A Republican congresswoman has been charged with bringing a gun to an airport outside Washington D.C.
U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana is facing weapons violation charges after carrying her handgun into Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
“Victoria Spartz, 45, of Noblesville, IN, was charged on Friday, June 28 with a weapons violation at Dulles Airport,” a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said Tuesday.
The gun was reportedly unloaded and Spartz claims to have packed it into her luggage by accident.
“Last Friday, Rep. Spartz accidentally carried an empty handgun in her suitcase with no magazine or bullets, which she did not realize was in the pocket of her suitcase, while going through security at Dulles airport,” a statement from Spartz’s office said.
It continued, “Rep. Spartz was issued a citation and proceeded on her international flight to the [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly] meeting in Europe.”
Spartz is a Ukrainian-born immigrant who won her seat in Indiana’s 5th Congressional District in 2021.
She announced last year that she would not be seeking reelection and would not be seeking any public office at the end of her term.
She walked that back in February and re-entered the race, successfully defending against multiple GOP primary challengers.
She won the GOP primary for her district in May, securing her spot in the general election this November.
After a rough debate performance from President Biden, some Democrats have raised the possibility of him stepping aside for a new nominee, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s name being mentioned as a possibility — but how would he handle the border crisis?
Should Biden resign immediately, Vice President Kamala Harris would be the automatic successor. However, if Biden were to say he did not wish to serve a second term, the Democratic National Convention could elect a new 2024 candidate.
Newsom has been mentioned repeatedly as a potential presidential nominee, although he did not throw his hat in the ring for either the 2020 or the 2024 race. However, his name has been raised in conversations in the wake of last week’s presidential debate, where Biden was widely seen to have fared poorly.
If he were to become the candidate to replace Biden, he could inherit a thorny situation at the southern border. While numbers have decreased in the last months, numbers are still high compared to the pre-Biden years, after which the U.S. has seen records repeatedly broken in terms of encounters.
Newsom would have some experience on this issue given he is a governor of a border state. He has also been vocal on the subject in a number of ways, and as a close Biden ally, would likely represent a continuation of the approach taken by the Biden administration.
In April, he came out in full support of Biden’s efforts to get more funding and a comprehensive immigration reform bill from Congress.
“Let’s be clear: President Biden is doing all he can to fund border security and humanitarian efforts while Republicans in Congress are choosing border chaos for political gain,” he said.
Newsom supported a Biden-backed bipartisan Senate package this year which would provide more funding to border communities and cities receiving migrants, while putting some limits on entries at the border. However, he joined Biden in accusing Republicans of undermining reform efforts.
His office has also previously pointed to California’s moves to provide more than $1.3 billion for humanitarian aid and related services to local communities since 2019. Awards to non-profits have allowed for over 500,000 migrants to be sheltered since 2021.
While he shares that funding-first focus, there are also signs that the governor could take more radical steps than President Biden.
This year, California became the first state to offer health insurance to all illegal immigrants, regardless of age, through Medi-Cal — California’s Medicaid program. The ambitious move, which built on previous moves allowing young adults and the elderly to access insurance, was predicted to aid more than 700,000 illegal immigrants in the state.
Newsom told reporters that it was based on a principle.
“In California, we believe everyone deserves access to quality, affordable health care coverage – regardless of income or immigration status,” he said.
However, he later took some heat from activists when he moved to stop paying for caregivers to the homes of disabled people living in the country illegally. The move was targeted to save about $94 million as the state faced a deficit.
Some outlets also noted that Newsom neither criticized nor praised a Biden executive order limiting asylum claims when encounters reach a certain level.
Instead, he focused on criticizing Republicans, claiming that the “only thing they’re interested in is playing politics.”
Newsom has also taken an aggressive stance towards Florida’s efforts to send migrants to his state, suggesting he may continue the Biden administration’s strategy of suing red states that have taken immigration matters into their own hands.
Last year, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent flights to California, Newsom suggested that he may file kidnapping charges against his Republican counterpart.
