Monthly Archives: August 2022

Out-Of-State Dems Dump Millions Into Kansas Election Because Abortion Is On The Ballot – The Federalist

Posted: August 2, 2022 at 3:46 pm

Kansans head to the polls Tuesday to vote on the proposed Value Them Both constitutional amendment that seeks to overturn the Kansas Supreme Courts decision in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that declared that the state constitution guarantees a fundamental right to abortion. Many Kansans may not realize, however, that the votes they cast on Tuesday may have been heavily influenced by out-of-state abortion apologists who contributed a whopping 71 percent of the $6.54 million spent by the lead group campaigning against the amendment.

The proposed Value Them Both amendment passed the Kansas House and Senate in January 2021 by the two-thirds threshold required under the state constitution to place the proposal on the ballot for the citizens of Kansas to decide. The amendment would overturn Hodes holding that a state constitutional right to abortion exists by adding to the Kansas Bill of Rights a section defining the propriety of abortion regulation, stating:

Because Kansans value both women and children, the constitution of the state of Kansas does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion. To the extent permitted by the constitution of the United States, the people, through their elected state representatives and state senators, may pass laws regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.

At the time of the Hodes decision, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remained the law of the land under the federal Constitution. Pro-life Kansans nonetheless responded to the opinion by pushing for the Value Them Both amendment for two reasons.

First, the Kansas Supreme Courts Hodes opinion created a so-called right to abortion even broader than the then-controlling right established in Roe and tweaked in Casey a state constitutional right so expansive it would guarantee a right to taxpayer-funded abortions.

Second, pro-life Kansans wanted to ensure that if the Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey, its legislature would regain the right to regulate abortions. While opposition to the amendment by Kansass supposedly pro-life Democrat lawmakers initially delayed the state legislatures approval of the Value Them Both amendment, early last year, the proponents of the amendment garnered the votes necessary to put the proposal on the August primary ballot, which occurs tomorrow.

But then came Dobbs, in which the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey and held there is no federal constitutional right to abortion. The Dobbs decision makes the outcome of Tuesdays vote crucial to the question of whether Kansans will now be able to decide on the appropriate regulation of abortion through their elected officials or whether it will be a Midwest abortion haven.

While politicians and pundits see the outcome of Tuesdays vote on the Value Them Both amendment as registering the pulse of the public on abortion policy, the disparity in out-of-state money flooding the airwaves with the deceptive talking points of abortion apologists, and the reality of the actual issue on the ballot, render the outcome less prophetic then billed.

For the period of January 1, 2022, through July 18, 2022, campaign finance reports summarize the source of donations to the two competing campaigns. The Value Them Both Campaign, led by Kansans for Life, Kansas Family Voice, and Kansas Catholic Conference, supports passages of the amendment, while a group calling itself Kansans for Constitutional Freedom heads the anti-amendment campaign.

The anti-amendment campaign group raised $6.54 million during the approximate half-year reporting period, of which 71 percent of the donations came from out of state and only 29 percent came from in-state sources. In contrast, the Value Them Both Campaign received donations of $4.69 million during the same time period, with less than 1 percent of the donations originating from out-of-state and more than 99 percent of the donors residing in Kansas.

One would think Kansas politicians would resent such out-of-state influence, but rather than condemn the outsiders interference in a matter of state law, Kansas Democrat Sen. Cindy Holscher attacked Catholic churches and dioceses in Kansas for donating money to support the Value Them Both Campaign. In a Friday op-ed for the Kansas City Star, titled Kansas Constitutional Amendment on Abortion is a Bailout for the Catholic Church, Holscher argued the church doesnt value them both. No, she wrote, the support for the amendment is the church valuing its bottom line.

Beyond Holschers dizzying logic and nonsensical thesis that Kansas Catholic churches want to ban abortion in their state so they wont lose more pro-abortion parishioners yes, that truly is her argument the Kansas senator completely ignores the donations made by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund ($850,000) and Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes ($492,000) to the Kansans for Constitutional Freedom campaign. Now there you have a money motive.

