Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once served as mayor; she was superintendent of the school system.
And as if all those levers of local power weren’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the prime hangout in this small rural town and a key source of high school jobs.
Read More
Kamala Harris shrugged.
Read More
Law enforcement in the United States has collapsed. Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart stores are behind plexiglass, that you must call a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while you read and examine the different packages. People know these companies have no choice. Americans know that crime is rising, but the true collapse in law enforcement, particularly in large cities, is without precedent.
A Gallup survey last November showed that 92 percent of Republicans and even 58 percent of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March 2023 to April 2024, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse – 60 percent to 61 percent. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.
Read More
Abundant and affordable energy drives America’s powerful and productive economy. That’s been true throughout our nation’s history, and America’s recent achievement of energy independence provides the most concrete illustration of that fact.
But to keep our nation firing on all eight cylinders, we need government policies that prioritize providing adequate, reliable and secure domestic energy supplies.
Read More
Jon Graft is on a mission to reignite the passion for learning by pushing a long-denigrated classroom practice: vocational education.
The superintendent of the Butler Tech District of high schools in Ohio is a leader in the growing movement to revive public education, marred by low test scores and high absenteeism, through a hands-on approach to learning that prepares students for careers in today’s tech-driven economy. Traditionally a means of funneling disadvantaged kids into outdated shop classes and dead-end jobs, vocational education is being reimagined by Graft and others in sophisticated career and technical education (CTE) programs nationwide, offering high school students of all academic abilities training in healthcare, computer science, engineering, skilled trades, and even the arts.
Read More
Three weeks ago, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe angrily pushed back on senators’ calls to immediately fire or discipline key agents directly responsible for the security failures that led to the assassination attempt against former President Trump at last month’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Since that time, Secret Service leaders have placed several members of the Pittsburgh Field Office on administrative leave, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Read More
Ever since early 2021, Americans have watched as illegal aliens have flooded across the Southwest border unimpeded. They have read with horror the accounts of innocent Americans victimized by those here unlawfully. They have seen family and friends die after being poisoned by fentanyl coming across the border. And the Biden-Harris administration has largely done nothing.
Yet now, following a few months of somewhat-reduced numbers of apprehensions between ports of entry along the Southwest border, the Biden-Harris administration is taking a victory lap. Such premature celebration, however, ignores the reality of the continuing nature of this crisis.
Read More
Most of us get the big things right: Don’t touch fire, wrestle alligators, or play in traffic. But beneath these necessary survival strategies, we are boundless reservoirs of delusion.
While many of our unmoored beliefs are specific to us – I seem to be the only person who thinks I have a beautiful singing voice – some are universal. Chief among these is the claim: I’m my own worst critic.
Read More
Even the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post could not stomach the new proposal from Kamala Harris to place price controls on food. The headline of the opinion piece from Catherine Rampell read:
“When your opponent calls you a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t try price controls?”
Read More
Amid the many battles over how to improve American schools, it’s often forgotten that what’s taught in the classroom is but one component of ensuring that students receive a high-quality education; it’s also important to remove barriers to children’s learning.
And the idea to remove one major impediment – cell phones in K-12 schools – has gained significant traction over the past year, most recently in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Read More
Vice-presidential picks generally balance a ticket, but Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate does anything but. And American Catholics and others who care about the poor and vulnerable should be alarmed.
Consider their attacks against their states’ life-affirming pregnancy care centers. For me, this issue is more than political. It’s personal. Like many Catholics across the country, I volunteer at our local pregnancy centers. I’m the medical director for the centers run by the Archdiocese of Miami and I read their fetal ultrasounds. Helping families and expectant mothers through my work there is one of the most rewarding ways in which I practice medicine.
Read More
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrating into everyday life – as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems – which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations – can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users. LLMs’ growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.