President Biden will on Wednesday posthumously award the Medal of Honor to two Union soldiers who pirated a locomotive deep in Confederate territory during the Civil War and then drove it 87 miles north, destroying railroad tracks and telegraph lines along the way.
Private Philip G. Shadrach and Private George D. Wilson will receive the honor for their gallantry and intrepidity while participating in a covert military operation 200 miles behind Confederate lines on April 12, 1862, which became known as the Great Locomotive Chase.
In what was one of the earliest special operations in U.S. Army history, Union soldiers dressed as civilians infiltrated the Confederacy and hijacked the General Locomotive in Georgia before proceeding north.
The goal of the operation was to destroy the Western and Atlantic Railroad between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee, and help bring about the end of the Civil War. They were pursued by Confederate forces on foot, and then later on by a succession of locomotives, including The Texas.
Although the raiders caused a lot of damage, they were unable to burn bridges or damage Tunnel Hill and the train stopped 18 miles from Chattanooga after the wood they had hoped to burn was soaked by rain resulting in the locomotive running out of fuel.
The plan for the Great Locomotive Chase was hatched by James J. Andrews – a Kentucky-born civilian spy and scout. Andrews and 23 other men, including Shadrach and Wilson, later became known as the Andrews’ Raiders and infiltrated the South in small groups, rendezvousing north of Atlanta at Marietta, Georgia.
Six of the Union participants became the Army’s first recipients of the newly created Medal of Honor. It is unknown why Private Shadrach and Private Wilson were not originally recommended for the award. The Medal of Honor is awarded to members of the Armed Forces who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, and it has been awarded to more than 3,500 people.
According to the White House, both were deserving in 1863 and will be posthumously awarded later today. The first Medal of Honor ever bestowed went to Pvt. Jacob Parrott, who participated in the locomotive hijacking and was beaten while imprisoned by the Confederacy.
Shadrach, a native Pennsylvanian and Union Army Soldier, and Wilson, a soldier from Belmont County, Ohio, were eventually captured by Confederates and executed by hanging. Biden is recognizing their courage 162 years later with the country’s highest military decoration.
Shadrach, who was left orphaned at an early age, was 21 years old when he volunteered for the dangerous mission. He left home in 1861 and enlisted in the Ohio Infantry’s 2nd Regiment.
Wilson was originally a tradesman who supported his family as a journeyman shoemaker. He enlisted in an Ohio-based volunteer infantry in 1861.
Both The General and The Texas survived the war and have been preserved in museums. The General is located at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, in Kennesaw, Georgia, while The Texas is at the Atlanta History Center.
The Walt Disney Corp. made a 1956 movie about the hijacking titled “The Great Locomotive Chase,” starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter. The 1926 silent film “The General,” starring Buster Keaton, was also based on the historic event.
A federal judge in Kansas has blocked the Department of Education’sTitle IX rewrite in four more states, continuing a pattern of successive losses for the Biden administration on the controversial regulatory overhaul.
U.S. District Court Judge John W. Broomes issued an injunction on Tuesday to the Biden administration’s new Title IX rules, which change the definition of sex to include claimed gender identities, bringing the total number of states with a similar block to 14. The ruling blocked the new rules in Kansas, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming, representing the fifth federal court to rule against the Biden administration.
Critics of the rewritten Title IX rules say the Education Department is attempting to strip women and girls of private spaces, such as restrooms and locker rooms, by allowing biological males to use the same facilities.
“Given … the evidence before the court, it is not hard to imagine that, under the Final Rule, an industrious older teenage boy may simply claim to identify as a female to gain access to the girls’ showers, dressing rooms, or locker rooms so that he can observe his female peers disrobe and shower,” Broomes wrote.
The judge also made note of the legislative history of Title IX, which he said clearly referred to “biological sex,” not claimed gender identities or sexual orientations.
“One of the principal purposes of the statute was to root out discrimination against women in education,” he stated. “The legislative history shows that Congress was concerned about the unequal treatment between men and women for admissions opportunities, scholarships, and sports.”
