A bill to require the Chinese company Bytedance to divest its stake in TikTok within 165 days or face a ban on the popular smartphone application in the U.S. passed on the House floor in a bipartisan vote on Wednesday.
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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be an “incredible successor” to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky in a post on X.
McConnell announced in a Wednesday floor speech he would step down as the leader of Senate Republicans in November, but would serve out his term in the Senate, which ends in January 2027. Kennedy, a longtime environmental advocate, suggested McConnell’s fellow senator from Kentucky, as the replacement.
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The U.S. Senate passed yet another bill to provide billions in aid to Ukraine and Israel, despite efforts by conservative and anti-interventionist Republicans to block the measure.
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Legislation offered by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the “Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2024,” would conduct an audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for the first time since the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010 required an audit of the central bank’s purchases of mortgage-backed securities.
This time around, the GAO would look at the Fed’s entire balance sheet, including the recently enacted Bank Term Funding Program — now $141 billion according to the central bank’s latest H.4.1. release — that has been lending banks money in exchange for U.S. Treasuries after the spike in interest rates caused there to be a reported $620 billion of unreported losses including regional banks that experienced failures in the interest rate crunch.
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The best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection, recent studies suggest.
A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal’s Archives of Disease in Childhood, found “no association” with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and “critical” or “serious” risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.
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Long before key components of the intelligence community acknowledged they believed COVID-19 came from a lab leak, Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall had drawn a bull’s-eye around the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Marshall, a doctor turned politician, argued early and often that the virus’ emergence and genetic characteristics did not seem like those of a naturally evolving animal-to-human virus. But senators like him and Kentucky Republican Rand Paul were marginalized and even demeaned early on by detractors ranging from Dr. Anthony Fauci to TV comedian Stephen Colbert.
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At least a dozen states are considering implementing or already have free student meal programs to continue the federal government’s COVID-19 giveaways, while some activists are demanding for more things to be made free.
Congress allowed a pandemic-era free student meal waiver to expire on Sept. 30, returning to the pre-COVID posture where only students at some schools or those whose families met specific income requirements were given free or reduced-price meals.
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United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hit the airwaves to connect the recent assault on Paul Pelosi with “fascism” and “white nationalism.” She insists that both are now ubiquitous. And both prompt increasing politically motivated violence. (Ocasio-Cortez remains oblivious to the greatest sustained political violence in our recent history; the 120 days of Black Lives Matter and Antifa-fueled rioting, arson, looting, and mayhem of summer and fall 2020—often cheered on or defended by public officials and social media.)
The deplorable violent attack on Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has been described as the logical reification of increasing bitter political discourse. Shrill accusations spread even as full details of the attack are still not known. But the general picture of the assailant is one of an unhinged conspiracy freak of all flavors. He seems to have been a lunatic, drug-crazed white supremacist and anti-Semite, a former hemp jeweler, and nudist, who was either homeless or was living in a cluttered hippie-like commune in Berkeley plastered with pride and BLM flags.
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Former President Donald Trump won the CPAC 2022 straw poll for the 2024 presidential primary with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) coming in second.
The poll, conducted from Thursday to Sunday with 2,564 attendees, shows that 59% of people said they would vote for Trump in the 2024 primary. DeSantis has less than half the support of Trump, 28% as the second-highest-ranking primary candidate.
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“History will figure that out on its own.” That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab—and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.
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The red state/blue state dichotomy is not simple.
Nowhere is that more apparent than Tennessee where—despite having one of the most conservative electorates in the country—the leadership has been passive at best in responding to the wishes of their supporters during these days of great crisis.
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Republican Sen. Rand Paul said Wednesday that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley “could have started an accidental nuclear war” if he indeed made unauthorized phone calls to China in the final weeks of the Trump presidency to assure Beijing that the U.S. would not attack the country.
The assertion that Milley made two such calls is reportedly included in an upcoming book titled “Peril” by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
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