So it’s of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLoS ONE, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Read More
The National Educators Association, the largest teachers union in America, is “fired up” for Kamala Harris’s VP nominee, Tim Walz. “Gov. Walz is known as the ‘Education Governor,’” wrote NEA President Becky Pringle, “because he has been an unwavering champion for public school students and educators, and an ally for working families and unions. As a high school teacher and NEA member, Walz is committed to uplifting our public schools.”
The NEA’s endorsement should be worrisome for Americans who are actually concerned about the state of education in this country: for years, the NEA has put radical politics above children.
Read More
“I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
Cast off by a drug-addled mother, raised by a discipline-demanding, f-bomb-wielding Mamaw, J.D. Vance’s inspirational story is one of lost potential reclaimed. If Vance is elected and remembers where he came from, this country has much to look forward to – because his redemptive story envelopes millions of Americans.
Read More
More than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats – including Washington D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities – allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. San Francisco not only permits noncitizens to vote but appointed one to serve on its Elections Commission.
Read More
In the past four years, approximately 4 million Latino Americans have become eligible to vote, making the Latino population account for 14.7% of all eligible voters. This increasingly independent cohort is up for grabs, and one conservative Latino-focused PAC intends to win them over.
The bloc was a key part of the coalition that helped deliver President Joe Biden to the White House in 2020. In 12 of the 13 states with the largest Latino populations, Latinos supported Biden over former President Donald Trump by a margin of at least two to one. And in nine of the 13 states, that margin was at least three to one. Only in Florida was Biden’s margin less than two to one.
Read More
Rancor, recriminations, and serious formal misconduct complaints have plagued all levels of the Secret Service detail assigned to protect former President Donald Trump over the last year, distracting the team from its core mission of securing Trump from physical harm and preventing an assassination.
Read More
Ideological litmus tests have no place in higher education. They weaponize loyalty and contradict the university’s purpose of fostering academic inquiry and informed debates. Scholars cannot pursue truth or progress if they are denied academic jobs based on their devotion to a specific political ideology or philosophy.
I applaud states like Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas that have banned varied Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements that mandate loyalty to its agenda. But we need to go further. Congress can deny federal funding to universities that impose DEI on faculty, administrators, and staff. Conservative lawmakers are already trying to “dismantle” DEI in the federal government and others are currently weighing defunding universities over Title VI violations. They should extend defunding to universities that require DEI.
Read More
The teenage female athletes at California’s Pomona High School said they felt special when a handful of coaches there took them under their wing, spending more time with them than others, providing extra encouragement, sharing personal stories and, sometimes, seemingly harmless flirtatious talk.
One track team member was amazed at a Nevada meet when she saw the coaches drinking, smoking marijuana, and sharing the party scene with teammates. But that attention turned to tragedy at a subsequent meet in Las Vegas when a coach brought the 16-year-old to his hotel room, plied her with alcohol, and, she says, raped her.
Read More
Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.
Read More
The United States has become the largest market in the world, and at the same time it delivers the highest standard of living to its citizens compared to the world’s other major economies. Contrast this success with other large economies such as China, where despite being the world’s second-largest economy, its citizens have a standard of living that has more in common with the developing world than a global powerhouse. Now China is facing demographic challenges that raise the prospect that as a nation, it may get old before it gets rich. Layer its long-standing repression and authoritarianism on to its economic challenges, and one is hard-pressed to see a domestic policy regime worthy of emulation.
Likewise looking to America’s south, and one is struck by the generations of squandered opportunities for prosperity in South America. As a region, South America has been buffeted by financial collapses, runaway inflation, and geopolitical instability. For nations digging out from a legacy of ruinous fiscal and economic policies, there is no easy route forward, only difficult tradeoffs. Argentina has certainly charted a new course and there is hope that near-term pain may pave a path forward to stability and long-term growth. But the present pain is very real.
Read More
Kamala Harris’s sudden ascendancy within the Democrat Party, with nary a peep from other ambitious Democrats, spotlights the uncomfortable contradictions of identity politics and the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement.
