The worldwide price of crude oil skyrocketed to more than $100 per barrel for the first time since 2014 as Russia launched a full-scale offensive against Ukraine.
The Brent crude index, the global oil benchmark, hit $101.66 per barrel Thursday morning, surging more than 4% overnight. The U.S. WTI index skyrocketed nearly 7% to $98.69 per barrel Thursday, its highest level since 2014.
Read More
It doesn’t take a genius or even a veteran political watcher to conclude that Americans don’t have long attention spans.
Perhaps the lack of retention is due to the establishment news media’s fondness for sensationalizing every little tidbit of information whether the hysteria is warranted or not. How many times have we seen “Breaking News” flash across a screen to describe an occurrence that normally wouldn’t prompt much mention at all, such as a press secretary leaving vice president Kamala “no one gets out of my hemisphere happy” Harris or yet another House Democrat retiring rather than risking being humiliated and summarily booted out of office because of senile president Joe Biden’s abysmal job approval ratings or his or her district was reassembled in a manner that made a return trip to Washington too arduous.
Read More
For the second time in a year, the Biden administration is seeking to divert Customs and Border Protection officers from the southern border crisis to an overseas conflict, this time to help process people fleeing the Russian assault on Ukraine.
Read More
On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed that well over 200,000 illegal aliens coming across the southern border have managed to completely evade Border Patrol and other border authorities since October.
The New York Post reports that an anonymous DHS official reported as many as 220,000 “gotaways” over the last four months, illegals who were never even stopped by Border Patrol. The official noted that the unusually high number came even during the winter season, which usually sees a slowdown of border crossings due to harsh weather conditions.
Read More
Georgia House Speaker David Ralston and his Republican colleagues in the State House pulled a bill that would have expanded school choice for Georgia families, reportedly in anger over a mailer sent by a national pro-school choice organization intended to pressure lawmakers into voting in favor of the bill.
Read More
Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has already left at least 40 Russian soldiers and “a few” Ukrainian civilians dead as of Thursday, multiple sources reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine early Thursday as air strike sirens rang in Kyiv and Russian missiles reportedly struck multiple cities across the country.
Read More
A study released last week has found more than one in three children in grades K-3 are unlikely to be reading on grade level by the end of the current school year unless they receive major remedial help.
Curriculum and assessment company Amplify analyzed data from more than 400,000 students in kindergarten through fifth grade and found that, while students have begun to rebound from the learning loss suffered during school closures amid the coronavirus pandemic, considerable gaps remain in basic reading skills, Education Week reported.
Read More
There is always a tweet, so says the online aphorism, developed during the chaotic Trump years, that now seems to hold true across administrations and perhaps even with increased significance after a Russian strongman decided to invade an eastern European neighbor over the holiday weekend.
The Russian in question is Vladimir Putin. The country invaded, Ukraine, or more specifically the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics that Russia recently recognized diplomatically. And the tweet, well, that came from Joe Biden.
Read More
Connecticut Senate Republicans are proposing measures to help stem the tide of drug overdose deaths, particularly from fentanyl.
Senate Republican Leader Kevin Kelly, R-Monroe, told the The Center Square the opioid epidemic is a public health and safety crisis in the state.
Read More
The Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys (ADDA), a union which represents the vast majority of Los Angeles County prosecutors, voted overwhelmingly to support the recall of District Attorney George Gascon.
Gascon, who received over $2 million in financial backing from left-wing financier George Soros according to The Los Angeles Times, is currently facing a recall petition spurred by backlash to his perceived lenient stance on crime.
Read More
Newly uncovered federal grant documents show that the U.S. Department of Education awarded roughly $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars to a Florida-based education program that trains future teachers and other professionals in, among other things, critical race theory.
The funding came through two grants, one in 2017 and another in 2021. Both grants went to faculty at Florida State University, which has partnered with Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
Read More
According to Hans Rosling “Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.” The American Psychological Association indicates the use of fear to influence behavior is effective, especially among women. For fear to be a successful change agent, it must be viewed as a legitimate warning about what will happen if behavior does or does not occur.