Even more appalling is the false framing of the amendment Holscher posed in her op-ed, inaccurately claiming that the Legislature currently has the power to pose limits on abortion. To date, there are dozens of restrictions. What the Legislature cant do is ban the procedure, as the Kansas Constitution currently guarantees access. Thats what this amendment is about, contrary to the confusing language that appears on the ballot.

It is not the ballots language that is confusing, however, but rather the spin put on the Value Them Both amendment by Holscher and her fellow Kansas Democrats. As the Democrats know full well, a state constitutional guarantee to abortion access means virtually every law passed by the legislature will be declared unconstitutional by the state courts. Waiting period: struck. Parental notification: struck. Informed consent provisions: struck. But taxpayer funding of abortions to ensure access for poor women that will be required. Conversely, the passage of the amendment merely means that the authority to regulate abortions will be returned to the legislative branch, where it rightly belongs.

Many of the political advertisements funded by out-of-state donors repeat the same false claims about the Value Them Both amendment as peddled in Holschers Friday op-ed. And it is not merely the Planned Parenthood types flooding Kansas with money in the hopes of defeating the amendment. An out-of-state billionaire heiress who promotes left-wing causes contributed 15 percent of the total raised by the anti-amendment group, or $1,000,000. A further 23 percent of the donations to the anti-amendment Kansans for Constitutional Freedom campaign came from liberal super-PACS, including groups that the Atlantic and Politico have classified as leftist dark-money networks, such as the 1630 Fund and the North Fund. North Fund operates an umbrella group for various left-of-center advocacy organizations and has spent millions to promote causes that included opposing a 22-week abortion ban.

With such huge influxes of cash from outsiders, those pushing to defeat the Kansas amendment have been able to blanket the airways with distortions about the legal import of the Value Them Both amendment. And according to Danielle Underwood, the director of communications for Kansans for Life, out-of-state, radical activists and politicians in Washington, D.C., are trying to force their extreme pro-abortion agenda on the people of Kansas. These unwelcome intruders include the Biden administration and far-left congressional members like Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren, Underwood told The Federalist, and they do not represent the people of Kansas or our values.

At this critical moment, Underwood added, Kansans can and must fight back against outside interests aggressive tactics by voting yes on the Value Them Both Amendment. It is the only way to safeguard the common-sense abortion limits we already agree on and show the world our state believes in protections for both women and babies.

Kansas voters may not recognize the outside influences in play, however, but if they take the time to actually read the proposed amendment before marking their ballots tomorrow, theyll realize that the no side of the debate has been lying to them for the last year-and-a-half. Or Kansas voters can instead learn the truth the hard way when, once the amendment has been defeated, abortion activists turn to the state courts to start striking the current abortion regulations on the books and obtain taxpayer-funded abortion. Conservative Kansans will then learn what so-called abortion access really means.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the reporting period during which the anti-amendment group raised $6.54 million was approximately a half-year, not one-and-a-half years.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist's senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prizethe law schools highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Google’s Solution To Its Campaign Email Problem Is A Phony Fix – The Federalist

Posted: at 3:46 pm

I have led the fight in the Senate to hold Big Tech platforms such as Google accountable for their manipulation and use of machine learning that unfairly censor communications from political campaigns and rob the electorate of their options. Our latest demands for transparency and fairness apparently spooked Google. But instead of moving to treat all political emails the same and filtering Republican versus Democrat communications as they are now, the tech giant has proposed a pilot program in the form of an Advisory Opinion, currently with the Federal Election Commission.

This proposal would eliminate all spam filter algorithms for participating candidates and organizations. While this proposal may appear to be in the best interest of all political emails, Gmails current deliverability practices have disincentivized Democratic campaigns from joining the program due to the increased chance of unsubscribes. Further, Google has created a loophole in the program allowing them to change the rules whenever its convenient to them, requiring participants to adhere and comply with no exception.

Let me be clear: Googles pilot program is the wrong approach. We should have the expectation that if a voter signs up for a Republican campaigns email, they should receive those emails in their inbox.

