is set to announce today that the United States will be spending $4 billion on an effort to increase distribution of the coronavirus vaccine in poor and third-world countries, as reported by ABC.
Congress had approved spending the funds on an international vaccine distribution effort back in December; half of the money will go to an organization called Gavi, an international group that focuses specifically on vaccine distribution and is backed by the United Nations. The funding will cover Gavi’s operations throughout 2021 and 2022.
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Around $14.3 million worth of narcotics and several weapons have been seized since the start of February at an Arizona port where officials also arrested a man wanted for murder, Customs and Border Protection announced Tuesday.
Officials seized 440 pounds of methamphetamine, 385,000 tablets of fentanyl, 84 pounds of heroin and almost 13 pounds of cocaine in around 25 instances since Feb. 1, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A 28-year-old man wanted for murder in Las Vegas was arrested while in possession of an AR-15 assault rifle, a handgun and over 300 rounds of ammunition.
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Florida Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried issued a press release on Monday stating that she will direct offices within her purview not to lower flags to half-staff in honor of the recently deceased conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh.
The announcement from the Democrat comes after Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had previously indicated that flags would be lowered to half-staff to honor the late conservative icon.
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Two House Democrats sent letters Monday to a dozen television broadcasters suggesting that they stop airing Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network, a move which a Republican commissioner on the FCC called a “chilling transgression” aimed at deplatforming the conservative networks.
“Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date?” California Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney wrote in a letter to the companies.
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U.S. Senate Republicans may use next week’s Interior confirmation hearing for Rep. Debra Haaland to air their grievances about the Biden administration’s energy policies, running the risk of alienating Native Americans in Western states.
GOP Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Steve Daines of Montana sit on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which will hold the Tuesday hearing, and both have already raised objections that Haaland holds “radical” views. Daines vowed to block her progress in the Senate unless she addresses several issues that concern him.
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Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, has begun attaching formal disclaimers to many of its products at the start of each movie or TV show declaring that the content may be “offensive,” as reported by the New York Post.
Among these products is “The Muppets Show,” which begins with a disclaimer that the show features “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.” The disclaimer continues to say that “rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
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McDonald’s will tie executives’ pay to diversity goals and aims to hit gender parity in management by the end of 2030 as the company tries to overhaul its workplace culture. Fifteen percent of the company’s annual bonuses will be used to reach these targets, McDonald’s said in the statement.
The world’s biggest restaurant chain on Thursday said the company aims to increase the number of women in leadership roles to 45 percent from 37 percent by 2025. It also wants to boost “historically underrepresented groups” in leadership positions to 35 percent from 29 percent over the same time frame, CNN reported.
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The extreme cold weather across much of the country has delayed 6 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, slowing a vaccination rate that has been steadily rising since the Biden administration took office last month.
The backlogged doses account for roughly three days’ of delayed shipments affecting all 50 states, due to road closures, snowed-in workers and power outages, said Andy Slavitt, senior adviser on the White House’s COVID-19 response, during a news conference Friday.
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