A Pennsylvania teacher who was fired for allegedly attending the U.S. Capitol “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, has won a wrongful termination lawsuit after a two-week trial.
Jason Moorehead, a 17-year veteran social studies instructor in the Allentown School District, had always maintained he was “at all times over a mile away” at the Washington Monument when the riot occurred.
Read More
After the recent assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump, some think the race is Trump’s to lose. I tend to agree that the race is in some ways Trump’s to lose, while at the same time feel very strongly that the left is not going to simply roll over and give up on trying to keep Trump from a second term.
So it’s important to not be over-exuberant; Trump is absolutely riding high right now, from the debacle of a debate for Biden to Judge Cannon dismissing the Jack Smith documents case to surviving an assassination attempt. But the right needs to focus on what takes place between now and November 5th, specifically on how every Republican and conservative can help Trump win by doing one simple thing: casting your ballot early.
Read More
Conversations by The Pennsylvania Daily Star with around two dozen neighbors near the house where Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump, lived painted a picture of a family that mostly keeps to itself and a young man who had little interaction with the neighborhood.
Read More
An attendee at former President Donald Trump’s Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania told The Pennsylvania Daily Star that attendees feared the shooter stood among the crowd, and they felt relief only when Trump rose to his feet and raised his fist.
Read More
The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was vital to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society.
Writing in 1818, our third president described public education as “the means to give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business … to express and preserve his own ideas … to improve his morals and faculties … to understand his duties, and to exercise his rights.”
Read More
Lawsuits across six battleground states will significantly impact the November election as laws regarding mail-in balloting are challenged.
In the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, lawsuits that have either concluded or remain ongoing over laws about mail-in and absentee ballots are shaping how votes will be counted in the general election.
Read More
Pedestrian deaths are finally starting to drop across America to pre-pandemic levels.
Pennsylvania, however, bucked the national trend. Drivers killed 192 pedestrians in 2023, eight more than in 2022, and 25 percent more than in 2019, according to an analysis from the Governors Highway Safety Administration.
Read More
Four indictments and one set of convictions later, a Democrat-led lawfare strategy has failed so far to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House, but it has triggered an avalanche of financial support as the former president hold leads in most battleground states that will decide the 2024 election.
No where was Trump’s resilience more obvious than his travels across the West Coast this weekend, where he collected $12 million at a Silicon Valley fund-raiser at the home of a Big Tech executive who used to support Hillary Clinton, scored millions more at events in blue southern California and then jetted off to Las Vegas for a boisterous rally in Nevada where a post-conviction poll showed him leading that once-Biden-friendly state by five points.
Read More
The Biden administration’s changes to Title IX will reverse 50 years of progress for female athletes by allowing biological men to keep competing in women’s sports, pro-women’s sports leaders said Friday at an Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition rally.
The event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was one of the first stops on the coalition’s Take Back Title IX bus tour, which calls on America’s leaders to ensure equal protections for female athletes under the federal regulation.
Read More
President Joe Biden’s signature pieces of legislation are routing billions of dollars into swing states, but pundits are not convinced that the money will make much difference in November’s elections.
The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have cumulatively routed billions of dollars to battleground states over the course of Biden’s first term. The Biden campaign is running swing state ads to promote the funding and projects that Biden’s legislative agenda has created, but state and national pundits told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the benefits are unlikely to be a decisive factor in states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Read More
Former President Donald Trump is leading President Joe Biden in five crucial battleground states for head-to-head matchups ahead of a November rematch, and has gained ground among black and Hispanic voters, a Monday poll found.
Trump is ahead of Biden by 13 points among likely voters in Nevada, as well as by nine points in Georgia, six points in Arizona, three points in Pennsylvania and one point in Wisconsin, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College survey. Biden is only leading in one state, Michigan, with a 47 percent to 45 percent margin.
Read More
With inflation, high-interest rates and slowing economic growth already stressing Americans heading into the 2024 election, another reason to worry about the Biden economy has cropped up: distressed banks in danger of failing.
Last month U.S. regulators seized a bank known as Republic First Bancorp and agreed to sell it to Fulton Bank.
Read More
The prevailing belief in the Democratic Party is that abortion will again be a potent issue against Republicans in this year’s election cycle just as it was in 2022 – and that this time it will not just cost the GOP gaining the majority in the U.S. Senate, but also give Democrats the upper hand in retaining the presidency and winning back the House.
Abortion rights put the brakes on the Republicans’ chances in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years; a decision that transformed American politics that year, benefiting Democrats who were on their way to a bruising midterm election defeat.
Read More
Republican secretaries of state and state legislators are pushing back against “Bidenbucks,” what call the federalization of voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, claiming that the executive order is unlawful.
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner and Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, along with Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature, are fighting President Biden’s Executive Order 14019 from March 2021, which turns federal agencies into “Get Out The Vote” (GOTV) centers across all states.