I know political bias in Silicon Valley better than most; as someone who was branded a terrorist by an engineer at Google and whose pro-life campaign video was removed by Twitter for being inflammatory, Ive learned when to laugh it off and when to stand my ground. This is a case of the latter.

Email is the norm for how we conduct business, stay in touch with friends and family, learn about sales from our favorite retailers, and receive updates from political campaigns and organizations. Millions of Americans have signed up to receive emails from political candidates through campaign websites, petitions, surveys, or events, signaling their interest in receiving updates and information from the campaign trail.

But this is unfortunately not how its been playing out. Though email communications have been normalized on campaigns for several election cycles and email use continues to grow globally, the disparity between Democratic and Republican email inboxing has reached a breaking point this year. Google, the most dominant email provider, has been a particularly bad actor. Unfairly gatekeeping inboxes and censoring the voices of hundreds of conservative candidates, committees, and causes by sending their emails to spam or, worse, failing to deliver messages. A recent study by North Carolina State University found that nearly 80 percent of emails sent by conservatives ended up in spam folders.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had a banner year in 2020, with the Democratic National Committee flaunting best practices and recommendations by emailing a list of dormant email addresses, and instead of triggering spam filters, reactivating 875,000 supporters. In a Substack post written a month after the 2020 election, the DNC Mobilization Team bragged they sent every single emailable inactive at least two emails and reactivated millions of supporters who accounted for 16% of our online fundraising revenue in the last quarter of the election. These levels of engagement and activity are unheard of.

Its clear that the liberal elites in Silicon Valley are once again placing their thumb on the scale, manipulating communications that could lead to consequential outcomes. When a conservative supporter goes to a Republican website to sign up to receive emails, we should be confident that they will get the emails they signed up to receive. But even after consultation with top email specialists to achieve and execute best practices, Republicans still cannot guarantee that to be the case. This is shameful and wrong.

Its absurd, isnt it, that in 2022, Big Tech elites have made the practice of delivering an email from point A to point B so complicated and polarized?

Conservatives are not asking for the ability to send unsolicited emails in an unchecked manner. We believe in the protections used to defend consumers against malicious attacks, bad actors, and unwanted communications. We are simply asking that Google treat Republican emails the same as those of our Democratic counterparts, and to make transparent the rules used to place emails in inboxes.

When I ran for Senate, I vowed to the people of Tennessee that I would never back down from a fight. I never thought one of those fights would be about something as simple as email, but this just demonstrates how out of control Silicon Valley and the liberal elites are and why this fight is more important than ever. If email is under attack now, whats next?

Marsha Blackburn is a United States senator from Tennessee.

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Blake Masters is splitting the difference between Donald Trump and Peter Thiel – The Verge

Posted: at 3:45 pm

In campaign ads and stump speeches, Blake Masters is playing Trumps greatest hits. He complains about wokeness, talks openly about American decline, and demands that the government finish building the wall on the southern border. But unlike Trump, Masters political ambitions reimagine America in the eyes of Silicon Valley and one of its most powerful and controversial investors.

On the heels of Trumps endorsement, Masters is poised to win Tuesdays primary and become the GOPs next Senate nominee in Arizona. But his mentor Peter Thiel casts a long shadow over his candidacy and raises the stakes to something much larger than a single Senate seat. Over the last decade, Masters has studied under Thiel at Stanford, led Thiels powerful investment firm, and co-authored the pairs New York Times bestseller Zero to One, a contrarian guide for Silicon Valley startup founders that denounces higher education and encourages monopolization.

Now, that strain of tech libertarianism has launched Masters into a political alliance with Donald Trump. Speaking at an Arizona Trump rally late last month, Masters praised the prior administration and cursed the current presidents actions on inflation and border security.

Everythings on fire under Joe Biden, Masters warned. Arizona, make me your nominee so we can beat Mark Kelly, put America first, and finish the work that President Trump got started.

Sen. Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, is running unopposed for the Democratic nomination after flipping late GOP Sen. John McCains (AZ) seat blue in a 2020 special election. Leveraging his background in science, Kelly has called for more drastic action to tackle climate change while defending federal entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which are popular with Arizonas older population.