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, argued the case before the court.
“If President Biden had his way, a 16-year-old female high school student on an overnight field trip could be forced to share a hotel room with a male who identifies as a girl, or the district would risk losing federal funding,” Kobach said, reacting to the court’s ruling. “We’re pleased the court ruled to rein in the administration’s vast overreach. It’s unconscionable, it’s dangerous for girls and women, and it’s against federal law.”
In addition to the four states involved in the lawsuit against the Education Department, other organizations involved in the case include Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation, and the Alliance Defending Freedom.
“The Biden administration’s radical redefinition of sex won’t just rewire our educational system,” ADF legal counsel Rachel Rouleau said in a statement. “It means girls will be forced to undress in locker rooms and share hotel rooms with boys on overnight school trips, teachers and students will have to refrain from speaking truthfully about biological sex, and girls will lose their right to fair competition in sports.”
In addition to sex-specific facilities being at issue, Broomes ruled the new Title IX rules violate the First Amendment, as they would force students and teachers to use “preferred pronouns” and alternative names to refer to some students with gender dysphoria. Broomes ruled it would undermine the speech of those who “want to articulate that sex is immutable and binary” and “refer to individuals with biologically accurate pronouns.”
Other states with a ruling that blocks the new Title IX rules include Louisiana, Mississippi, Idaho, Montana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Former Biden White House communications director Kate Bedingfield argued Democrats should not be pressing the panic button on President Joe Biden’s reelection bid and instead stick with him as the presumptive nominee.
Discussions about replacing Biden with another Democratic candidate have grown exponentially since the first presidential debate last month, during which the president performed underwhelmingly against former President Donald Trump. Bedingfield, however, encouraged Democrats to “level-set” their concerns about Biden, claiming that post-debate polling was not as drastically bad as some predicted.
“I would not argue the status quo is great for him either,” Bedingfield said on CNNThis Morning. “I mean, you see him consistently within 1 or 2 points in swing states that he needs to win. So I‘m not arguing that the landscape looks terrific for him right now, but it is also true that the bottom has not fallen out since the debate. So I think that should be the point of discussion.”
Bedingfield added that swapping Biden out with someone else would not be “a magic fix” to the Democratic Party’s chances at winning the 2024 elections, as doing so would be a very difficult process. She also argued that if this were to happen, the replacement candidate would be placed “in the firing line.”
Going forward, she encouraged the Biden campaign to “push the narrative back to Trump,” and to be more aggressive in this push to remind voters about the likely rematch between the two. Bedingfield argued that Biden has so far not made a noticeable effort with this, as he has only appeared at one rally post-debate.
Bedingfield was one of several CNN anchors who criticized Biden’s performance right after the network’s debate, arguing that the president failed to show voters that he has the stamina to serve in the White House for another four years.
Biden is speaking with multiple Democratic governors throughout this week as the party continues to grapple with the possibility of replacing him. Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and Wes Moore (D-MD), among other governors, have been suggested as replacements.
The Biden family has so far dismissed the idea of the president dropping out, with first lady Jill Biden stating that they will “continue to fight” in this election cycle and that her husband will “always do what’s best for the country.”
Framed on a wall in my office is a copy of my first opinion column, published by the Dallas Morning News on Oct. 11, 1987. Until then, I had been a wire service reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., and, before that, a sportswriter in Boston, but had never written opinion.
When given the chance by the Morning News, I jumped on a subject that had piqued my curiosity: A senator for Delaware running for president had brazenly stolen a speech by a Welsh Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom and, when caught, paid the price by humiliatingly dropping out of the 1988 presidential race.
The Welsh politician was Neil Kinnock, and 27-year-old me simply used the brouhaha over the purloined speech as an excuse to praise him for daring to tell Labourites that “socialism had become old hat,” as I put it. Democrats should be stealing that speech, I wrote.
The senator for Delaware was President Joe Biden. Over the last 37 years since my column was published, I have watched him lie and lie again, sometimes about small things, other times about larger ones, but always with impunity.