Americans universally believe that everyone should have a fair shot at opportunities regardless of sex or race, which is why the kind of racism and sexism that was once so prevalent is so rare today.
Read More
Just days after Secret Service Acting Director Ronald Rowe denied playing a direct role in rejecting repeated requests for added security measures and assets for former President Trump, whistleblowers have come forward refuting those claims and blaming Rowe for some of the agency’s security failures that led to the July 13 assassination attempt that nearly killed Trump and left rallygoer Corey Comperatore dead and two others wounded.
Other whistleblowers are coming forward citing more systemic problems with the Secret Service, the vaunted agency whose primary job is to protect presidents, vice presidents and former presidents and their families.
Read More
Wading into the confusing abyss of administrative law, on June 28 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, overruled the much-criticized 1984 decision in Chevron, restoring the bedrock principle — commanded by both Article III of the Constitution and Section 706 the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act — that it is the province of courts, not administrative agency bureaucrats, to interpret federal laws. This may sound like an easy ruling, but the issue had long bedeviled the Supreme Court. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, an administrative law expert, supported Chevron prior to his death in 2016. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Chief Justice John Roberts sure-footedly dispatched Chevron.
If, as I wrote for The American Conservative in 2021, “Taming the administrative state is the issue of our time,” why did the Supreme Court unanimously (albeit with a bare six-member quorum) decide in Chevron to defer to administrative agencies interpretations of ambiguous statutes, and why did conservatives — at least initially — support the decision? In a word, politics. In 1984, the President in charge of the executive branch was Ronald Reagan, and the D.C. Circuit — where most administrative law cases are decided — was (and had been for decades) controlled by liberal activist judges. President Reagan’s deputy solicitor general, Paul Bator, argued the Chevron case, successfully urging the Court to overturn a D.C. Circuit decision (written by then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg) that had invalidated EPA regulations interpreting the Clean Air Act. Thus, in the beginning, “Chevron deference” meant deferring to Reagan’s agency heads and their de-regulatory agenda.
Read More
“Crime went down under Biden, and crime went up under Trump,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg claimed on Fox News Sunday. “Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
“It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” President Biden similarly claimed. And fact-checkers, at places like Politifact, rate Biden’s statement as “true.”
Read More
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
Read More
A revolution is underway. Parents, physicians, and principals have seen the devastation inflicted on an entire generation of children raised on screens, and they are taking bold steps to end “phone-based childhood.” Politicians are joining the cause, too, with Congress on the brink of passing bi-partisan legislation to protect kids online – the first significant law of its kind in nearly 30 years. The catalyst for this revolution is Jonathan Haidt’s new bestselling book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
Read More
Last month the Supreme Court ended the 40-year precedent known as the Chevron Doctrine. When the Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council ruling was handed down in 1984 there was nil understanding that it would enable the burgeoning 20th Century administrative state to dig its foundation down to societal bedrock. This legal precedent tied the hands of lower courts over the next 40 years, forcing them to defer to administrative agencies on how to interpret the law in areas that congress did not offer crystal clarity.
Chevron opened the door for succeeding precedents like the 2005 ruling in the National Cable & Telecommunications Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Services case, which enabled governmental agencies to “override judicial constructions of ambiguous federal laws by promulgating their own conflicting, yet authoritative, interpretations.” In 2020, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the Brand X opinion, lamented the ruling, rightly noting that it further ensconced judicial doctrine to the point of “administrative absolutism.” In essence, Chevron, and subsequent precedent under its umbrella, allowed presidential administrations to legislate around congress through cabinet agency directors.
Read More
As state and federal policies mandate the electrification of virtually all end uses to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels. For example, 18 states have adopted California’s Advanced Clear Car II rules requiring increasing percentages of new vehicle sales to be EVs, reaching 100% for the 2035 model year. In 2019, New York City enacted Local Law 97, which requires all residential buildings larger than 25,000 square feet to convert to electricity by 2035. Other states, such as New Jersey seek to convert all residential heating to electricity.