In contrast, Masters program is relentlessly focused on privatization, putting anything from social security to Arizonas water resources under corporate control. Its an approach closely tied to Thiels own political pessimism and faith in private interests. As Thiel put it in a 2009 essay, [t]he fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

In laying out his platform, Masters seems to be doing his best to take up that mantle, including its lofty language. At his final pre-primary rally, Masters tweeted an image of himself onstage with the brief caption, Subverting existing paradigms.

The Thiel connection also helped Masters land Trumps official endorsement this past June, which has been the greatest single factor in his success. Thiel famously served on Trumps transition team and has long cultivated the former president as an ally. In the wake of the endorsement, Masters jumped ahead in polls, with his lead growing as high as 15 points, according to FiveThirtyEight on Monday. The numbers have given his campaign enough confidence to rename its Tuesday night election party a victory celebration.

While never denying the 2020 results outright, Masters accused Democrats of cheating. Hes already started to cast doubt on the integrity of the midterm elections, suggesting they wouldnt be fair, according to CNN.

Masters has also courted support from the cryptocurrency world, making early moves to accept Bitcoin donations and auctioning off NFTs to support the campaign. In September, he proposed that the US create a strategic reserve of Bitcoin, which he described as Fort Nakamoto the new Fort Knox. In the months since the proposal, Bitcoin has fallen by more than 40 percent.

Masters own financial holdings back up that enthusiasm, showing extensive holdings in a wide range of cryptocurrencies. In October, Masters disclosed Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Tezos, and Litecoin totaling millions of dollars, according to financial ethics filings. He had also invested in Urbit star, a decentralized finance project launched by the controversial neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin.

The current value of Masters crypto assets is unclear. His 2022 financial ethics form was originally due May 17th, but he requested an extension making his new deadline August 15th, just weeks after the primary election.

But while his Silicon Valley ties might seem unusual for a GOP candidate, they havent stopped Masters from being embraced by the conservative movements most prominent kingmakers most recently in a primetime interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday night. The conversation focused on bread-and-butter Republican issues like inflation and demented Democratic spending. The Democrats in charge have failed, Masters said. Theyre destroying this country, and then theyll lie about it.

At the end of their conversation, Carlson wished Masters good luck and offered something just short of an endorsement. We are rooting for you, Blake Masters, he said.

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Blake Masters is splitting the difference between Donald Trump and Peter Thiel - The Verge

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Donald Trump Reportedly Made This Ill-Informed Comment After Pardon Meeting With Kim Kardashian – Yahoo Life

Posted: at 3:45 pm

Jared Kushners upcoming memoir, Breaking History: A White House Memoir,is certainly providing a lot of fascinating insight into Donald Trumps time in the Oval Office. The latest excerpt breaks down Kim Kardashians visit to Washington, D.C. in hopes of securing Alice Johnsons release from prison.

Kim first reached out to the family, via Ivanka Trump, in 2017 to draw attention to Johnsons case. The then-63-year-old woman had been in prison for over two decades serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. Kushner revealed, in an excerpt obtained by People, that the issue was put on his desk to present to Donald Trump. He praised Johnson for the work she had done while behind bars, writing,Shed become an ordained minister, completed multiple vocational certifications, mentored fellow inmates, and maintained a spotless behavioral record.

Opinion | The Patronage System Was Corrupt. It’s Threatening a Comeback. – POLITICO

Posted: at 3:45 pm

But that could all change under new threats emanating from former President Donald Trump and his allies, to the detriment of our democracy and our governments ability to keep us safe from a myriad of challenges facing our country.

Recent reporting has revealed that a group of Trump supporters are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if [he is] re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his America First ideology. And the former president publicly vowed to do just that.

Taking such a radical step would effectively eviscerate the merit-based, apolitical career civil service and return the country to the time when competence was undervalued and when public offices were used to reward members of the victorious political party.

