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Idaho Lawmakers Hold Hearing On Bill To Legalize Medical Marijuana

Jeremy Kitzhaber, a U.S. Air Force veteran, held up a blue lunch bag to a committee of Idaho lawmakers on Monday that he uses to store the drugs meant to soothe his pain, including hydrocodone, morphine and oxycodone.

Kitzhaber has a rare type of stage four cancer that he developed while transporting radioactive and hazardous materials in the military. He can take those strong opioids at any point in the day—in addition to the drugs he takes to keep his cancer from growing and manage his bowel movement and anxiety. However, the one drug he cannot legally take is marijuana.

Idaho has some of the strictest laws against any kind of marijuana usage, but an informational hearing held in the Idaho House Health and Welfare Committee opened the discussion for Kitzhaber to advocate for a bill to legalize medical marijuana for Idahoans living with chronic pain and answer lawmakers’ questions about what legalizing marijuana would look like in Idaho.

Kitzhaber has been working on legislation to legalize marijuana for six years, and this year, Reps. Ilana Rubel (D-Boise), and Jordan Redman (R-Coeur d’Alene), named House Bill 401, or the “Sgt. Kitzhaber Medical Cannabis Act,” after him. The sponsors introduced it as a personal bill, meaning it has no chance of advancing this session and is intended to send a message.

What would medical marijuana look like in Idaho?

Unlike most of its neighboring states, marijuana is recreationally and medically illegal in Idaho.

During the 2025 legislative session alone, lawmakers passed at least two pieces of legislation aimed to restrict marijuana usage in Idaho. This includes a bill signed by the governor and set to take effect July 1 to implement a $300 minimum fine for individuals found possessing less than three ounces marijuana.

Another piece of legislation passed in both chambers is a proposed amendment to the Idaho Constitution that, if approved by voters, would make it so that only the Idaho Legislature has the power to legalize marijuana and other narcotics.

House Bill 401 is modeled after Utah’s legislation, Rubel told the committee, who said Idaho lawmakers should at some point consider this type of legislation.

The bill would move marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule II controlled substance. It would allow medical practitioners to give medical cannabis cards to patients who are at least 21 years old and diagnosed with qualifying conditions such as cancer, ALS, AIDS, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and other debilitating illnesses. The card would be valid for up to one year, and renewal must be sought after.

Under the bill, individuals with medical cannabis cards would not be subject to prosecution for certain amounts of marijuana possession.

“The bill does not legalize cannabis, it only decriminalizes it,” Kitzhaber said.

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House Judiciary Committee Investigates Biden-Harris AI Censorship Allegations with New Subpoenas

Political trends and circumstances change, as do US administrations – but the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Jim Jordan continues to “soldier on” in its multi-year, comprehensive bid to get to the bottom of the activities by the Biden-Harris White House aimed at pressuring tech companies to its political advantage.

In the past, these investigations produced some spectacular results – such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly admitting to his company relenting to that pressure, stating he regretted that – and that the tech giant would reverse the policies that facilitated compliance with the former government.

The latest set of the Committee’s subpoenas concern companies developing AI tech. The subpoenas have been sent to Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI.

We obtained a copy of one of the letters for you here.

The Committee wants all documents and communications that the previous administration had with these companies concerning content “moderation and suppression” – i.e., collusion with the aim of censoring lawful speech – to be preserved and presented. The timeframe is January 2020 to January 2025.

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Big Development: Is Letitia James Guilty of Mortgage Fraud?

For over two decades, Letitia James repeatedly claimed her Brooklyn apartment building was a four-unit property on mortgage applications—despite official records proving it had five.

This may seem a minor discrepancy, but misrepresenting the unit count enabled her to secure more favorable loans, including a 2011 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) loan that saved her tens of thousands of dollars annually.

Now, the same legal principles she used to prosecute others may be turning against her.

It all began in 2001 when Letitia James purchased a four-story multi-family apartment building with five apartments in Brooklyn for $550,000.

In 2005, James refinanced the building with an adjustable loan from Aegis that started at an interest rate of 7.2% with a ceiling of 10.2%.

For the next two decades, James took out refinancing mortgages and always listed the number of units as four.

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Why Is The NYT Admitting the Covid Lab-Leak Theory Now?

Yesterday the New York Times, the written order-of-the-day for the old school left, put out an op-ed admitting, in so many words, the covid lab-leak theory. Check the revealing title: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives“. Some were surprised about this.