Read More
President Joe Biden suggested that Americans may be negatively impacted at the pump as a result of a sanctions package targeting Russia he unveiled Tuesday.
“As we respond, my administration is using every tool at our disposal to protect American businesses and consumers from rising prices at the pump,” the president remarked at the White House on Tuesday. “As I said last week, defending freedom will have costs for us as well and here at home. We need to be honest about that.”
Read More
Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib will deliver a response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Tuesday on behalf of the left-wing Working Families’ Party.
News of her speech, first reported by Politico, comes weeks after Democratic moderates have slowed much of Biden’s domestic agenda, much to the chagrin of their colleagues further to the left. According to a summary of the remarks obtained by the outlet, Tlaib is expected to hammer the moderates responsible for the obstruction, which all but killed Biden’s plan to boost domestic spending and fight climate change.
Read More
Election integrity issues from the 2020 presidential election have yet to be resolved, “so we are not ready for 2024,” Phill Kline, Director of the Amistad Project, warned on Monday.
Kline was asked by “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show cohosts John Solomon and Amanda Head if election integrity issues had been solved after the 2020 election. “No, we still have many of the same problems,” he replied, explaining that this is “because the legislatures have not taken the time to understand the problem.”
Read More
Mortgage applications plummeted to their lowest level in three years as rates continued to edge higher, hitting home buyers and refinancers.
Mortgage applications decreased 13.1% in the week ending Feb. 18, the lowest level since December 2019, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Application Survey. The survey, which measures mortgage loan application volume, found refinancing activity decreased 15% on a weekly basis and was 56% lower than the same period one year prior.
Read More
Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue on Wednesday released a new campaign ad that highlights former U.S. President Donald Trump’s endorsement. According to a statement, Perdue’s advertisement will run across the state with a $600,000 buy.
Read More
Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue on Tuesday called for term limits for all statewide elected officials. Perdue, in a statement, proposed a total of two four-year terms for all statewide elected officials, including the governor.
Read More
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on Tuesday announced $422 million in grants to improve the state’s infrastructure relating to water and sewer.
The funds, stemming from the more than $4 billion from the American Rescue Plan awarded to Georgia, were given to dozens of local governments and organizations.
Read More
Two litigation firms have filed petitions against organizations that have admitted to paying for abortions in Texas after detection of a fetal heartbeat, a violation of the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Attorneys from both America First Legal and the Thomas More Society filed petitions for discovery against the Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity and the Texas Equal Access Fund, both of which have admitted in court that their organizations paid for at least one abortion of an unborn baby in Texas who had a detectable heartbeat.
Read More
If we follow the conventional political thinking, Republicans can anticipate an electoral shift during the November midterm elections and appear likely to recapture the White House in 2024. A grassroots revolt is already showing signs that the Democrats should expect to be punished for politicizing education and mismanaging COVID policy.
If we follow the conventional thinking even further, this will spell success for a usual cast of Republican-leaning characters in leadership and consulting roles. Karl Rove is likely already updating his fee structure. Veterans of the two Bush Administrations will send their résumés east in hopes of retaining old posts so they can steer contracts and favors back to their allies and former employers.
Right, Left, Right, Left, the hypnotic rhythm drums on—briefly interrupted only by an aberrational Trump Administration or popular uprising—but it all returns to the statists’ status quo in the end. The uniparty simply shifts its weight from its left foot to its right while business proceeds as usual.
Read More
The performance of surgical and chemical procedures on children for the purpose of gender transition “can legally constitute child abuse” under Texas law, declared Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Friday in a formal attorney general opinion.
Paxton responded to questions from State Representative Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth), chair of the Texas House Committee on General Investigating, who asked whether “sex change” surgeries performed on children, including castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, mastectomies, and removal of otherwise healthy body parts, constitute child abuse.