The plan, first delineated in a Trump executive order in the fall of 2020 and rescinded by President Joe Biden two days after taking office, has support from some Republicans in Congress and could be embraced by other potential GOP presidential candidates. It would create a new job classification for career employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making and policy-advocating positions, and would strip these individuals of long-standing civil service protections by allowing politically appointed leaders to fire them at will.

Reviving this proposal could require a wide range of civil servants, including policy analysts, attorneys, managers, scientists and a host of other career employees whose unbiased judgment we rely on for safety and security, to show partisan allegiance or risk their jobs.

Such a policy would have a real chilling effect discouraging federal employees from speaking out while simultaneously eroding public trust in our government. It also would tarnish the historic requirement of a merit-based system where well-qualified federal employees are given charge over our most sensitive capabilities, data and choices, and would undermine the role of civil servants as stewards of the public good.

The current civil service system is remarkable for its ability to provide for the continuity of our government during changes in administration. It prevents huge knowledge gaps by keeping in place civil servants with expertise on terrorism, cybersecurity, international relations, public health and a wide range of other critical issues.

The arbitrary firing of tens of thousands of civil servants by a new administration could not only put the nation at risk, but potentially hamper the governments ability to effectively deliver important services, from veterans benefits and Social Security to farm programs and ensuring military readiness.

Our nations chief executive already faces the huge task of filling more political appointments than any other democracy. These 4,000 appointees include about 1,200 who must undergo the slow and partisan Senate confirmation process, leaving many critical jobs vacant for long periods of time and leadership gaps across the government.

Indeed, we need fewer, not more, political appointees, as well as a host of changes to strengthen the civil service. This includes improved leadership development, better employee recognition, support for innovation, increased accountability for poor performance and more streamlined hiring practices and policies that will bring young people and those with technology skills into the federal workforce.

Politicizing the federal workforce would be a major step backward and undo many of the hard lessons learned from the past.

Congress and the White House should not only act to preempt future efforts to bring a wrecking ball to the professional, merit-based civil service. They should take steps through new legislation to strengthen it, and in the process, protect our democratic system of governance.

In a world in which we face so many fast-moving challenges and risks, we need a highly capable and competent government, not one that returns us to the 19th century.

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Opinion | The Patronage System Was Corrupt. It's Threatening a Comeback. - POLITICO

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What Donald Trump Got Out of His Divorce From Ivana – The Atlantic

Posted: at 3:45 pm

The funeral for the first wife of former President Donald Trump, Ivana, took place on a hot July day at St. Vincent Ferrer Roman Catholic Church on Manhattans Upper East Side, not far from the townhouse where she died at the age of 73. Her golden casket sat next to a large poster board of her 1992 Vanity Fair cover, which read Ivana Be a Star! The story, by Bob Colacello, chronicled the junketing and jet-setting that went along with Ivanas effort to reinvent herself after her 1990 divorce from Donald.

Although, at the time of her death, Ivana had been out of the public eye for years, she had helped make Donald, as the editor who put her on that magazine cover told me.

I do think Ivana was hugely important to Donald Trumps riseshe domesticated the beast socially, said Tina Brown (who left Vanity Fair to become editor of The New Yorker shortly afterward). Before and after her, you never saw Trump at any top gathering or cultural opening. She brought him into circles he had ogled from outside and created a glamour aura.

Ivana may have succeeded in gaining the couple access to more exclusive echelons of Manhattan society, but above all, their parting, not their pairing, was what transformed them into prominent characters in the 1990s new culture of tabloid-gossip-driven celebrity. I was only 12 in 1990, but even a middle schooler could not have been innocent of the Trumps divorce.

Read: What Ivana reveals about Trump family values

Over breakfast, my stepfather and I would take turns reading the New York Post and the Daily News. Then I would walk to school. Every morning, on Lexington Avenue, I would pass a fancy sock store that featured elaborate, animated window displays of the latest episode in the divorce, sometimes with blown-up copies of a front page from one of the tabloids. I remember one day an enormous, moving mechanical check with Ivanas name on it.

