U.S. Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) laid it all on the line Tuesday afternoon in supporting a motion to vacate to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-23) from the post he has tenuously held for less than a year.
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Republicans have had a crash course since 2016 in the ways the power of the intelligence community can be abused. To take a few examples, four consecutive judges operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act approved wiretaps of a Trump adviser, Carter Page, relying without question on the partisan fictions of the Steele dossier. Michael Flynn was ousted after he was the target of an unprecedented leak of another FISA intercept. And 51 former intelligence officers intervened in the 2020 election to dismiss without evidence the Hunter Biden laptop contents as likely Russian disinformation.
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As House Republicans have settled back into Washington, D.C. this week fresh off a month-long hiatus, all eyes will turn to whether the party in control of the lower chamber can muster any resistance against the current regime running roughshod over the nation and blatantly interfering with the upcoming presidential election.
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The federal archive agency that helped spark former President Donald Trump’s first federal indictment has come under fire from Republicans after reporting showed the agency has embraced far-left diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Republicans blasted the National Archives and Records Administration after The Center Square reported that the agency’s latest 2022 DEI plan pledges to double down on equity training for employees.
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An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.
The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.
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America is now in the deepest, most dangerous constitutional crisis since the hostility in the 1850s that led to secession and civil war.
This constitutional crisis is so widespread and threatening that House Republicans must dramatically widen their investigations. Hunter Biden and President Joe Biden are only a tiny part of a spiderweb of corruption, dishonesty, criminal behavior, and state weaponization. The rule of law is steadily being replaced by a frightening new rule of power.
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Google has long been accused of suppressing conservative speech, but a new study shows the internet search engine giant is playing favorites with Democrats in the 2024 presidential race.
By typing in just one query, “Presidential campaign websites,” Google returned only Democratic Party candidates — some of whom are not even running in 2024, according to Media Research Center, the media watchdog and parent of conservative news site NewsBusters, which is “committed to exposing and combating liberal media bias.”
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The fish are plentiful today. There’s Hunter Biden and his various lies: about the sources of his prodigious income, his payment (that is, non-payment) of taxes, drugs, guns, child support, laptops and prostitutes. There’s Joe Biden and his lies, the sources of his prodigious income, and—the latest—his use of pseudonymous email accounts when writing to Hunter and Hunter’s business partners to discuss the weather—or was it the whether and how to siphon 20 million of the crispest into virtually untraceable bank accounts?
There’s the seemingly endless series of indictments directed at Donald Trump. The latest new there, if I am up to date, is that he told people to watch election returns on One America News Network. Clearly part of a RICO conspiracy. Someone whose math is sharper than mine calculated that President Trump is potentially on the hook for 450 years in the slammer for . . . well, his torts are mostly in the eye of the beholder.
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Abortion-on-demand proponents insist most Americans believe in the unfettered right to abortion.
A new poll finds a majority of Americans believe there is a limit.
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A recent Fareed Zakaria Washington Post op-ed nicely summarized our new reality:
There is a debate within the Republican Party. Some senior figures, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and former vice president Mike Pence, are vigorously making the case for an active and engaged America. But the party’s base seems to be with the isolationists, as can be seen in the tilting stances of the weather-vane speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). From Donald Trump to his copycat, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and the party’s most powerful media ideologist, Tucker Carlson, conservatives are increasingly contemptuous of America’s support for Ukraine and its strong alliance with Europe. Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) told the New York Times that although some Republicans remain staunchly interventionist, “That’s not where the voters are.”
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Recent voter registration numbers from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office show an increasing number of voters in Maricopa County registering as Republican rather than Democrat. Between last fall’s election and April, Republican voter registration in the county increased by 9,905 to 851,047. Democratic voter registration increased by only 2,791, less than a third as much. Republicans maintained their registration advantage at 34.39 percent, while Democrats dipped below 30 percent to 29.69 percent.
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Former President Donald Trump triumphs in yet another new poll.