Read More
Former President Donald Trump received polling bumps against President Joe Biden in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a survey released Wednesday.
Trump’s advantage grew in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina since March, while he is now leading in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the latest Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll. The former president’s lead in Georgia remained the same, and his margin across all seven battleground states including Michigan also grew to six points in a head-to-head matchup with Biden.
Read More
Former President Donald Trump’s support among black men has increased in battleground states ahead of the 2024 election by more than double his support among the same group in 2020’s election, according to a poll published on Thursday by The Wall Street Journal.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has long sought to gain support among black voters, traditionally a Democratic-supporting demographic, by touting his record on the economy and criminal justice reform while in office, among other matters. A recent poll estimated that 30 percent of black men in seven battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — “definitely or probably” plan to vote for Trump in November’s election, an increase of 18 percent from his nationwide performance among that demographic in 2020, where he earned 12 percent of their votes, the Journal reported.
Read More
While Democrats and liberals criticize Republicans, conservatives, and others who are concerned about election integrity, smearing them with the pejorative label “election deniers,” many allegations regarding election irregularities are now being made against Democrats.
Since the 2020 presidential election, former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have raised concerns about election irregularities and are often called “election deniers” by Democrats and the media. However, many Democrats have been accused or found guilty of election crimes, sometimes by members of their own party.
Read More
Former President Donald Trump has staked out a significant lead against President Joe Biden in several of the most pivotal states that could decide the 2020 election, a recent survey has revealed.
The Wall Street Journal survey questioned voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and found Trump leading his likely opponent in all of them except Wisconsin, where the pair tied.
Read More
As Alabama has banned ballot harvesting and Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania are fighting ballot drop boxes, GOP campaign efforts are using those same tools where legal.
Democrats have long focused on mail-in and early voting while Republicans have warned of potential insecurities of those methods. Now the GOP is starting to embrace it this election cycle. However, the acceptance of mail-in voting as a tool isn’t preventing Republicans from looking to secure or ban certain aspects of it, such as ballot harvesting and ballot drop boxes.
Read More
It’s the economy, stupid.
Bill Clinton political strategist James Carville’s famous quip in the 1992 presidential election is truer than ever for 2024.
Read More
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s declaration of independence from the Democratic Party is bad news for President Joe Biden’s prospects for a second term, according to a new poll by United Kingdom-based pollster Redfield & Wilton Strategies.
Read More
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis officially launched his presidential campaign Wednesday, ending months of speculation and ratcheting up what promises to be an intense battle for the Republican Party nomination.
DeSantis enters the race as a top tier candidate, but still lagging far behind frontrunner Donald Trump, according to just about every poll out there.
Read More
President Joe Biden announced his re-election campaign Tuesday, insisting he’s running again to “stand up for fundamental freedoms.”
Republicans in the nation’s presidential battleground states say the out-of-touch 80-year-old Democrat has cost Americans their freedoms — and their finances.
Read More
Google agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states after an investigation found that the tech giant participated in questionable location-tracking practices, state attorneys general announced Monday.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called it a “historic win for consumers.”
Read More
Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor — that would be state Sen. Doug Mastriano — is under attack by the establishment elite for not being … part of the establishment elite. And, of all people, the Republican Governors Association has signed on for the attack.
For those who have not followed the tale, Mastriano is a 30-year active-duty combat veteran who retired as a colonel in the Army. Apart from being deployed to Iraq for Operation Desert Storm (1991), assigned to the U.S. forces liberating Kuwait, in the post–9/11 world he was assigned to NATO and had three tours in Afghanistan. He ended his military career as a professor at the U.S. Army War College, in nearby (to me) Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He has four master’s degrees and holds a doctorate in history.
Read More
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday the 2019 law expanding the state’s mail-in voting was constitutional, overruling Republicans who argued no-excuse absentee voting should be outlawed.
Read More
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolfe and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin are moving their states in opposite directions.
Gov. Youngkin is focused on lowering the cost of living and improving Virginia’s appeal as a place to do business. Boeing’s recent announcement that it is moving from Illinois to Virginia is an example of his efforts. Youngkin’s aggressive pro-jobs push led CNBC to call Virginia the No. 1 state in the country for business.
Read More
Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, covered a Bristol, Pennsylvania, town hall held by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Senate GOP candidate endorsed by President Donald J. Trump, where the heart surgeon and former TV star addresses questions about his dual citizenship with Turkey.
Read More
Neil W. McCabe, the national political editor of The Star News Network, interviewed radio talk show host John Fredericks ‘The Godzilla of Truth’ about how his show is different from other shows just after he hosted an April town meeting with Pennsylvania GOP hopeful, Dr. Mehmet Oz.