Donald gave away a lot in the divorceprecipitated, after all, by his highly publicized affair with Marla Maples. Ivanas divorce lawyer was Michael Kennedy, a crusading attorney (and friend of my parents) known for representing members of the Weather Underground and the United Farm Workers. With his help, Ivana got: $14 million for herself; $650,000 a year in alimony and child support to raise Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric; a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut; and an apartment on the Upper East Side.

But what Donald got from the divorce from Ivana was a realization that making a shameless spectacle of yourself could be boffo. As his biographer, the journalist Tim OBrien, told me: The lesson Trump drew from it was that he could endure a grotesque personal debacle, which he set in motion by his cheating on Ivana, and come out the other side even more an object of interest than he was before.

The headlines that the divorce generated made the gauche Trump brand gold-plated. The spectacle of their marital disintegration was a kind of lurid but victimless crime, involving two people who fed off the media attention while dragging each other through Page Six. The Trumps were just another bloated float in the 80s parade of showy New York money-grubbers, Tina Browns successor as Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter, told me. Their divorcefought more in the pages of the Post and the News than in the courtselevated them to grand-marshal status.

Read: What kind of man is Donald Trump?

All the weaponry he built up in his arsenal was finally used in his media war with his wife, said OBrien. He had the New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams and she had the Daily News gossip columnist Liz Smith, and both of those writers ingested what the Trumps were telling them, and you went to each tabloid to know how to think about them. That divorce became a touchstone for how society thought about celebrity, fame, and marriage in the New York of the 1990s.

The divorce was a gift that kept on giving to headline writers, but perhaps the most famous one of all was the Posts Best Sex Ive Ever Had. The author of the accompanying article, Jill Brooke, later disclosed in an article for The Hollywood Reporter that the splash was born of Donalds frustration that Ivana was getting more and better coverage than he was, so he planted the story himself by calling the Posts then-editor, Jerry Nachman, and telling him, I want a front-page story tomorrow. In her report on the warring couple for the September 1990 issue of Vanity Fair, Marie Brenner quoted an unnamed journalist exclaiming, Goddamn it we created him! We bought his bullshit! He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!

Ive never known anybody who is as dependent on attention as he is, the writer Kurt Andersen told me. But to me, it is in his case a jones like Ive never seen. His obsession with fame is truly pathological. Its not figurative; its not a metaphoric addiction. He had a real addiction. Andersen, along with Carter, was a co-founder of the satirical magazine Spy, which famously traded on mocking Donald. But it was a two-way trade.

Of course, Donald Trump was a natural character, a natural target. He was made for us, said Andersen. Trump loved the attention we gave him. Sometimes people accuse us of making him famous. But we were trying to kill baby Hitler.

The divorce taught Donald the value of negative attention. Whether people felt disgust, envy, or indignation toward him, the outrage only burnished his brand. That instinct for manipulating bad publicity and turning an audiences negative emotions into mass entertainment and media spectacle never left him. That was what his 2016 presidential-campaign announcement on the golden escalator in Trump Tower was all about: Insulting Mexicans as drug-running rapists was simply a way of holding the stage as a supervillain. As he learned from his uber-brag about the sex he had with Marla when he was cheating on Ivana, our media culture loves an antihero.

Ivana died alone, after an accidental fall in her home. Meanwhile, her ex-husband is seemingly preparing for another presidential run, surrounded by sycophants and enablers, and still the center of the attention he craves and courts. What he learned from divorcing Ivana, he told us again in 2016: When youre a star, they let you do it.

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Waveland Police host inaugural Fishing with the Fuzz event – WXXV News 25

Posted: at 3:43 pm

Waveland police officers took a break from catching bad guys this weekend to go fishing with kids at Buccaneer State Park.

A pole and bait was all it took for the officers to come together to create lasting memories with children and their families on Saturday morning.

Fishing with the Fuzz hosted 62 kids who got a free fishing pole for a fishing experience along with lunch.