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After reading my commentary about my self-inflicted ordeal of listening to NPR for a month, a friend noted this station’s “reports” bear no resemblance to “objective reality.” Can so many Americans, asked my correspondent, believe that the U.S. is full of oppressed transgendered who must take up arms to protect themselves against “anti-trans rhetoric?” Do NPR listeners really think American blacks are suffering from “systemic white racism,” and that only increased government control can protect them from being shot on the streets by white racists?
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Montana Republican legislators are the latest GOP state officials to be targeted, receiving threatening letters containing white powder after Tennessee and Kansas Republicans received similar suspicious mail in recent days, officials say.
Meanwhile, four days after the Cordell Hull Building legislative offices in Nashville were locked down upon Republican leaders received threatening mail, an FBI official tells The Tennessee Star that the incident remains under investigation and that the agency has no comment at this time.
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The annual Faith and Freedom forum – considered the country’s largest public policy gathering of Christian conservative activists – concluded Saturday evening with a keynote speech from front-running GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump in which he spoke passionately to a key part of a coalition he must rebuild to win the GOP nomination.
But Trump, like the other top-tier 2024 GOP presidential candidates who spoke during the three-day event in Washington, D.C., faces a long road to Election Day in which the nominee will also have to win over independents, the undecideds and other voters for Republicans to retake the White House.
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The elite set of individuals that sit atop our federal agencies have completely weaponized our entire government apparatus. It is no longer a one-off “mistake,” but rather the intentional creation of a two-tier system of justice that has gone unchecked. The resulting impact is a death knell for American faith in all three branches of government.
Allow me to preface with one important factor: This is not an indictment of the men and women who are our “boots on the ground.” They remember every day why they signed up to serve. They investigate real crimes, protect the public from acts of terror, and root out rampant corruption. These men and women across the country serving in all agencies remain heroes and are equally as frustrated with the leadership at the top of our federal government.
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America is in a state of decline, if not chaos, following disappointing results in three straight elections and too many years of organized turmoil in our streets, schools, government institutions, and elsewhere. Reversing this requires fundamental changes in conservatives’ political and philanthropic strategies.
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Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida fired back at Republican critics of his efforts to rein in big businesses, calling them “corporatists.”
DeSantis signed legislation May 2 that prohibited state agencies and local governments from considering Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors when issuing bonds, barred banks from considering “social credit” when making loan decisions and prohibited discrimination on the basis of political, social or religious ideology. Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and former President Donald Trump have criticized DeSantis, a potential 2024 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, over the feud with Disney that started after DeSantis signed parental rights legislation in March 2022 over the company’s opposition.
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Republicans in Congress are moving to rein in President Joe Biden’s executive order putting federal agencies in the business of getting out the vote. Their proposed legislation would defund any federally backed voter mobilization drives and prohibit the government from entering election-related agreements with private, nonprofit organizations to mobilize voters.
Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., who co-chairs the House Election Integrity Caucus, plans to introduce a bill Tuesday called the Promoting Free and Fair Elections Act.
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Former California gubernatorial candidate and radio host Larry Elder announced on Thursday he would seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Elder made the announcement on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
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Republicans have the opportunity to take back the Kentucky governor’s mansion from Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear – who narrowly won in 2019 – in November, and numerous GOP contenders are itching for the nomination.
Beshear is running for his second term in 2023 in a state with a Republican supermajority in the legislature. Though 12 Republicans are running in the May 16 GOP primary, there are three clear frontrunners whose campaigns will largely hinge on issues such as education and crime while also targeting Beshear’s record on COVID-19, they told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee Jantzen scheduled oral arguments for May 16 on whether Abe Hamadeh should get a new trial.
Jantzen dismissed his complaint challenging his loss to Kris Mayes for Arizona Attorney General in December. Jantzen’s ruling came shortly after Hamadeh filed an additional pleading to bolster his request, which accused then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of withholding evidence from him and cited new arguments due to the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling in Kari Lake’s election contest.