Read More
Aquarter century ago as Whitewater prosecutors closed in on evidence that Bill and Hillary Clinton both gave factually inaccurate testimony, the then-first lady unleashed a blistering attack that stunned a capital city that in those days was far less rancorous.
Mrs. Clinton called the Whitewater probe “an effort to undo the results of two elections,” claiming it was run by a “politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband.”
Prosecutors have been “looking at every telephone call we’ve made, every check we’ve ever written, scratching for dirt, intimidating witnesses, doing everything possible to try to make some kind of accusation against my husband,” she declared in that 1998 interview with NBC’s “Today” show.
Read More
An Ivy League law school will start paying tuition for low-income students beginning next fall to diversify its culture and make law degrees more affordable, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Yale Law School will cover the tuition for students with income below the federal poverty line by offering scholarships of roughly $72,000, the Wall Street Journal reported. The scholarship will cover tuition, fees and health insurance while students are responsible for their estimated $21,000 living expenses.
Read More
Kyle Rittenhouse on Monday announced that he is launching a new initiative aimed at holding major media outlets and celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg accountable for telling “malicious defamatory lies.”
Last November, the 18-year-old was acquitted of all charges related to the shooting deaths of two antifa rioters, and the injury of a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020. The jury found that he had acted in self-defense. Charges ranged from intentional homicide to recklessly endangering safety.
Read More
Woke ideology is proof that the world has gone Mad – as in Mad Magazine. What passes as penetrating insight on the left is just a newfangled version of the old fill-in-the-blanks word game Mad Libs. Try to guess what the Princeton University students are talking about here:
We aim to decolonize our practice of ____, even as ____ remains an imperialist, colonialist, and white supremacist art form. (Answer: ballet)
How would you complete this statement from Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?
Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of a web designer fighting a Colorado law that forces her to promote messages against her religious beliefs, the court announced Tuesday.
Lorie Smith of 303 Creative asked the court to review the 10th Circuits’ ruling that Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act requires Smith to engage in speech that violates her conscience, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing her.
Read More
In his Gettysburg Address at the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pointed out that the United States was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” “Now,” he continued, “we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Thankfully, we are not in a civil war today – and, one hopes, never will be again. We are, however, in a battle for the soul of our country.
Read More
Missouri Republican Rep. Vicky Hartzler scored another major endorsement in her bid to succeed Sen. Roy Blunt as polls show that the race’s frontrunner could be a risky general election candidate.
The Susan B. Anthony List endorsed Hartzler Tuesday, calling her an “unwavering pro-life champion” who is “Planned Parenthood’s worst nightmare.” It comes just days after Republican Sen. Josh Hawley also endorsed her over the rest of the crowded GOP field.
Read More
It seems like every day America is becoming more anti-American than the day before. The Biden administration just keeps shooting for the “how can we out-do ourselves in pushing our Marxist policies” prize, and blue states are in lockstep. The American people keep getting whacked day in and day out, and the media is complicit. No one is safe these days in Biden’s America.
Read More
ATHENS, Georgia – Representative Jody Hice (R-GA-10), currently running to replace Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, launched a statewide tour in Athens on Tuesday to address Georgia’s election integrity issues. And, during the stop, Jessica Fore, a Democrat running for Hice’s 10th Congressional seat, challenged Hice on Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.
Read More
Legislation to legalize horse race betting again has been introduced in the Georgia Legislature.
Similar bills have been pushed in Georgia over the past three years after the federal government lifted a federal ban on sports betting outside of Nevada in 2018.
Read More
As school districts start dropping the mask mandates, removing pornographic books from their libraries, and explicitly prohibiting critical race theory, it’s clear that the parent protests are working. School boards, even in progressive bastions like San Francisco, are currently being cleaned out and replaced by more pro-parent members. Moreover, politicians like the governor of Oklahoma are openly instituting a school choice model that would allow for different schooling models and have education dollars follow the student, not automatically go to the school.