Together, mandates for electric vehicles (EVs) and electrification of space and water heat will likely double electricity consumption and peak demand. Coupled with policies that mandate supplying the nation’s electricity with zero-emissions resources, notably intermittent wind and solar power, not only will electricity prices continue to increase but the ability to meet consumers’ increased demand will become more problematic.
Read More
On Sunday, President Joe Biden made the appropriate decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race amid pressure and a soft coup attempt from Democrats. While dropping out, Biden, our sitting commander-in-chief, hid in Delaware for almost a week without being seen by the American people, prompting “proof of life” demands. Unfortunately, this past week is not the first time this has happened before – Joe Biden has been missing in action for the last four years as our country has been falling apart around him.
As a retired Navy SEAL and former Marine, I’ve had the honor and duty of serving this country in some of the most challenging and dangerous situations imaginable. Our missions demanded precision, adaptability, and unwavering leadership. Any failure, any gap in our planning or execution, could cost lives. That’s why it is deeply troubling to see the current state of leadership under President Biden, who has become a “single point of failure” as our commander-in-chief. His weakness continues to put America in grave danger as our enemies seek to capitalize from America’s missing leader.
Read More
It did not have to be this way. The COVID-19 pandemic cost American citizens their lives, their livelihoods, education, mental health, reputations and, ultimately, civil and religious freedoms. “The U.S. accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but more than 25 percent of total COVID-19 cases reported across the globe, and it currently ranks among the top 10 countries in COVID-19-related deaths per capita,” wrote the authors of 2023 commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And for all that, we have government to thank.
For years leading up to the pandemic, the nation had spent billions on preparation and planning for a biohazard attack or event. Whatever we learned was quickly discarded or undone by a lack of accountability, transparency, and humility. Decades of planning and untold man hours of research and training were rendered ineffective by a corrupt culture of greed, self-importance, scientific misconduct, and outright fraud. Because, while the government worked to prevent the worst, it was also helping to create chaos and contagion by funding and facilitating gain of function (GOF) research.
Read More
Next month, the Huntsville School District in Arkansas will join the wave of public schools switching to a four-day week.
The shorter school week, which first emerged in a few rural areas decades ago, is now expanding into suburbs and smaller cities. At least 2,100 schools in half the states have embraced the three-day weekend mostly as an incentive to hire and keep teachers, prompting cheers of support from instructors, unions, and many families.
Read More
For over a half century the proponents of DEI and its intellectual precursors have fought from high ground, not from a moral position, but a tactical and strategic one secured by Marxist indoctrination that has pervaded nearly every corner of society.
The deliberate and methodical campaign has successfully muted public criticism, although privately most Americans felt that there is something terribly wrong with a philosophy that prioritizes appearance over ability. DEI’s commanding role in all branches of the military has resulted in no tangible benefits but a myriad of failures—falling morale and standards, recruitment shortfalls, plummeting public confidence in the military, poor leadership, and with the exception of the Marine Corps, the inability to fulfill basic mission requirements at an acceptable level.
Read More
Paul Fishbein’s conviction on rent fraud charges in New York City last year was a feast for the tabloids.
The story was crazy enough to get readers to click. Prosecutors said that Fishbein, 51, somehow convinced local housing agencies that he owned dilapidated apartment buildings that he didn’t, enabling him to move in tenants and skim government rent subsidies meant for lower-income, disabled, and elderly residents. Fishbein kept the con going for more than years. His take: $1.8 million.
Read More
New allegations that Secret Service training resources were reallocated to “executive leadership bonuses” and DEI-prioritized recruitment are among the torrent of charges leveled against agency Director Kim Cheatle and other top officials in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Read More
The most refreshingly true statements articulated by Gill Pratt at the RealClearEnergy Future Forum are “Not everyone is the same” and “One size does not fit all.” As Toyota’s chief scientist, Pratt understands very well the complex nature of a very diverse consumer base (check the video link above to see his part).