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Maricopa County officials tapped former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Ruth McGregor to investigate the printing problems in the 2022 election, and on Monday, the county released her report blaming the thickness of the ballot paper. Jennifer Wright, who was the Election Integrity Unit civil attorney for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office during the election and who performed her own investigation of Maricopa County’s election problems going back to the 2020 presidential election, told The Arizona Sun Times the report was “meaningless” since it did not include an analysis of the printer logs.
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New Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs is piling up vetoes of bills sent to her from the Republican-dominated Arizona Legislature. By Thursday, she had vetoed 37 bills this session, more than any other governor in Arizona’s history except Democrat Janet Napolitano. The progressive Phoenix New Times dubbed her the “Veto Queen.”
The Kari Lake War Room Twitter account had a strong reaction to all of the vetoes. “.@katiehobbs is Arizona’s very own Ron Burgundy,” the account tweeted. “She’s wedded to the teleprompter and she’ll VETO anything that’s put in front of her. Even when it’s language that she herself (supposedly) wrote. She’s not even reading these bills. Hobbs isn’t a Governor. She’s a clown.”
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One of the most startling gaps in the literature on the function of political parties is the lack of discussion about the most important reason they exist: to protect their voters from the abuses of government and the totalitarian temptations of the opposition party.
The formation of political parties grew from a need to organize people and get them to the polls around a set of ideas that could be put into practical action. As they originally functioned, there was a reciprocal relationship between citizens and parties. Yet, on a practical and self-interested level, the party had appeal for voters because of the benefits it bestowed on those who supported it.
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Former Republican candidate for Arizona Secretary of State Mark Finchem, who is contesting his loss last fall to Democrat Adrian Fontes, filed a Notice of Supplemental Authority and Evidence in Support of Contestant’s Motion for Reconsideration last week. A Maricopa County judge dismissed his lawsuit in December. Finchem included 10 exhibits consisting of mostly declarations from observers, election workers, and experts, including one who believes the election printer settings in Maricopa County were deliberately modified to create misreads of the ballots.
Exhibit K was a declaration from Bob Hughes, who has 50 years in the printing industry and 16 years printing ballots for the Maricopa County Elections Department. Last month, Hughes and a team examined the Logic & Accuracy tests that were performed immediately prior to the election, the ballots used for testing, the certification reports for each voting center, and the tabulator reports printed from the testing. He concluded, “An intentional change was made to the printers affecting the DAY OF Election ballots.”
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The marked shifts of Black and Hispanic voters away from the Democratic Party is something Americans for Limited Government Foundation (ALGF) has covered in depth, but new data shows Asian Americans are also abandoning the left.
The New York Times recently published analysis of voter turnout in the 2022 gubernatorial election in New York and showed New York City neighborhoods with a heavy Asian population shifted toward the GOP by 23 points compared to 2018. The Times analysis showed, it was the “largest electoral shift in Asian neighborhoods in the period from 2006 to 2022.”
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by Mary Lou Masters Republicans and Democrats are entering an arms race to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in upcoming 2024 campaigns to complete simple, daily tasks previously accomplished by droves of interns, according to The New York Times. Both parties are racing to develop AI technology to carry out…
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Former President Donald Trump on Monday asserted that Republicans must embrace ballot harvesting in the states that permit the practice in order to win the next election.
“So for 2024, should Republicans embrace early voting, voting by mail, and embrace the tactics of the Democrats and follow the ballot harvesting laws of their respective states?” Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked in an interview that premiered Monday.
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It’s challenging to say something original about the Ukraine war. It’s been debated now for more than a year, and it’s not over yet. But that’s bad news for those supporting the war. Most Americans’ interest in foreign policy matters is limited, and many expect quicker favorable results than are probably ever possible in war. A year of war in a far-off land – another war in another far-off land – is not something Americans are likely to support for long, especially if it’s led by a stumble-bum president who picks incompetents for cabinet secretaries, campaigned for a mentally challenged stroke victim, and may be compromised by his son’s business dealings.
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Teacher pay in Arizona has become a hot-button issue, with both Democrats and Republicans proposing increases but not supporting the alternative. Meanwhile, teacher’s unions are demanding a spending hike worth more than both parties’ plans.