Naturally, these developments invite more pushback (sometimes literally so) from those who believe they’re supporting public education. It was fine in the past to let various kooky parents carry on about the evils of teaching Harry Potter or sex ed; school boards and district leaders could simply yawn and carry on as before. However, now that it actually threatens their authority and influence, they can no longer ignore parents’ concerns..
In general, opponents of protesting parents make the same points over and over. They deny that public schools have problems, play semantic games with critical race theory (“it’s just an abstract legal theory taught in law school,” etc.), and accuse angry parents of being misguided racists. In their view, parents who demand a more wholesome and academic experience for their children are actually demanding an exclusively white and privileged experience. And for good measure, they will add an anecdote about a heroic public school teacher changing lives, proving beyond any doubt that public schools are still doing noble work and are essential for a healthy, diverse society.
Read More
In a letter to the House Speaker and Senate President Friday, President Joe Biden extended the national COVID-19 emergency pandemic indefinitely.
“There remains a need to continue this national emergency,” Biden wrote.
Read More
Matt Richards, running to replace Representative Jody Hice (R-GA-10) in the U.S. House of Representatives, said Monday that his campaign has come to an end. Richards, on Facebook, said the best candidate to replace Hice in the 10th Congressional District is fellow Republican Mike Collins.
Read More
Canada is now governed by absurdism, and it is symptomatic of an ailing Western elite.
Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week invoked martial law to arrest and financially destroy truckers on the charge that their largely peaceful protests are “dismantling the Canadian economy” that had already been dismantled for two years under some of the most draconian lockdowns in the world. The trucker “sect,” Trudeau added, is guilty of felonious “unacceptable views.” But his rhetoric still cannot square the circle of demonizing vital workers while conceding he cannot run his country without them.
Read More
All taxpayers are dealing with a disastrous filing season this year, with the IRS backed up on processing millions of returns and refunds from last year and communication from the agency nonexistent at best. But some taxpayers will have an added headache in the future as a result of an unnecessary new paperwork requirement that went into effect this year. Fortunately, however, legislation introduced by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) would address this issue by removing the burdensome new requirement.
Ever since IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig claimed last year that the “tax gap,” or the gap between what the IRS collects and what it believes it is owed, could be as large as $1 trillion, politicians and legislators have been scrambling to propose ways to collect all that missing revenue. That’s despite the fact that more sober analyses show that the $1 trillion figure is probably wildly exaggerated, that it is functionally impossible to wholly prevent tax evasion, and that a far greater concern is the IRS’s inability to handle its taxpayer service responsibilities.
But as far as proposals to collect all this supposed “extra revenue” go, most of the focus has rightly been on schemes to drastically increase the IRS’s enforcement budget and allow the IRS to snoop on taxpayers’ financial accounts. But another more targeted change has already gone into effect, and is already causing problems.
Read More
In a now-viral video an unidentified man encouraged a national strike in every Canadian business sector, along with active support for those who are opposing COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates in the country.
“You’ve seen what’s happening in Ottawa,” the man, whose face was blurred in the video, said. “Canadians are known around the world to be among the most kind, most peace-loving people anywhere. And so you know when Canadians star rising up by the millions, to oppose what their government is doing, something is horribly wrong.”
Read More
University of Michigan head basketball coach Juwan Howard is suspended for the remainder of the regular season and is forced to pay a $40,000 fine, The Big Ten Conference announced Monday.
The ddisciplinary action comes after Howard struck Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft on Sunday in Madison, Wis.
The Big Ten also found University of Wisconsin head basketball coach Greg Gard in “violation of the conference’s sportsmanship policy” and gave him a $10,000 fine.
Read More
Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii who ran for president in 2020 and has been critical of President Joe Biden, will headline a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to the event’s website.
Gabbard has sharply criticized “elite” members of the Democratic and Republican parties since leaving Congress just over a year ago, pushing back on rhetoric that she says is divisive and against policies embraced by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice. She has also defended Kyle Rittenhouse, saying that the charges brought against him were motivated by politics and “should be considered criminal.”
