Posts on Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Furloughed federal employees may not receive back pay when the government shutdown ends. The Trump administration has argued that federal employees are not automatically entitled to back pay, maintaining that Congress must approve any such payments in legislation ending the shutdown. President Donald Trump on Tuesday addressed the possibility of some federal workers not getting paid when the shutdown ends.[snip] The president of the American Federation of Government Employees condemned the possibility that some workers could be denied back pay.

Senate Republicans confirmed a staggering tranche of President Donald Trump’s nominees on Tuesday as the government shutdown continues. Lawmakers voted along party lines to confirm the batch of 107 of Trump’s nominees, a move that whittled down the remaining pending nominees on the Senate’s calendar to double digits. It also came as the upper chamber was deadlocked in the midst of a government shutdown, during which floor votes have largely been dedicated to trying to reopen the government. The slate of confirmed nominees included many of Trump’s top allies and former candidates that he hand-picked

The Virginia Fraternal Order of Police is demanding that embattled Democratic attorney general hopeful Jay Jones exit the race “immediately” in light of the recently surfaced text messages showing him fantasizing about the former state House speaker getting shot in the head. Jones’ disturbing text messages in 2022 had surfaced late last week in a bombshell story, but the AG hopeful has remained in the race and local Democrats have stood by him. “This conduct has no place in our society or democracy, especially from an elected official who is running to be the top prosecutor in Virginia,” the Old Dominion State’s FOP wrote in a letter to Jones on Monday.

Joe Biden’s presidency was a multi-trillion dollar criminal conspiracy that shred every “norm,” violated nearly every right, and abused any power it could to punish its political opponents. The Trump administration’s prosecutions of Team Biden’s abuses of power may be the healthiest development for the rule of law since the end of Jim Crow. This is a story Republicans should tell with pride — and must tell incessantly, or the next Democrat administration will make Biden’s four years look like Camelot under Arthur.

Students at Auburn University taking "Crime and Justice in America" are learning queer criminology, which includes lessons on radical gender ideology that contradict Alabama's definition of sex, critical race theory —the notion that the Black Lives Matter movement has been a positive influence on the nation and other progressive theories on race and racism. Of the course material reviewed, 100% were progressive with ideological talking points.

Attorney General Pam Bondi got into a heated exchange with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), accusing him of “lying” about his military record when asked about the lobbying activities of her former firm, Ballard Partners. The back-and-forth took place during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing with Bondi on Tuesday.(snip)That prompted an indignant response from Bondi, who immediately pivoted to accusing Blumenthal of lying about his military record. “Sen. Blumenthal, I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service. You lied, you admitted you lied to be elected a U.S. senator,” she said, speaking over Blumenthal.

In Donald Trump’s first term, we had comediennes holding up his bloodied, effigial head for photoshoots. Before his second term, we had one man who actually made the once-and-future president’s head bloody with a bullet, and one who certainly hoped to try. Charlie Kirk, arguably the most prominent conservative activist since William F. Buckley, has been assassinated. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh almost was, allegedly by a man who wanted to kill several more conservative justices, as well. Progressives now believe in record numbers that violence is an acceptable means to achieve a political end. New York City is poised to elect a mayor who believes the phrase “globalize the intifada”

Democrat Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones appears to have violated the community service terms for his 2022 reckless driving charge, according to a statement the office that prosecuted the case provided to the Daily Caller. Jones was arrested in New Kent County for driving 46 miles per hour over the speed limit in 2022. He avoided jail time through a “deferred deposition,” which allowed him to pay a fine and complete community service hours. New Kent Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Randy Del Rossi told the Caller that Virginia defines community service as “unpaid service or labor performed through any non-political, charitable non-profit,” confirming prior reporting

On a lovely Sunday afternoon, I traveled to see for myself what was going on in the streets of Portland at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building that has been under siege by Antifa and its comrades-in-arms for five months now. I actually had an unprecedented experience there. Shocking, really.The entire phalanx of elected officials in Portland announced mere days ago that there was "only" one block of protester activity. They were downplaying the violence that had taken place there. Like robots, they announced to their citizens that visuals from the ICE facility were years old or unrepresentative of the current situation. What was the truth?

As RedState’s Susie Moore reported Monday, the FBI revealed bombshell information that former Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team spied on nearly a dozen GOP senators as part of the "Arctic Frost" investigation into January 6th and the 2020 election. According to documents released by Director Kash Patel, Smith and his gang allegedly tracked the phone calls of GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.