‘A lot of my competitors go in a studio, they bring them the paper, somebody brings them a hot chocolate with whipped cream on it. Then they have a coach there, they have a studio, it’s all comfortable, air-conditioned,’ Fredericks said.
Read More
The battle for Hispanic voters in traditional Democratic strongholds is intensifying in Pennsylvania. Last month, the Republican National Committee opened a Hispanic community center in Allentown, the state’s third-largest city. It’s the sixth such center that the RNC has opened nationwide.
Allentown, once associated with steel and Mack trucks, is centered in the Lehigh Valley, now a booming region thanks to the warehousing and logistics sector. The politically competitive Valley is increasingly important to statewide elections, such as the upcoming races to replace retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who lives near Allentown, and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.
Read More
Former President Donald Trump released a blistering attack Friday afternoon on former Vice President Mike Pence’s claims earlier in the day about the January 6, 2021 Joint Session of Congress over which Pence presided at which Electoral College votes submitted by the states were counted.
In a speech before the Florida Chapter of the Federalist Society in Orlando on Friday, Pence asserted, “There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress, I possessed unilateral authority to reject Electoral College votes. And I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election.’ President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” (emphasis added)
Read More
Democrats four years ago rode a blue wave to governors’ mansions across the country, flipping Republican-held seats in the Midwest, Northeast and West alike.
Now, however, many of those governors face Republican challengers amid a political environment that looks potentially promising for the GOP, meaning that contentious races may lie ahead in some of the nation’s most pivotal battleground states. Republicans have already had two strong showings in states that lean Democratic, flipping the governor’s seat in Virginia and coming surprisingly close in New Jersey, a state that voted for President Joe Biden by 16 points in 2020.
Governors in less competitive states are also facing primary challengers from the left and right, making for multiple bitter, closely-followed primaries between candidates from different wings of the same party.
Read More
Then-President Donald Trump’s team assembled a 10-day pressure campaign in December 2020 hoping to shame governors and state legislators into officially investigating allegations of Election 2020 irregularities, according to memos newly turned over to Congress by former New York Police Commissioner and Trump confidant Bernard Kerik.
The strategy called for “protests” at governors’ mansions and the homes of politicians ranging from secretaries of states to “weak” congressional members in key battleground states, the memos show.
The documents, turned over Friday night under subpoena to the House’s Jan. 6 commission, are remarkable in part because they show the primary focus of the Trump team leading up to the Jan. 6 certification of the 2020 vote – an event that turned violent when pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol – was to get “support for hearings” to probe allegations of voting irregularities Trump’s team had received but not vetted.
Read More
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday ruled to strike down Governor Tom Wolf’s statewide mask mandate for schools.
The challengers of the mandate, including Pennsylvania Senate President pro tempore Jake Corman (R-Centre) and State Representative Jesse Topper (R-Bedford), argued that the decision of masking should be left to local school boards or parents, not the state government.
Read More
A shortage of Santas this holiday season prompted a Pennsylvania state representative to propose a tax credit for those who suit up, as well as the businesses that employ Old Saint Nick.
Rep. Jonathan Fritz, R-Susquehanna, posted a memoranda on the House website this week seeking co-sponsors for legislation he said is aimed at the revelation recently highlighted in media reports.
Read More
The Pennsylvania House State Government Committee has unveiled a preliminary map for new congressional districts, selected from one of 19 submitted by the public.
Rep. Seth Grove, R-York, chair of the State Government Committee, said a map submitted by Lehigh County resident Amanda Holt was selected because it was crafted without political influence, met constitutional standards and limited splits of townships and municipalities, among other factors.
Read More
Two Pennsylvania counties use the same lenient bail-calculation system that is used in Milwaukee County, WI and that is now being scrutinized in the wake of the Nov. 21 Waukesha Christmas-parade massacre.
Suspect Darrell E. Brooks Jr. faces homicide charges for killing six people at the holiday celebration with his car. Earlier that month, prosecutors handling a case of physical abuse and vehicular assault regarding Brooks asked a court to set bail bond for the defendant at a mere $1,000, to which the court agreed.
Read More
A Pennsylvania government watchdog group is highlighting how the incestuous relationship between local government entities and lobbyists is costing taxpayers millions of dollars. The Commonwealth Foundation also is supporting legislation designed to put an end to the practice.
The Commonwealth Foundation issued a report Monday that reveals Pennsylvania taxpayers paid at least $42 million in lobbying expenses between 2007 and 2020 to advocate for more government spending, though the actual cost is likely substantially more.
The foundation sent public information requests to 1,518 government entities to collect data on taxpayer-funded lobbying, which involves boroughs, cities, counties, school districts and state agencies that hire lobbyists or pay dues to associations to lobby other areas of government.
Read More
Gov. Tom Wolf has vetoed legislation that would have allowed residents to carry a concealed firearm without a license, claiming the measure would exacerbate gun violence in the commonwealth.