Gabbard, a staunch opponent to interventionism, has also criticized Biden’s handling of the crisis on Ukraine’s border with Russia. She also spoke out against Biden’s pledge to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court instead of nominating someone based on merit.
Read More
The enthusiasm to join former President Trump’s new new social media platform – Truth Social – on its official launch day appears to have overwhelmed the site.
The site went live Sunday night ahead of its official President’s Day launch. However, potential users in roughly the past 24 hours have reported problem getting on the platform.
“Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist,” read the message received by several users, according to Reuters.
Other users reported having trouble registering for an account amid the early scramble to join.
Read More
Attorney General Merrick Garland has undercut his own promise to restore trust in the Justice Department by “doing the bidding of the radical left,” such as suing to block voter ID laws and launching FBI probes of school parents, a former top agency lawyer says.
Gene Hamilton, who served as counselor to Trump-era Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr, told Just the News he hoped Garland would focus the department on core law enforcement priorities and away from ideological agendas but has been sorely disappointed.
“For all of his rhetoric, and for all of his talk about returning the Department of Justice to norms and all of those other such things, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has betrayed the trust of the American people,” Hamilton said during an interview Friday on the John Solomon Reports podcast.
Read More
A political action committee is funding a series of trucker protests against COVD-19 restrictions in the U.S., mirroring efforts by Canadian truckers to lift the country’s vaccine mandates and rules.
The Great American Patriot Project (GAPP) launched a campaign Wednesday intended to organize and fund several truck convoys to begin in early March across the United States.
Read More
The “Class Discussion Guidelines” section of Ana Maria Candela’s “Social Change -Introduction to Sociology” syllabus, which instructs white male students to wait their turn to speak after “non-white folks” talk, opens with a quotation about speaking from Mao Zedong, the communist Chinese dictator who killed 45 million people.
“No investigation, no right to speak,” the quote reads in the document for the Binghamton University class.
Read More
A federal appeals court on Thursday halted a mandate from the Biden administration that required an hourly minimum wage of $15 for outdoor recreation companies operating on public land.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver granted an injunction in a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation against the Biden administration on behalf of outdoor recreational groups that have contracts with the U.S. government or operate on federal land.
Read More
A growing number of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck despite increasing wages, a newly released report found.
PYMNTS and Lending Club released the report, which says that 61% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, an increase of 7 points since May 2021. The report also found 54% of Baby Boomers and seniors are living paycheck to paycheck.
Read More
As backlash grows against so-called “diversity” programs in public schools, some districts throughout the country have been canceling plans to implement such programs.
According to ABC News, one such program was in Colorado Springs School District 11, a district that serves over 26,000 students. In May of 2020, shortly after the accidental fentanyl overdose death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, the district was among the first in the nation to push for an “equity policy.”
Read More
As West Coast states deal with the fallout of putting anatomically male inmates in women’s prisons, the East Coast is looking to join the club.
Maryland is considering legislation similar to a California law that lets inmates choose their correctional facility based on self-declared gender identity, an option that concerned even transgender inmates in the Golden State.
A purported draft executive order by President Joe Biden would do the same to federal prisons, prompting GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to introduce opposing legislation.
Read More
Democrats are “aiding and abetting” the humanitarian crisis along the southern border, as “women are being raped on a daily basis,” Arizona’s Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb said on Thursday.
“It shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, Democrat or Independent,” Lamb told “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show cohosts John Solomon and Amanda Head. “If you care about human beings, you should absolutely care about border security. Why? Women are being raped on a daily basis … kids are being used as pawns, men are being extorted.”
Read More
Governor Brian Kemp said Saturday he’s not taking sides on whether Buckhead and Atlanta should formally separate. Buckhead City Committee CEO Bill White responded to Kemp’s comments and said now is the time for Republican legislators to act.
Read More