Hundreds of pro-Palestine students chanted “from the river to the sea” – an antisemitic slogan calling for the destruction of Israel – during protests on the second anniversary of Hamas’s October 7th attacks. The Mail has more. Scores of people demonstrated outside Sheffield University’s students’ union where they chanted: “From river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The song, which has been adopted by Hamas and is used in the terror group’s official charter, is deemed antisemitic and a direct call for the state of Israel to be destroyed. The Palestinian flag-waving students also accused Israel of a “holocaust” and shouted: “Your uni is covered in Palestinian blood.”

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Attorney General Pam Bondi went head-to-head with Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL), exposing, once again, his refusal to release the Epstein flight logs that could implicate some of the world’s most powerful elites. Bondi, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, wasted no time calling out Durbin’s obstruction and hypocrisy, and Blackburn backed her up. Durbin accused Bondi of misleading the public by claiming she had access to the Epstein client files. But Bondi fired back, clarifying her statement.

On Monday, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) said that the Trump administration was normalizing the presence of the military in cities, allowing them to use these forces to confiscate ballot boxes and recount votes to alter unfavorable results of the 2026 midterm elections. Pritzker said, “The broader goal, I believe, is the militarization of major American cities before the 2026 elections. Let me be clear about what’s going on on the streets of Chicago. They have dressed ICE and CBP in fatigues, put them in military gear, including with automatic weapons, and had them marching up

Twenty years ago, when Dan Rather was pushed out from CBS News following a controversial 2004 report on former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, it was a massive scandal. While many remember it for being predicated upon shaky documents, it was also incredibly prophetic about the future media landscape: One that’s rapidly consumed by corporate interests, political pressure and the erosion of editorial independence. After a 24-year tenure in the anchor chair of the “CBS Evening News,” Rather did not depart quietly. “They sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain, and in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News,”

As RedState’s Susie Moore reported Monday, the FBI revealed bombshell information that former Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team spied on nearly a dozen GOP senators as part of the "Arctic Frost" investigation into January 6th and the 2020 election. According to documents released by Director Kash Patel, Smith and his gang allegedly tracked the phone calls of GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.

Virginia Democrats have taken up the task of defending attorney general candidate Jay Jones after newly surfaced text messages show Jones fantasizing about murdering Republicans and their children. A group of Democrat committees rushed to Jones’ defense, insisting, “Let those without sin cast the first stone” — as if calling for the murder of an opponent and his children is a common human mistake. In a newly released 2022 exchange with Republican House Delegate Carrie Coyner, Jones said it would be a “good thing” if his former legislative colleague’s children died.

Virginia’s Democrat candidates for governor and lieutenant governor, Abigail Spanberger and Ghazala Hashmi, are refusing to withdraw their support for Democrat Jay Jones’ attorney general bid after the latter’s comments fantasizing about shooting a Republican lawmaker became public. The revelation comes after the Friday release of a bombshell National Review report disclosing 2022 text messages Jones sent to a GOP state legislator. As The Federalist’s Breccan Thies summarized, the Democrat now running to serve as Virginia’s chief law enforcement officer mused “about assassinating then-state House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican, and ‘wished’ death upon Gilbert’s children.”

state court ruling late last week ordering the Wisconsin Elections Commission to deal with its dirty voter rolls could have national implications in the election-integrity battle to ensure only U.S. citizens vote in U.S. elections. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Maxwell issued writ of mandamus requiring the state’s election regulator check Wisconsin’s voter registration list for noncitizens. The judge enjoined the Elections Commission and local elections offices from accepting voter registrations without first verifying the citizenship status of the applicant.

A far-left University of Chicago professor has been arrested and charged with violent felonies following riots at an ICE facility in the city, law enforcement has said. Eman Abdelhadi, an associate professor in the university’s Department of Comparative Human Development, was arrested Friday and charged with two counts of aggravated battery to a government employee, a Class 3 felony, and two counts of resisting/obstruction peace, a Class A misdemeanor, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office told Fox News. Radical sociologist Abdelhadi, who previously cursed out her employer while speaking at a “Socialism 2025” conference, is due in court again on Tuesday.