“This legislation removes the requirement that an individual obtain a license, and with it, the ability of law enforcement to conduct a background investigation,” Wolf said. “Removal of the licensing background investigation will hinder the ability of law enforcement to prevent individuals who should not be able to carry a firearm concealed from doing so.
Read More
Republican Al Schmidt, who is the only GOP member with a seat on Philadelphia’s election board, announced on Tuesday that he will resign from his position.
Schmidt, who has received harsh criticism from former President Donald Trump, is accepting a position as president and CEO of The Committee of Seventy.
The commissioner will step down in the middle of his third term.
Read More
The former Republican congressman running for governor of Pennsylvania told The Star News Network drove him to run for governor after watching families and businesses suffer under Gov. Thomas W. Wolf and his pandemic policies.
“Actually, watching how Governor Wolf mismanaged the pandemic,” said Louis J. “Lou” Barletta, who left his House seat to challenge Democratic Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr., in 2018. Wolf is term-limited and cannot run for a third term.
Read More
Legislation authored by Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Pat Browne, R-Lehigh, to bring transparency and efficiency to Pennsylvania’s campaign finance reporting system was approved by the state Senate.
Under Senate Bill 140, all candidates for office and political action committees will be required to file with the secretary of the commonwealth by utilizing the Pennsylvania Department of State’s online filing system to provide campaign finance reports.
Read More
A lawsuit alleging multiple violations of federal and state election laws as well as Pennsylvania’s “Right to Know” statute was filed in Pennsylvania Wednesday night, according to sources familiar with the litigation.
In early 2021, a whistleblower working for the Delaware County Bureau of Elections began inquiring why it was apparent to her that multiple documents pertaining to the Nov. 3, 2020 elections were being destroyed in the southeastern Pennsylvania county, the sources said. The name of the whistleblower has not yet been made public.
Read More
Pennsylvania Republicans want to create a new Bureau of Election Audits to conduct result-confirming audits of every election, as well as performance audits of elections operations, systems and processes at least every five years.
House Speaker Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster, laid out the legislation during a hearing in the General Assembly’s State Government Committee this week, arguing the current system of allowing county election offices to audit themselves is not sufficient.
Local election officials “must be held to a standard of accountability,” Cutler said.
Read More
The Editorial Board of the University of Pittsburgh student paper recently published an article calling to get rid of the gifted program in surrounding schools.
“The gifted program segregates students — sometimes based on IQ tests conducted at an early age. The program is deeply flawed, encourages students to unnecessarily compete against each other academically and often ends up leaving behind students of color. It is time for Pittsburgh to follow New York’s example and eliminate the gifted program from local school districts,” claims the piece.
Read More
Legislative Republicans excoriated Gov. Tom Wolf for “playing favorites” after a report concluded his administration helped only Democratic counties secure $21 million in private grants ahead of the 2020 election.
Broad + Liberty reported the Pennsylvania Department of State and various left-wing groups worked together to funnel private grant funding to Democratic-leaning counties without offering the same assistance to Republican-leaning counties.
“This latest report indicates the administration and the Department of State played favorites when they connected certain counties to large sums of grant funding while ignoring other counties,” Rep. Seth Grove, R-York, said. “Not only did this create unequal access to voters, but it also essentially disenfranchised voters in counties that did not receive equal funding.”
Read More
A Pennsylvania Satanic organization was able to convince a school district to alter its dress code to remove a ban on clothes that were “satanic in nature,” local news station WPVI-TV reported.
Joseph Rose, the founder of Satanic Delco, told WPVI-TV that the children of Satanists enrolled within the Rose Tree Media School District, which is near Philadelphia, made him aware of the dress code.
Read More
A new report reveals that multiple private grants tied to the Big Tech giant Facebook overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates and counties in the state of Pennsylvania in 2020, as reported by the New York Post.
The report by the publication Broad + Liberty (BL) reveals that one such grant, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), spent more money on turning out registered voters in Democrat-majority counties than Republican-majority counties. In addition to the increased push for voter turnout, these counties were given a jumpstart on this grant and information on how to apply by state officials.
Read More
Two Pennsylvania state senators said recently they want to hold social media companies accountable for religious or political censorship.
Sens. Doug Mastriano, R-Gettysburg, and Scott Hutchinson, R-Oil City, said their Senate Bill 604, also called the Social Media Accountability Act, would create a private right of action to allow residents to sue social media companies like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter for banning or censoring their account due to sharing religious or political beliefs on the platform.
Read More
Pennsylvania lawmakers plan to introduce a measure banning private organizations from funding election administration in the Keystone State.
The bill’s sponsors, state Sens. Lisa Baker (R-Dallas) and Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-Jacobus) have cited the role that the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) played in election operations in Philadelphia and other Democratic-leaning counties in 2020. CTCL has been funded significantly by Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.
Read More