House Republicans Vote to Remove Rep. Liz Cheney from Leadership Post

House Republicans voted Wednesday morning in favor or removing Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership post.

Cheney was the House GOP conference chairwoman, the No. 3 Republican in the chamber. The vote to remove Cheney occurred via a voice vote, according to Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Following the vote, Cheney told reporters she would work to make sure former President Trump is not elected again.

Read More

More Americans Are Living Their Lives, Leaving Masks at Home, Survey Shows

Group of people sitting at public restaurant, eating.

A majority of Americans said for the first time in over a year that returning to their “normal” pre-pandemic lives did not pose a moderate or large health risk, an Axios/Ipsos survey shows.

The survey, released Tuesday, showed just 43% of Americans saying that returning to “normal” posed either a large or moderate risk to their health. It also shows that majorities of Americans have begun to enjoy several aspects of pre-pandemic life: 54% of Americans have eaten at a restaurant, 59% have visited family or friends and 31% have made summer plans – all in the past week alone.

The return to normalcy and the mental health benefits associated with it directly corresponds with the amount of Americans who say they have been vaccinated. Almost two-thirds of respondents say that they have received at least one shot, and 18% say that their emotional well-being has improved in the past week, which the survey notes is an all-time high during the pandemic.

Read More

Commentary: Biden Must Reverse Course on Iran Before It’s Too Late

President Joe Biden walks along the Colonnade with the Combatant Commander nominees U.S. Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost and U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson on Monday, March 8, 2021, along the Colonnade of the White House.

Media outlets around the world recently reported on leaked audio comments in which Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif admitted that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls all of Iran’s foreign policy decisions.  Although President Joe Biden was careful to mention neither Zarif nor Iran in his speech before Congress last month, Zarif’s embarrassingly candid revelations have direct implications for Biden’s entire Iran policy: namely, it underscores that reducing economic sanctions in order to moderate the Iranian regime cannot work.

For decades, U.S. policy toward Iran has produced disappointing results, largely because American administrations have underestimated the entrenched ideology of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship and mistakenly assumed the regime can be tamed by conciliatory diplomacy.  Western efforts to placate Tehran have failed consistently since the revolutionaries took power in 1979, yet recent reports indicate President Biden is in the process of repeating this failure. 

Just as the Obama administration did with its disastrous 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Biden administration is now seeking to lift economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for temporary commitments from Tehran to curb its nuclear program.  A senior State Department official recently revealed that the Biden administration is reviewing all U.S. terrorism and human rights sanctions on Iran since 2017 to assess whether those sanctions were “legitimately imposed,” and that some sanctions will need to be lifted to ensure Tehran is “benefiting” from the nuclear deal.  Like Obama, Biden hopes that relaxing economic pressure can convince the regime to put aside its nuclear ambitions, focus on Iran’s economy and people, stop bankrolling terrorist proxies, and become a normal member of the international community. 

Read More

Army Veteran Denton Knapp Announces Bid to Challenge Rep. Liz Cheney for Wyoming House Seat

Denton Knapp

Army veteran Denton Knapp has announced a bid for Wyoming’s one and only House seat, meaning that sitting Rep. Liz Cheney will face yet another challenger in the GOP primary.

Knapp, who graduated from Campbell County High School in Gillette, Wyoming, lives in California but is returning to the state, according to the Gillette News Record. He will face-off against multiple other Republicans who will also be competing in the contest.

Cheney, the House Republican Conference chairwoman, has been a vocal critic of former President Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud. She was also one of 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Read More

Surveys Show Largest Expansion of School Choice in U.S. History

More children are likely to have increased access to educational options after state legislators across the U.S. advanced a slew of bills this year expanding school choice, according to several state-by-state surveys.

“This is a banner year for the educational choice movement. Hundreds of thousands of children nationwide will now have greater access to educational opportunities,” Jason Bedrick, director of policy at Ed Choice, a national nonprofit organization that promotes state-based educational choice programs, told The Center Square.

At least 50 school choice bills have been introduced in 30 states so far, designed to create or expand vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, among other measures.