A Dallas-based auto lender built on giving car loans to illegals has just gone belly up, and it’s dragging Wall Street down with it. Tricolor Holdings was once hailed by the US Treasury as a “community development” success story. Now, they’ve just filed for bankruptcy as fraud allegations and a full-blown federal investigation overtake them. The company, which sold overpriced used cars to illegals and wrapped the scheme in a feel-good “social lending” label, is leaving major US banks like JPMorgan, Barclays, and Fifth Third staring at massive losses.

President Donald Trump loves a Sharpie pen, and now he has all the more reason to love the company that makes them. The president signed the flurry of executive orders he issued the day he returned to office with a Sharpie. He's used them for years, finding them more reliable than fancier pens. Now we know they have another merit, too: They're almost entirely made in America. Only the felt tip of a Sharpie comes from abroad -- it's made in Japan, according to the Wall Street Journal's Natasha Khan, who published an eye-opening article on the penmaker last week. What makes Newell Brands, the corporation behind the Sharpie, so newsworthy

Jesse Jackson Jr. will reportedly announce a run to reclaim his old congressional seat in Illinois after vacating it more than a decade ago following his conviction on fraud charges. “We must fight them at every level to restore decency, fairness, and equity back into the federal government,” reads a line from the Jesse Jackson Jr. for Congress webpage. Jackson, 60, the son of prominent political activist and minister Jesse Jackson, was sentenced to 30 months in prison “for conspiring to defraud his reelection campaigns of about $750,000 in funds that were used to pay for personal items and expenses, including high-end appliances and electronics, and then filing misleading reports

This is exactly as expected. Larry Ellison now controls TikTok while his son David Ellison now controls Paramount/Skydance which is CBS. To solidify the objective of TikTok, new algorithms will be implemented, while to solidify the objective of CBS, Bari Weiss is hired as Editor-in-Chief of news.(snip)]The Trump administration assisted both the purchase of TikTok by Larry Ellison, and the acquisition of Paramount by David Ellison. CBS settled with President Trump for $16 million. Paramount then purchases/acquires Bari Weiss online site The Free Press and moves Weiss to editor of CBS news, while President Trump triggers a tariff against Hollywood production movies not made

Democrats in 2025 are looking to their forebears in 1861 and Governor Wallace in 1963, standing in the schoolhouse door, defying federal officials trying to enforce federal law. (X) They are even resorting to the same excuses they did when they were defending slavery and segregation: state sovereignty and states' rights. (X) At least they are acting consistently with a brand they established long ago, although I have to note that in many of the intervening years, they have been very inconsistent about applying this principle. Their attitude is more "states' rights for me, but not for thee." (X) There is a serious flaw in the "state's rights" argument,

At the specific request of then-Vice President Joe Biden, the CIA buried an embarrassing intelligence report detailing the poor view the Ukrainian government took of his diplomatic efforts and the business dealings of his own family in that country. Biden had traveled to Kyiv in December 2015, ostensibly to meet with leaders of that fledgling democracy and to deliver a warning against “the cancer of corruption.” And during an address to the Ukrainian parliament, he did condemn the “pervasive poison of cronyism, corruption, and kleptocracy.” But behind the scenes, Ukrainian officials expressed “bewilderment and disappointment” that the vice president had crossed the Atlantic “almost exclusively to deliver a generic speech.”

Former Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel to do his share of the Biden administration’s dirty work in the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago documents cases. The appointment document is posted online on Smith’s page in the Department of Justice online archives here. Thanks to the relentless digging of Senator Chuck Grassley, yesterday it was revealed that the FBI spied on eight GOP senators during its sweeping anti-Trump probe related to the January 6 Capitol riot. Brooke Singman broke the story for Fox News Digital. NR’s James Lynch provides useful background here. The Republican senators identified in the September 2023 FBI document

Day by day, year by year, what once was unthinkable has now become celebrated, and even protected by law. Meanwhile, what was once virtuous or admired is seen as hateful and backwards. The older you are, the more you see it. In the recent past, America and Europe were grounded in a Christian ethos, one that influenced everything in society. Today, a kind of egalitarian, nihilistic ethos—in which individuals create their own beliefs and shape their lives and actions around them—is taking over. If you don’t accept or tolerate those behaviors, no matter how deranged …