Rep. Matt Gress, R-Phoenix, has introduced H.B. 2800 – seeking to increase the salary of teachers statewide by $10,000 by 2025. The bill would cost taxpayers $1.1 billion over two years but it makes Arizona’s average teacher pay the fourth-highest in the nation.
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The Arizona State House passed Senate Bill (SB) 1063 by State Sen. Sonny Borrelli (R-Lake Havasu), which aims to eliminate the grocery tax across the state, sending it off to the governor’s desk for a final decision.
“At a time when thousands of Arizonans are already struggling to make ends meet, government shouldn’t be contributing to higher costs for basic necessities like food,” said State Rep. Matt Gress (R-Phoenix) following his vote in the bill’s favor. “With Arizonans facing one of the highest inflation rates in the nation, I’ll never stop fighting to lower costs for families, seniors, and our most hard-hit fellow citizens.”
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President Joe Biden’s approval rating plummets towards the lowest point of his presidency on Thursday, according to a new poll.
The president’s approval sank to 38% this month, nearly reaching the lowest point he has received in office where he received a 36% rating in July 2022, an AP/NORC poll found. Biden‘s March approval has dropped from a 45% rating since February and 41% in January.
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On its face, there wasn’t anything unusual about the email that landed last week in the press office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Background interview request from the Washington Post,” read the subject line that summarized the industry-standard process whereby information is shared with reporters under pre-negotiated terms, usually anonymity. When sanctioned by a politician or their team, it is called “going on background” to shape and broaden a story with additional facts and contexts but without direct attribution. When not sanctioned, well, then that is just called leaking.
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You’re forgiven if you didn’t hear the news – or didn’t pay attention to it – but former Maryland governor Larry Hogan announced last week that he won’t run against Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
This didn’t mean Hogan accepted the inevitable and intends to throw-in with the wisdom of his party’s voters and simply do what most loyal politicians do when the grassroots selects in a primary someone he or she doesn’t necessarily agree with. No, Hogan said he hopes like heck that someone other than Trump or DeSantis will earn the GOP nod – and henceforth release him from taking drastic measures. But should Republican primary participants opt for a Trump or DeSantis candidacy… Larry may run instead on a third-party ticket.
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Following Tuesday’s news that the political party, the No Labels Party (NLP), qualified for Arizona’s 2024 ballot, the party confirmed to The Arizona Sun Times that it would only be using its presence on the ballot for a potential presidential candidate.
“Right now, we do not have any plans to use the ballot lines for races other than the presidency,” said a spokesperson for the NLP.
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Registered Republicans in Arizona increased their lead over Democrats from about three percent to over four percent over the past year. This is the biggest gap since 2018.
Similarly, in Maricopa County, Republicans increased their lead from about four percent more than Democrats to almost 4.5 percent more, according to the latest numbers from the Arizona Secretary of State.
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Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, like his entire presidency, was an astonishingly cynical performance. There were plenty of hollow boasts about things Biden hasn’t actually achieved, but he went further than the usual partisan spin. He conveyed, to a primetime audience, a Potemkin village version of his administration’s goals. While he did plug gun control and an anti-police bill, there were few mentions of identity or race. He mostly talked about economics. In fact, he presented himself as a champion of national revitalization.
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Saturday morning on WarRoom: Battleground, Stephen K. Bannon welcomed The Star News Network’s National Political Editor, Matt Kittle the program to discuss the Iowa caucus, Kari Lake’s reception, and the newly launched Iowa Star digital newspaper.
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Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake made her second stop in her two-day trip to Iowa with a message to conservatives in the kick-off caucus state: Back candidates who put America and election integrity first.
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Saturday morning on WarRoom: Battleground, Stephen K. Bannon welcomed The Star News Network’s National Political Editor, Matt Kittle the program to discuss the Iowa caucus, Kari Lake’s reception, and the newly launched Iowa Star digital newspaper.