That is why a multi-path approach that enhances the customer’s quality of life is the most productive strategy. America’s motorists come from a variety of backgrounds who purchase vehicles for a variety of purposes. “Our job as a manufacturer is to adapt and provide customers with choices to satisfy their needs and desires,” says the executive.
Read More
On June 27th, I hosted a Special Order speech on the House floor to raise awareness of veteran Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I chose this date for a reason: June was National PTSD awareness month, and June 27th was National PTSD Awareness Day.
According to the National Center for PTSD, ten percent of all Veterans suffer from PTSD. PTSD is the leading cause of the Veteran suicide epidemic, claiming between 17 and 44 Veteran lives each and every DAY – a cumulative loss of nearly 150,000 Veteran lives since 9/11. This figure is 21 times greater than the 7,000 servicemembers we lost in post-9/11 warzones, making PTSD exponentially more lethal than combat.
Read More
The New York Times op-ed dropped just minutes before President Biden headed for his motorcade, and as he was driving across town to meet with union workers, all of Washington devoured the words of George Clooney, the movie star publicly calling on the president to step aside.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” Clooney wrote, setting up a betrayal worthy of the big screen. “He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Read More
Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history.
Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.
Read More
President Biden’s duty to the American people is to “faithfully execute” his office. As a public trustee, Biden took an oath to do what is right. He is a trustee of powers bestowed upon him by the Constitution in return for his promise to be dutiful.
Like every agent and trustee, Biden owes fiduciary duties to those who are served by his decisions. He owes them two duties: the duty of always acting with due care; and the duty of giving them his absolute loyalty, always putting their interests above his own.
Read More
Reasonable constitutional scholars and jurists could quibble about the details and impact of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision in Trump v. United States, but the hysteria coming from the left, including President Joe Biden and dissenting Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, is beyond rational discourse. An inability to control emotions and anger has become commonplace for progressives who don’t get their way.
Writing for a 6-3 majority, split on ideological lines, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion laid out a three tiered approach to presidential immunity premised on the Constitution’s vesting of the complete executive power in one individual, giving him duties and power of “unrivaled gravity and breadth” and making that individual a full and equal branch of the United States government, alongside the Congress and courts. Roberts observed that the president’s constitutional powers are often “conclusive and preclusive” and those powers may not be subject to review by Congress or the courts.
Read More
President Biden’s debate performance on Thursday night has brought talk of replacing him on the Democratic presidential ticket out into the open. Most have focused on Biden voluntarily withdrawing from the race. There is, however, another solution that is being ignored by party leaders. They can simply decide to nominate a different candidate.
I know this sounds strange, since the 4,696 delegates who will attend the convention, and particularly most of the 3,949 who are pledged to vote for Biden, have likely already booked their hotel rooms in Chicago. The dirty little secret about the Democratic Party, as Bernie Sanders’ supporters learned in 2016, is that the rules governing their conventions are entirely “democratic.” Sanders’ problem was with the so-called “superdelegates,” who attend the Democratic National Convention by virtue of their leadership position in the party. The disconnect between voters and delegates, however, potentially also extends to the rest of the delegates.
Read More
Two years before he formulated the ideas for the Monroe Doctrine, then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was asked to give the annual Independence Day address in the United States Capitol. It became what historian Samuel Flagg Bemis called a landmark document in the history of American foreign policy. Its message continues to resonate in modern debates about U.S. foreign policy.
