Please don’t take my newsletter for granted. I rely on paid subscriptions for the vast majority of my revenue. Without enough paid subscribers, I can’t continue to justify spending 30-plus hours a week on this newsletter and independent journalism. Click the button below to subscriber you can quit at anytime. Thank-you!
CHICAGO, IL - Illinois schools would be required to share curriculum materials with parents under a pair of bills in Springfield. State Rep. Amy Grant’s House Bill 3806 and state Sen. Andrew Chesney’s Senate Bill 2080 require school materials be made available to parents.
A pair of new bills would give Illinois parents more insight into what’s taught in their schools, including access to teaching materials that can help them support their children’s educations.
State Rep. Amy Grant, R-Wheaton, introduced House Bill 3806 and state Sen. Andrew Chesney, R-Freeport, filed Senate Bill 2080. Both bills represent the Curriculum Transparency Act, requiring public and charter schools to make educational materials accessible to parents within 10 days of classroom use. Click here to read more.
During the final months of the Biden administration, the National Institutes of Health awarded $28 million to a mysterious venture-backed company called Vaccine Company Inc., a biomedical firm founded in 2022 whose chief financial officer happens to be one of former president Joe Biden’s top COVID advisers.
To Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), the September 2024 grant from the NIH’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health doesn’t pass the smell test. Vaccine Company has left virtually no public footprint showing what it has done with the taxpayer funds, which the Biden administration doled out to a seemingly random post office box in Bethesda, Maryland. Ernst urged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a letter late Tuesday to investigate why the Biden administration awarded millions of taxpayer dollars to the mysterious firm and to consider clawing back any portion of the reward that remains unspent.
A Washington Free Beacon review of the taxpayer-funded company, which is supposed to use its $28 million HHS grant to develop vaccines to combat West Nile, dengue, and Zika viruses, indicates it has gone to great lengths to keep itself out of the public eye. The generically named firm has no website, and none of its top officers, including its chief financial officer, former Biden COVID adviser Sonya Bernstein, have disclosed their association to the company on their public résumés. Click here to read more.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, used the inaugural episode of his new podcast to break from progressives by speaking out against allowing transgender women and girls to compete in female sports.
Newsom made his declaration in an extended conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old who built the influential Turning Point USA organization that helped President Donald Trump increase his support last fall among the youngest generation of voters.
Kirk, like Trump, has been a vocal opponent of allowing transgender women and girls to participate.
"I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair," Newsom told Kirk on "This is Gavin Newsom."
"I am not wrestling with the fairness issue," continued Newsom, who played varsity baseball as a college student. "I totally agree with you. … I revere sports. So, the issue of fairness is completely legit." Click here to read more.
WASHINGTON D.C. - The Department of Justice has dropped a Biden-era lawsuit that had attempted to compel Idaho to allow abortions in violation of the state’s Defense of Life Act. The move comes after a yearslong battle the pro-life state has had with the leadership of the Department of Justice under then-President Joe Biden.
The Biden administration had argued in court that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) required pro-life states such as Idaho to allow abortions if they were required to stabilize a woman in a medical condition. Idaho’s Defense of Life Act already permits an abortion, according to the Idaho Attorney General’s Office, “on the subjective, good-faith medical judgment of a doctor who believes the life of the mother is threatened.”
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador has contended that EMTALA and the Defense of Life Act were not in conflict.
In January, St. Luke’s, a Boise, Idaho, hospital network, also sued Idaho in expectation that the Trump administration would drop the Justice Department’s lawsuit. Click here to read more.
By- Sharryl Attkisson - In watching the developments and controversies over downsizing the federal workforce, I’m reminded of a series of shocking but eyeopening stories I reported at CBS News in 2003.
That was the year I learned there are more than a few federal employees being paid six figure salaries to not work.
Three people I profiled who were getting big money to do nothing—happened to work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The first person was NIH grants manager Edward McSweegan. He had so little to do at work that he became a successful mystery writer on-the-job and joined a nearby gym to “break up the day.”
He told me he wasn’t the only one.
Indeed, after I aired his story, I began connecting with numerous other federal workers who likewise told me they were being paid six figures to do no work!
As it happens, it is so difficult to fire federal employees that when they get on the wrong side of a vindictive supervisor, the supervisor may simply isolate the person and give him nothing meaningful to do. Click here to read more.