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Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn’t alone Tuesday night in openly arguing President Biden in his State of the Union address misstated House Republicans’ position on the future of Medicare and Social Security. “I think, because he lied, it was a frustration,” Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie told Just the News after Biden’s roughly 72-minute address.
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President Joe Biden, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, called for unity, pointing to the bipartisan successes of the past Congress.
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OpenAI, the company behind the headline-grabbing artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, has an automated content moderation system designed to flag hateful speech, but the software treats speech differently depending on which demographic groups are insulted, according to a study conducted by research scientist David Rozado.
The content moderation system used in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products is designed to detect and block hate, threats, self-harm and sexual comments about minors, according to Rozado. The researcher fed various prompts to ChatGPT involving negative adjectives ascribed to various demographic groups based on race, gender, religion and various other markers and found that the software favors some demographic groups over others.
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If the November midterms proved one thing, it’s that Republicans have a less-than-breezy path to a majority in Washington, D.C.
Most of the attention on the 2024 election will center around the race for president. But don’t forget to watch the down ballot congressional races because the control of Congress really matters.
Both chambers are narrowly divided and control for both is up for grabs.
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The Maricopa County Republican Committee voted on January 14 at their annual meeting to censure Maricopa County Stephen Richer and the four Republican members of the Maricopa County Supervisors; Bill Gates, Thomas Galvin, Clint Hickman and Jack Sellers. The vote for the censure resolution was 1,460 for, 138 against, and 36 abstaining.
Maricopa County Member-at-Large Brian Ference told The Arizona Sun Times, “The PCs in Maricopa have spoken, overwhelmingly censuring Richer and the MCBOS, the key line being ‘Ceases immediately any and all recognition and support of the above individuals being censured and encourages all registered Republicans to expel them permanently from office.’”
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Kevin McCarthy’s speakership vote should have sent a clear message to GOP establishmentarians everywhere: conservatives have real power to leverage against Establishment-era Republicans, and they aren’t afraid to use it.
Even before the battle began on the floor of Congress, polling from Trafalgar Group and Convention of States revealed that Republican voters were dissatisfied with Republican Party congressional leadership. Capitalizing on the frustration of their constituents, a small band of Congressmen rebelled against the status quo and successfully managed to break up business as usual in our broken federal government.
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For the first time in more than three decades, a higher percentage of Americans are identifying as Republicans or saying that they are GOP-leaning than those who are saying they are Democrats or leaning toward the Democratic Party, according to a new poll.
While 44% of Americans say they are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, 45% of Americans said they lean toward the GOP, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday.
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With Democrats taking over the top leadership positions in Arizona, progressives are boldly moving onto their next steps in the state. Save Democracy Arizona (SDA) is looking into getting a ballot initiative that would open up primary elections to everyone and possibly implement ranked choice voting. The new group is composed of Democrats and moderate Republicans who seek to stop conservative Republicans from getting elected to office.
Arizona has a semi-closed primary system, meaning Republicans and Democrats automatically receive a ballot in the primary, but independents and other political parties must request one of those. With an open primary, any voter can vote with any party ballot. Save Democracy executive board member Sarah Brown Smallhouse explained why the group wants the change. “Because so few people (request a ballot), we almost have closed primaries,” she said. In recent years, independents have outnumbered both Republicans and Democrats in much of the state.
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“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That seems to be Kevin McCarthy’s favorite mantra. Friday night, on the 15th vote for speaker of the House, he finally got his moist little palm around Nancy Pelosi’s still-warm gavel. Welcome to the new Republican-ish speaker of the House!
The contest was brutal, occasionally absurd, and the occasion of hilarity and consternation among the punditocracy on both the Right and the Left. The Left clucked their tongues about the “chaos” on view on the other side of the aisle. Some among the GOP agreed and wondered why “their side” could not govern as effectively as the Democrats. Would Nancy Pelosi have put up with this level of dissension among the Democratic rank and file? Others said, no, no, the 20 freedom caucus members (and others) holding up the inevitable were just giving the world a reality show, live-action look at how “democracy” (if not quite Our Democracy™) works and should work.
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