The media are just as much to blame for Biden’s habitual dishonesty because instead of covering him, they’ve covered for him.
Even on those rare occasions when the legacy media have acknowledged that Biden is a fabulist, they have made excuses for him. The New York Times, for example,wrote protectively of him in 2022, saying that “President Biden has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity.”
It’s not that he’s lying, you see. Biden merely adorns reality.
Sometimes Biden’s fabrications were just so oddball that they made you wonder if he was all there —even before he started showing signs of senility. An example of this is Biden’s insistence that his “Uncle Bosie” was eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The Defense Department was forced to put out a statement that Ambrose J. Finnegan was lost when his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean.
Biden has also lied about graduating in the top half of his law school class, having his house “burn down with my wife in it,” growing up in the Puerto Rican community, and once being the driver of “an 18-wheeler” to name only a handful of falsehoods that reveal a bizarre distance from reality.
He also habitually lies about former President Donald Trump leaving behind a 9% inflation rate. Inflation was 1.4% in January 2021.
Other times, however, Biden’s mendacity reveals a level of pathos that makes you want to look away. A case in point is when he told the mothers of the 13 soldiers killed in Afghanistan because of his ill-conceived pullout in 2021 that he could feel their pain because his son, Beau Biden, had also died in the war.
It was not the first time. Joe Biden has a history of saying that Beau Biden “lost his life in Iraq.” Beau Biden died tragically at the age of 46 in 2015 of cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
“We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin,” Cheryl Rex said the president told her. Rex later complained at a forum, “My heart started beating faster, and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer and they were able to be by his side.”
The context was Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence at the time that he was not culpable for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. He was callously using his family’s tragedy to buy sympathy. As the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn put it, “Mr. Biden is not a gold star father and should stop playing one on TV.”
This long record of deceitfulness was on display in the president’s televised trainwreck of a debate with Trump on June 27, when he again lied about many things, including not having any military deaths during his term in office.
“I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world,” Joe Biden said at one point, ignoring the 13 body bags from the attack during his Afghanistan withdrawal, again painfully reminding the loved ones of those who died.
Joe Biden also claimed that Trump left him a 15% unemployment rate, that he had been endorsed by the U.S. Border Patrol, and that Trump had told people to inject themselves with bleach during the pandemic. All these things were lies.
Incongruously, post-debate Joe Biden is making truth-telling his badge against his display of precipitous cognitive degeneration. No, he doesn’t debate as well as he used to, he angrily spat out at a rally on Friday, but “I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!”
And the media are there for him, regurgitating the new White House talking points. Joe Biden may be mentally incapacitated, but he’s a truth-teller, unlike Trump, they claim.
“The ex-president got away with a torrent of lies,” wrote a CNN senior reporter. That phrase is garnering mentions on Google.
All of this to say: My first column has aged well.
Mike Gonzalez serves as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is listed for identification purposes only. No endorsement of a candidate by the organization is implied.
The move reflects the campaign’s concerns over abortion in November, an issue that tends to favor Democrats in popularity on the national stage. Several members of the RNC revealed the blocking of South Carolina convention delegates LaDonna Ryggs and Chad Connelly for the platform committee to Politico.
Delegates will gather in Milwaukee to decide on the RNC’s platform beginning Sunday. Ryggs and Connelly pledged not to “water down” the party’s positions on abortion, marriage, and Israel, while the delegates favored by the Trump campaign pledged to support his positions.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Trump and the RNC for confirmation and comment.
The fear among anti-abortion hard-liners is that Trump will push through a change in the platform to his publicly favored leave-it-to-the-states position, in contrast to the current nationwide ban after 20 weeks. Ryggs and Connelly believe that a softening on abortion could cost the former president the election.
“I would strongly urge the leadership of the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign to proceed with great caution on the platform and avoid doing anything that would discourage or in any way deflate the enthusiasm of pro-life and evangelical voters,” Faith & Freedom Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed said. “Right now, sitting here today, they are prepared to crawl across broken glass, to do everything in their power to see President Trump reelected. I don’t want to see anything happen that would change that current dynamic.”
Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign and the RNC, maintained that the specific language regarding abortion is still undecided.
After Democrats fought off a much-anticipated “Red Wave” in 2022, largely using the energy from abortion-rights activists angered over the repeal of Roe v. Wade, Trump has sought to establish a centrist stance on abortion.
This is the second day in a row that Jean-Pierre will hold a press briefing. During Tuesday’s briefing, she was questioned by press corps members on whether President Joe Biden suffered from dementia and whether he underwent a neurological exam after his disastrous debate performance.
After testing nasal swabs from children who visited the emergency room during the height of the COVID pandemic, researchers discovered that children’s innate immune response to other viruses and bacteria helped to minimize the severity of COVID infection.
While it takes time for the body to develop antibodies to target specific pathogens, the body’s first line of defense against infection, known as the innate immune response, takes over.
Study authors concluded that children had less severe effects of COVID due to their already active innate immune response that was protecting them from other viruses and bacteria. Because children’s innate immune response is more active than adults’, they likely had stronger responses to COVID infections.
“Activation of generalized antiviral defenses in children by other infections may have helped to fight off the initial stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection, leading to less severe outcomes in children compared with adults,” said a press release from the journal’s publisher, Rockefeller University Press.
The team of researchers, led by associate professor at Yale School of Medicine Ellen Foxman, tested over 600 nasal swabs from children for a host of viruses and bacteria, not just for COVID.
Roughly half of the samples from children under age 5 had respiratory infections other than COVID.
Samples were also collected from 1-year-olds in their routine well-child checkup and two-week follow-ups. Comparisons showed that more than half tested positive for a respiratory virus during one of their two visits, meaning that they either had gotten or recovered from an infection within that short time period.
Although the innate immune response in children is not continuously active, the findings suggest that it is more often activated because children are more easily infected with relatively harmless respiratory bugs. This may be because children do not have the benefit of having developed antibodies from prior exposure.
This worked to their advantage when exposed to COVID, however, because even adults did not have antibody protection against the novel virus.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, approximately 234,000 children under age 18 were hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID from fall 2020 to spring 2024. This peaked to over 6,500 hospital admissions in one week during the omicron surge in January 2022.
By spring 2024, there were as low as 310 hospital admissions of children with confirmed cases of COVID.
Mortgage rates once again crept over 7% as mortgage loan application volume fell, according to the latest report from the Mortgage Bankers Association.
The MBA said that last week mortgage rates rose from 6.93% to 7.03%. Additionally, the Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, fell 2.6% on a seasonally adjusted basis from the previous week, another sign that the housing market is struggling.
“Mortgage rates moved higher last week, crossing the 7% mark, even as the latest inflation data has kept market expectations alive for a rate cut from the Fed later this year,” said Mike Fratantoni, MBA’s senior vice president and chief economist. “Purchase applications decreased the final full week of June, even as both new and existing inventories have increased over the past few months.”
The latest data is yet another reminder of the struggles that the housing market has been facing.
The higher mortgage rates have eaten into housing affordability and have also depressed home purchases. The higher mortgage rates are a direct result of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in response to too-high inflation.
New home sales fell 11.3% from April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 619,000, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau. The number of new home sales is 16.5% lower than it was in May of last year.
The median sales price for a new home was $417,400 in May.
During the pandemic, a flood of homebuyers was able to lock in ultra-low sub-3% mortgages given that the Fed had loosened its monetary policy to a historic degree.
There has been a unique dynamic at play in the housing market because of the higher mortgage rates. Many people are holding on to their existing homes and waiting to sell until mortgage rates are lower, creating a shortage of existing homes for sale.
Existing home sales in May slowed 0.7% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.11 million, the National Association of Realtors reported recently. The pace of existing home sales is down nearly 3% from the year before.
Additionally, the median price for an existing home lurched to $419,300, which marks the highest median price ever recorded and the eleventh month in a row of year-over-year price gains.