I am not. I’ll tell you exactly why these prevaricating no-good slime-pushing would-be tyrants are admitting what the rest of us have been saying for years. Because they are scared for their jobs, their funding, their money, their slipping prestige.

Good. Be afraid. We should take it all away. All of it.

Now you’ve heard me many times call for the ending of government having a direct, and the direct, hand in funding science. But it sounds strange to hear. It doesn’t sound sensible. It sounds impossible. But let the NYT itself convince you.

Gain-of-function is the euphemism. Gain-of-lethality is the truth. Scientists, funded by you, dear reader, monkey with bugs to see if they can make them deadlier. To you. Which you pay for. They do this out of morbid curiosity, from the fiction that having created Frankenstein bugs they’ll be able to find cures for their own creations, cures which they wouldn’t need if they didn’t invent Accelerated Death, and because they have money to spend and prestige to seek. Your money.

They made the covid bug in a Chinese lab, which you partly paid for, and they were sloppy and it got out. That story has been told so many times you’re sick of it. But one item I don’t always emphasize. Why did they panic, when it was obvious to the sober there wasn’t any need?

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Putin Peels Off the Masks of the Ceasefire Kabuki

Putin will never sacrifice Russia’s “indivisibility of security” demands posed to Washington in December 2021 – and met with a no-response response.

The “ceasefire” announced with trademark bombast by Team Trump 2.0 should be seen as a tawdry kabuki inside a cheap matryoshka.

As we peel off the successive masks, the last one standing inside the matryoshka is a woke transvestite tiny dancer: a Minsk 3 in drag.

Now cue to a “ceasefire” redux: President Putin in uniform only for the second time since the start of the SMO, dead serious, visiting the frontline in Kursk.

Finally, cue to the actual peel off operation: Putin’s press conference after his meeting with Lukashenko in Moscow.

Ceasefire? Of course. We support it. And then, methodically, diplomatically, the Russian President pulled a Caravaggio, and went all-out chiaroscuro on every geopolitical and military detail of the American gambit. A consumate artful deconstruction.

End result: the ball is now back in Donald Trump’s court. Incidentally the leader of the revamping-in-progress Empire of Chaos who does not (italics mine) have the cards.

The art of diplomatic nuance

That’s how diplomacy at the highest level works – something out of reach of American bumpkins of the Rubio variety.

Putin was gracious enough to thank “the President of the United States, Mr. Trump, for paying so much attention to resolving the conflict.”

After all the Americans also seem to be involved in “achieving a noble mission, a mission to stop hostilities and the loss of human lives.”

Then he went for the kill: “This ceasefire should lead to a long-term peace and eliminate the initial causes of this crisis.”

As in all Russian key imperatives – widely known since at least June 2024 – will have to be satisfied. After all, it’s Russia that’s winning the war in the battlefield, not the U.S., the – already fragmented – NATO, and much less Ukraine.

Putin was adamant on the ceasefire: “We are for it.”

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As Trump moves to scrap key climate finding, emails show Obama EPA used it to push ‘progressive’ fix

As the Trump administration nears a decision on whether to reverse the landmark regulatory declaration that launched the “Green New Deal” movement, the legality and political motivations of the Obama-era environmental regulators are getting a fresh, hard look.

Emails reviewed by Just the News show that Environmental Protection Agency regulators who helped craft the 2009 “endangerment finding” — which declared greenhouse gases could be regulated because they risked public health — were preparing to impose the regulatory powers of the endangerment finding even before the science was wrapped up.

The emails also show there was an open discussion inside the Obama EPA about trying to score a win for liberals in what was supposed to be a scientific process. “You are at the forefront of progressive national policy on one of the critical issues of our time. Do you realize that?” Georgetown law professor Lisa Heinzerling wrote then-EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on Feb. 27, 2009. “You’re a good boss. I do realize that. I pinch myself all the time.”

A day earlier, Heinzerling estimated that the finding would be finalized in August or September 2009, but that imposing regulations like new car emission standards could occur ahead of the science being wrapped up.

Experts told Just the News such communications — which mostly have been relegated to insiders and trade publications — could provide a powerful messaging tool if Trump EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin decides to reverse the endangerment finding.