Officers and lieutenants helped and watched as kids reeled in fish off their poles. Everyone got a free t-shirt regardless if they caught anything or not. Lt. Chad Dorn said, When they all started showing up this morning it really. Its a real thing. and just seeing the kids smile. They are already catching fish. They are having a good time. Its a joy to see that happening. Meeting and greeting with them while they are out there fishing and stuff. Kinda the same thing while were doing our meal and stuff. We will get to know the kids and they will get to know us.

The Waveland Police Department plans to host more kids for this event next year.

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Far Northwest Side Teacher Alexandria Lialios Remembered With Honorary Street Title – Block Club Chicago

Posted: at 3:43 pm

IRVING WOODS For decades, the halls of Canty Elementary School twinkled with sparkly animal prints and glittery paper stars made by students in Alexandria Lialios classroom.

The Far Northwest Side school at 3740 N. Panama Ave. was Lialios second home for 38 years, where she taught first grade, Greek and specialized in early childhood development. The teacher died unexpectedly in February from lung cancer, her family said. She was 61.

In early June, on the last day of school before summer vacation, an honorary street designation for Lialios was posted across from the school at North Paris Avenue between West Waveland Avenue and West Grace Street. All of the students and staff joined in to celebrate the teacher and share memories.

Honorary Alexandria Lialios Way remembers the teacher and mother who impacted the school community and touched generations of students, said Canty Principal Jennifer Rath.

She was one of the longest-standing teachers here at the school, said Rath, who has been principal since 2019. One of the things that I learned initially was I have a teacher in the building who had [Lialios] as a first-grade teacher.

Lialios, a first-generation Greek American, grew up on the Northwest Side and lived in Arlington Heights. She devoted her life to teaching and always put others before herself, said her brother, Chris Lialios. She joined Cantys staff in 1984.

She loved teaching. She loved being around children, Chris Lialios said. She started teaching at a very young age, whether it was at our church, parish or Sunday school. She was fluent in both English and Greek, so she loved [teaching] that, as well.

Known for her polished look, Lialios always wore patterned animal outfits and was decked out with sequined jewelry, dresses and high heels. She was always dressed for work, and her makeup was perfect Rath only saw her in tennis shoes once, she said.

In Lialios decades at Canty, she created traditions at the school that will continue, Rath said. During the winter holidays, Lialios and her students would make large, white paper glittery star ornaments to wear while singing Do You Hear What I Hear? for the winter concert she organized.

Lialios also loved reading Corduroy, a classic 1968childrens bookwritten and illustrated byDon Freeman, to all of her students, and she tried her best to make sure no student fell behind, Rath said.

She understood the value of a neighborhood school that it should be the heart of a community, she said. That she dedicated her entire teaching to Canty really says a lot about her.

When Lialios wasnt in the classroom, she enjoyed spending time with her two children and caring for her elaborate flower garden, her family said. Neighbors would stop to admire the plants and shed often talk with them about her favorite flowers, relatives said.

Lialios was at Canty in late January when she didnt feel well and fainted, said her son, Demetri Verros. She was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

Verros said Lialios told the family her news, and her instinct was to comfort everyone else, he said.

When we got the diagnosis, we were all sitting there crying and she was looking at me trying to make me smile, Verros said. She had just received the worst news of her life probably and she was trying to comfort me.

Lialios died three weeks later, Verros said. It all happened so fast that Lialios never got a chance to say goodbye to her school community. With remote teaching because of the pandemic, there were students she never saw again and families with whom she lost touch.

With the honorary street designation, its almost as if she came back for a final adieu, her family said. Canty families came out in droves for her wake and the street dedication, and they reached out to the Lialios family to remind them of her impact on their lives, Chris Lialios said.

She never really got to say goodbye to all of the people she touched here so the street sign, I think, is her way and a blessing of saying, I love you guys. I was not able to say goodbye, but dont forget me,' he said.

That makes the street designation even more important, Chris Lialios said. The family is grateful to Ald. Nick Sposato (38th), who pushed the designation through City Council to make it in time before the school year ended.

Although Sposato never met the first-grade teacher, he said it was important to honor her.

She was loved by many. It was a very a nice thing for the family, said Sposato, who attended the unveiling ceremony.