Before getting into the details of Adams’ address, some background about Adams and 1821 (the year he delivered the speech) is necessary. John Quincy Adams was the son of John Adams, one of the driving forces behind America’s independence and the nation’s second president. Young John Quincy accompanied his father in diplomatic posts in France, and later served as private secretary to Francis Dana in Russia. Young Adams also had served as his father’s private secretary during the negotiations of the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended the War of Independence. He was appointed by President George Washington as U.S. Minister Resident to the Netherlands in 1794. He served in that same position in Prussia during his father’s presidency. President Madison named John Quincy U.S. Minister to Russia in 1809, and he served in that position until 1814, as the Napoleonic Wars were coming to a close. He chaired the U.S. delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent which ended the War of 1812 with Great Britain, and later served as U.S. Minister to Great Britain in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. President James Monroe appointed John Quincy as Secretary of State. In 1824, Adams won the disputed presidential election in the House of Representatives, where he bested military hero Andrew Jackson. (Jackson would later claim that Adams won the presidency in a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay, whom Adams appointed as Secretary of State).
Read More
Last week, in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.
(I must confess a personal interest in all of this: My civil rights organization, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represented individual plaintiffs in Murthy.)
Read More
Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction.
The payments to Gober were part of $260 million the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent from 2009 through 2019 to reimburse healthcare providers in 15 states and Puerto Rico for services to patients who were dead, according to the inspector general of the HHS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid — programs with combined expenditures of $1.7 trillion.
Read More
Amid the Democrats’ chaotic meltdown over President Biden’s Thursday night debate performance, one image stood out: A shrewd observer on X.com posted a video of a baseball pitcher just off the field dramatically engaged in big, arm-circle warm-ups.
“Gavin stretching in the bullpen,” the observer commented.
Read More
Just before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off in their second presidential debate, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper met in the White House with a small group of advisers to President Obama to hatch a plan to put out a first-of-its-kind intelligence report warning the voting public that “the Russian government” was interfering in the election by allegedly breaching the Clinton campaign’s email system.
On Oct. 7, 2016 – just two days before the presidential debate between Trump and Clinton – Clapper issued the unprecedented intelligence advisory with Obama’s personal blessing. It seemed to lend credence to what the Clinton camp was telling the media — that Trump was working with Russian President Vladimir Putin through a secret back channel to steal the election. Sure enough, the Democratic nominee pounced on it to smear Trump at the debate.
Read More
The editor-in-chief and publisher of The Tennessee Star was ordered to appear in court last week and threatened with charges of contempt after his newspaper reported on an anonymously leaked collection of documents authored by Nashville mass shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale. Michael Patrick Leahy was joined by his attorneys in court on Monday for a “show-cause hearing,” where the journalist was asked by Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles to demonstrate why his outlet’s reporting does not subject him to contempt proceedings and sanctions.
On March 27, 2023, Hale (born Audrey Elizabeth Hale) entered the Covenant School armed with three semiautomatic guns and murdered six people, including three 9-year-old children. Hale, who was eventually shot and killed by police in the school, was a transgender man and former student at Covenant who harbored extremist sentiments on race, gender, and politics. The massacre remains the deadliest mass shooting in Tennessee history.
Read More
When a candidate runs on character, you know his record can’t be good.
Hence President Biden’s reported $50 million spend on an ad titled “Character Matters,” which features unflattering photos of Donald Trump while focusing on the Republican nominee’s legal troubles. Hey, we paid good taxpayer money engineering those court cases and we’re not going to waste it.
Read More
The U.S. energy sector finds itself in a precarious position. Increasing geopolitical volatility and strong energy demand forecasts could spell trouble domestically in the future. The U.S. needs to stop hamstringing American energy companies and invest in the nation’s infrastructure, such as pipelines, processing, and production.
If we have learned anything in the last two and a half years, it’s that the U.S.’ energy industry is not free from geopolitical chaos globally. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Houthi’s attacks in Yemen backed by Iran and turmoil in the Middle East have very real repercussions for the average American. We may not be as intensely intertwined with those realities as our European allies, but energy is a global market with implications for domestic prices, supply, and demand. While different events can affect prices at home, there are steps the administration can take to protect our energy sector.
Read More