Read More

Commentary: How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War

Riot in Minnesotta; BLM

The other day, I wrote that “woke” was the new conformism.

It is, of course, but I undersold it. It’s much more than that and more dangerous.

As Tal Bachman notes at Steynonline, it’s now our state religion, a state religion in a country that—constitutionally and for good reason—isn’t supposed to have one.

But “Wokism” is yet more than that, too. It’s a mass psychosis similar to many that have arisen throughout history when the masses followed leaders who, in their zeal or self-interest, took them to disastrous ends.

Read More

Alabama Becomes Latest State to End $300 Unemployment Bonus

Close up of federal check

Alabama will soon cease participating in the federal government’s unemployment insurance program that grants out-of-work Americans an extra $300 per week, the state’s governor said.

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey announced that the state would withdraw from the coronavirus relief program by June 19, 2021, arguing that the $300 in additional weekly payments was incentivizing people not to look for jobs. She suggested that the labor shortages reported in states across the country have been caused by the unemployment boost.

“As Alabama’s economy continues its recovery, we are hearing from more and more business owners and employers that it is increasingly difficult to find workers to fill available jobs, even though job openings are abundant,” Ivey said in a statement.

Read More

Biden Administration Eliminates Religious Exemptions for Doctors

Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has eliminated religious conscience exemptions for doctors who are forced to perform gender-alteration surgeries, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The move represents yet another crucial and widely-popular policy that was first enacted by President Donald Trump, only for Biden to reverse it. HHS announced on Monday that to overturn this policy, it would be expanding its definition of sex discrimination so that sexual preference and “gender orientation” would be included among identities that could be considered discriminated against by such a policy.

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra released a statement in which he claimed that “people have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex and receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. That’s why today HHS announced it will act on related reports of discrimination.”

Read More

Commentary: The Government Hiding January 6 Video Footage and Why

Jan. 6 capitol riot

Joe Biden calls it the worst attack since the Civil War. Attorney General Merrick Garland compares it to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI is breaking down the doors of Iraq War veterans and small business owners who have no criminal records, and some are hauled off to rot in solitary confinement in a fetid D.C. jail, for their involvement in the alleged travesty.

The event, of course, is the roughly four-hour-long disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. As mostly nonviolent Americans dared to protest Congress’ certification of a clearly fraudulent presidential election in a place that once was considered “The People’s House,” lawmakers scurried for cover as reporters and photographers captured part of the ruckus on video and still shots to wield as political ammunition against Donald Trump and his supporters.

But have we seen a full and fair depiction of exactly what happened that day? The answer, as evidenced by an ongoing coverup by the U.S. Capitol Police and the Justice Department, clearly is no.

Read More

Trump Calls Democratic VA Candidate Terry McAuliffe Bill Clinton’s ‘Bagman’ in Youngkin Endorsement

Donald Trump

Former President Donald Trump endorsed Republican nominee for governor Glenn Youngkin in a Tuesday message that called Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe Bill Clinton’s “bagman.”

Trump’s endorsement comes after Youngkin, the former CEO of the private equity giant Carlyle Group, won the Republican nomination for Virginia governor Monday, the New York Times reported. The Virginia election will be one of only two state elections choosing governors in 2021.

“Congratulations to Glenn Youngkin for winning the Republican nomination for Governor of Virginia,” the former president said. “Glenn is pro-Business, pro-Second Amendment, pro-Veterans, pro-America, he knows how to make Virginia’s economy rip-roaring, and he has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

Read More

Georgia Suspends Gas Tax Amid Shortage

Gov. Brian Kemp (R) Tuesday signed an executive order temporarily eliminating the Peach State’s gas tax, among other measures, after a cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline has halted gas flow to much of the southeast. 

“Today I signed an executive order suspending the gas tax in Georgia to help with higher prices as a result of the Colonial cyber attack. We are working closely with Colonial and expect for them to recover by the end of the week,” Kemp said on Twitter, attaching an official statement from his office. 

Read More