After Lialios death, Canty created a committee to determine other ways to remember the teacher, Rath said. The committee, along with the family, has raised almost $10,000 in Lialios honor. The money will be used to build two benches near the schools playground that will be installed in September, the principal said.

The school also hosted a Ms. Lialios Spirit Day after she died, where all of the students and teachers dressed in sparkly animal prints and some received cheetah keychains as gifts.

Inside the school, a copy of the street sign hangs below Lialios picture, framed with sequins to match her style, the principal and the Lialios family said. The school also gifted the family with a sequined and framed photo.

The brown street signs, which border the back of the school on both sides of North Paris Avenue, can remind people of how deeply an educator can influence a community, Rath said.

Sometimes people dont think about the power of a first-grade teacher, she said. How wonderful that we have a street named after a teacher.

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Far Northwest Side Teacher Alexandria Lialios Remembered With Honorary Street Title - Block Club Chicago

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Letter to the editor: Vaping far less deadly than cigarettes – Washington Times

Posted: at 3:42 pm

OPINION:

Jasjit Ahluwalias op-ed argues for nicotine vaping as harm reduction compared to cigarettes, but it fails to explain why vaping is not the devil, cigarettes are (Nicotine is not the devil, cigarettes are, Web, July 28).

Cigarette smoke contains carcinogenic chemicals, which cause lung cancer, and smoke particles, which lead to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Nicotine vaping liquids contain neither of those, although they contain small amounts of mixing chemicals and many contain flavorings. Nicotine itself can exacerbate cardiovascular conditions, but it is not the cause of cigarette-induced lung cancer or COPD. Compared to nearly 500,000 deaths per year from cigarettes, vaping has been associated with a tiny number of deaths, almost all from jerry-rigged vaping devices or home-brewed vaping liquids with toxic chemicals added.

Teenagers should not vape nicotine. Published research from my own lab has shown that nicotine itself can change the fine structure of developing adolescent rat brains, but vaping nicotine is far safer for adults than smoking cigarettes.

BOB SMITH

Fairfax, Virginia

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Letter to the editor: Vaping far less deadly than cigarettes - Washington Times

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How The FDA Is Addressing Vaping And E-Cigarettes : 1A – NPR

Posted: at 3:42 pm

Packages of Juul e-cigarettes are displayed for sale. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption

Packages of Juul e-cigarettes are displayed for sale.

More than 2 million high school and middle students reported using e-cigarettes in 2021. A quarter of them say they vape daily. Now, the Food and Drug Administration is trying to do something about it.

Last month, the agency ordered one of the country's largest vaping companies, Juul, to pull its product from the market so it could conduct a sweeping review. But a day later, an appeals court blocked the FDA's plan. The temporary stay suspends the ban on marketing Juul products, but it doesn't rescind it.

So what restrictionsif anyshould be placed on e-cigarettes and vaping products? And what role should federal agencies play in regulating them?

Mitch Zeller, Cliff Douglas, and Dorian Fuhrman join us for the conversation.

Like what you hear? Find more of our programs online.

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How The FDA Is Addressing Vaping And E-Cigarettes : 1A - NPR

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Monthly Archives: August 2022

Out-Of-State Dems Dump Millions Into Kansas Election Because Abortion Is On The Ballot – The Federalist

Google’s Solution To Its Campaign Email Problem Is A Phony Fix – The Federalist

Blake Masters is splitting the difference between Donald Trump and Peter Thiel – The Verge

Donald Trump Reportedly Made This Ill-Informed Comment After Pardon Meeting With Kim Kardashian – Yahoo Life

Opinion | The Patronage System Was Corrupt. It’s Threatening a Comeback. – POLITICO

What Donald Trump Got Out of His Divorce From Ivana – The Atlantic

Waveland Police host inaugural Fishing with the Fuzz event – WXXV News 25

Far Northwest Side Teacher Alexandria Lialios Remembered With Honorary Street Title – Block Club Chicago

Letter to the editor: Vaping far less deadly than cigarettes – Washington Times

How The FDA Is Addressing Vaping And E-Cigarettes : 1A – NPR

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