And there’s also a trove of emails yet to be released but itemized on a log of documents the Obama administration insisted on hiding from the public by declaring them “privileged.” “I believe the privilege logs support that the [Obama] administration came in determined to do what they then went through the public motions of producing,” Chris Horner, an environment and energy policy attorney, told Just the News.  

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Soros-Funded Group Indivisible is PAYING Far-Left Activists to Protest at Tesla Dealerships

For weeks now Democrat Party proxy groups have been violently protesting at Tesla dealerships around the country.

Democrats are outraged that President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and his DOGE team have found over $100 billion in waste and fraud in the US government and they are shutting down the Democrat Party’s money machine at USAID.

On Monday, War Room White House reporter Natalie Winters revealed the Soros group behind the violent protests at US Tesla dealerships.

Natalie Winters actually brought the receipts.

Indivisible is reimbursing the violent mobs for the costs of advertising.

The groups are specifically targeting Elon Musk, a US citizen, and his car dealerships.

How is this legal?

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Trump says JFK files will be released Tuesday without redactions

President Donald Trump announced on Monday at the Kennedy Center that the files regarding former President John F. Kennedy’s assassination will be released on Tuesday without redactions.

“We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files,” Trump said. “So people have been waiting for decades for this, and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s going to be released tomorrow.”

The release will happen Tuesday afternoon, The Daily Wire reported.

“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, just don’t redact. You can’t redact,” Trump added. “But we’re going to be releasing the JFK files, and that would be tomorrow.”

“It’s approximately 80,000 pages,” he said. “So it’s a lot of stuff, and you’ll make your own determination.”

Trump said that the documents will be released without summaries so the public and media could drawn their own conclusions.

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Taxpayers Paid $6.2 Billion to Develop Weight-loss Drugs. Pharma Charges Consumers a Premium — Driving Up Healthcare Costs for Everyone

U.S. taxpayers picked up the tab for about $6.2 billion worth of research, development and distribution of GLP-1s, the new class of blockbuster weight-loss drugs, according to an investigation by The Lever.

The “blockbuster drugs” generate annual sales exceeding $1 billion for Big Pharma.

Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound — which belong to the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) class of drugs — are “minting billions of dollars” for Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the companies that make them.

Taxpayers fund the research. Pharma reaps massive profits. And Americans pay up to 11 times more for the drugs than people in other countries. The marked-up prices are inflating insurance premiums and risk bankrupting the country’s healthcare system, according to The Lever.

Researchers at Bentley University shared data with The Lever showing that between 1980 and 2024, the federal government spent $6.2 billion on the discovery and development of GLP-1 molecules, plus research on how to use those molecules to treat diabetes, obesity and other health conditions.

“You have to know a lot to develop a drug and to apply it in people,” Dr. Fred Ledley, professor of Natural and Applied Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, told The Lever. “What we call a ‘mature body of knowledge’ is not cheap.” Ledley provided the spending data to The Lever.

That research laid the foundation for the development of Ozempic and triggered a wave of similar drugs that spawned a massive market.

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Federal judge demands Trump admin provide information on Tren de Aragua deportations

In a 45-minute hearing on Monday, a federal judge questioned Trump administration lawyers over the use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and a deportation flight that took off from the US bound for El Salvador as he handed down a temporary restraining order blocking the administration from invoking the act to swiftly deport illegal immigrant gang members.

The administration attorneys had requested that the hearing be called off, but US District Judge James Boasberg declined, ordering them into court for a “fact-finding hearing” over the use of the Act, and whether the administration knowingly defied his order, per Fox News. A hearing is set for Friday over the administration’s request to vacate the case.

Justice Department attorney Abhishek Kambli said that the Trump administration had complied with the written order from Boasberg, which came hours after the oral ruling. Per NBC News, Kamblu argued that the written ruling took precedence over the oral one issued from the bench, saying, “We believe that we’ve complied with the order.”

“You’re saying that you felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t a written order,” Boasberg said. He called the argument a “stretch.”

Federal attorneys declined during the hearing to reveal how many deportation flights took off from the US on Saturday, citing national security protections. One lawyer for the administration said, “Those are operational issues, and I am not at liberty to provide information.”

Kambli said, “I am only authorized to say what we have said” in court filings, the one in question stating that the plaintiffs “cannot use these proceedings to interfere with the President’s national-security and foreign-affairs authority, and the Court lacks jurisdiction to do so.”

Near the end of the hearing, Judge Boasberg said, “My orders don’t seem to carry much weight.”

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