Democrats will never tire of calling the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a “giveaway” to the rich. But by their own definition, this bill was a huge giveaway to blue states and blue cities. That’s the finding from a Heritage Foundation report released last week. The study, which used Heritage’s own individual income tax model, looked not only at how much the bill saved taxpayers by preventing President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts from expiring (an average of $1,904 per taxpayer), but the impact of new tax cuts, including the expansion of the state and local tax deduction. What it found

Trinity Washington University will hold a campus-wide "remembrance" event Tuesday for Assata Shakur, the domestic terrorist who murdered a New Jersey state trooper and later escaped federal prison. The private school in Washington, D.C., with around 1,900 students, is hosting a "full-day" celebration of the "life, work, and enduring legacy of Assata Shakur." Faculty members and students will conduct a "community reading" of Shakur’s autobiography, a "critical discussion" of her life, and a "space for collective reflection and cultural appreciation." The school is Nancy Pelosi's alma mater, and she recently donated $1.5 million in Apple stock to establish a political center in her name.

The Trump administration's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the nail in the coffin of one-size-fits-all COVID-19 vaccine recommendations Monday, updating its children and adult vaccination schedules to encourage physicians, nurses and pharmacists to discuss harms and benefits from vaccination specific to each patient before they get jabbed. Parents may get an incomplete picture from healthcare providers who don't look too closely at federally funded research that promotes indiscriminate COVID jabs for kids, though. A research consortium buried a startling finding in its peer-reviewed study on biologically elusive "long COVID" and reinfection in patients under 21, published in a prestigious U.K. journal:

There's a saying that goes, "If you want to make a conservative mad, lie to him. If you want to make a leftist mad, tell him the truth." Truer words were never spoken. The Left has abandoned reason for rage, choosing violence over debate or even discussion. Democrats are not only unwilling to civilly engage conservatives -- they're increasingly unable to. They're resorting to threats, fantasies of murder, violence, and even support for such extremism. The pattern is clear, it's damning and it's time to call it out and demand accountability. Matt Walsh laid out how the Left expressed their violent streak over the last three days. He recounts

The FBI secretly obtained the phone records of nine Republican members of Congress, including eight sitting senators, under the Biden administration as part of its “Arctic Frost” investigation of 2020 election meddling, a bombshell document revealed. Specific reasons for the FBI’s espionage of the sitting lawmakers are not clear. The document revealing the spy effort was recently turned over to lawmakers and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released it to the public on Monday. “Based on the evidence to-date, Arctic Frost and related weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate,” Grassley said in a statement.

French President Emmanuel Macron is running out of wiggle room. The abrupt resignation of his prime minister Monday — Macron’s fourth in more than a year of almost ceaseless political upheaval — puts the French leader in a bind. None of the options now look appealing for Macron, from his perspective at least. And for France, the road ahead promises more of the political uncertainty that is eroding investor confidence in the European Union’s second-largest economy and is frustrating efforts to rein in France’s damaging state deficit and debts. Domestic turmoil also risks diverting Macron’s focus from pressing international issues — wars in Gaza and Ukraine, security threats from Russia,

China is actively preparing for war against the United States. The signs are obvious and ominous. During the Biden regime, we saw the first signs of it. The Chinese began a campaign of "elite capture" in the Western Pacific, quietly buying legislators until they controlled the parliaments of at least eight nations and then negotiating defense agreements, that, in the case of the Solomon Islands, gives China the right to deploy troops there to put down civil unrest; see China Seeks to Buy Eight Pacific Island Nations While Joe Biden and His State Department Are Comatose – RedState. Part of this was undoubtedly due to Joe being afraid to upset Xi

We live in ugly times — made uglier, and ever more violent, by the institutional left. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller didn’t mince words this weekend: “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” he declared on X. “It is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle . . . terror networks.” Progressives like Stephen King shrieked “extremist!” in response, but example after example backs Miller’s point. In Chicago on Saturday, a mob of protesters surrounded ICE agents on a routine patrol

A majority of registered voters believe that Republicans will win the shutdown fight, a survey from Harvard-Harris found. The survey asked respondents, “Who do you think will win the government shutdown — the Democrats or the Republicans?” Across the board, 62 percent said Republicans will win the shutdown fight, while just 38 percent expressed confidence that Democrats will emerge victorious. Republicans are overwhelmingly confident that they will win — 92 percent — and most independents, 62 percent, also believe Republicans will emerge as the victors. However, 70 percent of Democrats believe they will win the shutdown battle