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Even though it is illegal, the Biden administration announced another $4.28 billion in student loan handouts. This is as the Biden-Harris-Obama [Soros, Clinton] administration prepares to leave the White House. Since it is illegal, they are making the transition as difficult as possible. The massive loan handout will give 54,900 public workers loan forgiveness. That […] The post New Scheme to Forgive $4.2B in College Loans for Public Workers appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Over a dozen churches in a small Tennessee city have joined together to host a Christian-focused celebration after the community’s annual Christmas parade was derailed by leftist activists. Cookeville’s annual Christmas parade became embroiled in controversy earlier this year after activists — including a number of self-identified witches — complained that the original organizers of the parade weren’t “inclusive” enough, prompting city officials to take over the parade and allow politically-themed floats. As the city took over the parade, Kelly Parkison, a local pastor’s wife and former Miss South Carolina, stepped in and decided to organize the “Happy Birthday Jesus Party.” Parkison told The Daily Wire she organized the event to give local families “something exciting to do that focuses on Jesus” instead of the parade controversy. At least 18 churches in Cookeville are now involved in planning the birthday party, which will include train rides, a live nativity, food, crafts, and a time of worship. Parkison said that around 200 people have been involved in planning the celebration. “I’m just really excited about it,” Parkison told The Daily Wire. “We’re just excited for everybody that will come and we hope that they will come and enjoy themselves, have a wonderful time, know how much that they’re loved by the churches in this community, but most of all that they’re loved by Jesus.”  The celebration will also give locals an opportunity to support Hurricane Helene victims in East Tennessee by purchasing a special ornament designed for the event.  Parkison’s event is slated for Saturday, while the city’s Christmas parade has ostensibly been canceled due to weather. The city’s parade was set to feature activist organizations and significant input from a number of local witches, according to reporting from conservative Nashville outlet The Pamphleteer.  The battle over the city parade shows how even in the most conservative of areas — Putnam County, where Cookeville is located, went 73% for Trump in November — activists can leverage the media to pressure local officials.  The controversy began last year, after Cookeville’s Chamber of Commerce stepped away from organizing the parade after it caused an uproar by denying entry to a sexuality-themed float called “Don we now our gay apparel,” from a local LGBT group over concerns that it would not be family-friendly.  Scott Parkison, Kelly’s husband and the pastor of Stevens Street Baptist Church, told The Daily Wire that members of the Chamber of Commerce received death threats and were sent pictures of their children after the float application was denied.  As the Chamber, local leaders from the Life Church and The River Community Church decided to step in and privately organize the parade. The theme they decided on for the parade was “Celebrating the Light of CHRISTmas,” and they asked for participants to not promote anything that would be contrary to their Christian faith.  This blew up in October after accusations were made and publicized by local media outlets that organizers of the city’s Christmas parade were making participants sign a statement of faith to participate. In actuality, the parade was being privately organized by local church leaders who asked participants to not violate their Christian beliefs if they wanted to participate in the parade.  In response, a group of activists began to organize a counter parade under the umbrella of a new group called “Cookeville Inclusive.” One of those working to organize this counter parade was the owner of a Cookeville-based occult shop called “The Tiny Cloak” where you can purchase things like an “altar bell” and “altar clothes.”  Shortly after Cookeville Inclusive began organizing a rival parade, city officials stepped in to, in their words, “save” Christmas. The city council voted 5-0 in late October to take charge of the Christmas parade and appointed Cookeville Inclusive President Sam Raper to the parade planning board.  “We’re going to see what we can do and hopefully save Christmas,” said Mayor Laurin Wheaton.  Montana Chambers of the Tiny Cloak occult shop celebrated the city’s move in a Facebook video addressed to “my witchy friends, pagans and practitioners.”  “The city is now putting on the Christmas parade and has taken it away from the churches. Kind of a big deal. I just want to thank everyone for their support,” she said.  She added that Raper had been asked by the city to join the Christmas parade committee and was put “in charge of approving of applications and coordinating volunteers so this is a big win for us.”  CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE The Pamphleteer reported that Cookeville Inclusive, Upper Cumberland Pride, Queer Closet, and the Tiny Cloak were all slated to have floats.  Chambers told The Daily Wire that the Tiny Cloak’s Christmas parade float would have been “The Legend of the Christmas Witch.”  “Any concerns about ‘pushing occult practices’ are utterly baseless Christian fear mongering,” she said. “We live in a free society and we have the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression, as much as our Christian neighbors do, and have equal rights to participate in society, whether in a public park or a parade.” “Before I left the church, I learned in Bible school that Christians were called to ‘love thy neighbor as thine self’ and yet all of this backlash and controversy seems to be the exact opposite of Christ’s message,” she added. “I wish my Christian neighbors would be more kind, welcoming, and accepting of their neighbors who just believe a little differently than them.”  Scott Parkison told The Daily Wire that it was “very frustrating” that Mayor Wheaton allowed the parade to be controlled by activist organizations.  “Our town is full of constitutional conservatives that embrace family values and that want to conserve that in our city,” he said. “Our town does not want DEI initiatives to be pushed upon its citizens. We don’t want it in our schools. We don’t want it in our city.”  In the end, all of the controversy turned out to be moot after the city canceled the parade two nights in a row due to rain. But many commenters on the city’s Facebook post about the cancellation were skeptical of the reasons for the decision.  Kelly Parkison said that her “Happy Birthday Jesus” event was never meant as a direct competitor to the city’s parade, but as a positive alternative.  “My heart was never to try to compete with the parade or anything like that,” she said. “I just feel like the Lord called me to do it and my hope is really that we can just bring hope and peace and joy and unity into our community.” She said all the negativity surrounding the parade inspired her to take a different direction. The celebration on Saturday will conclude with everyone singing “Silent Night” and “Happy Birthday” before all going home with cake kits designed to tell the story of Christmas.  Other conservative Tennessee cities have not been immune from the cultural battles in recent years. Last year in Franklin, a conservative hub just south of Nashville, the city board was locked in debate for hours over whether to approve a “Pride” festival on city grounds. Residents and city board members said the festival had previously exposed young children to inappropriate drag performances and other indecencies. The council approved the festival with a 5-4 vote, with the mayor demanding that it be family-friendly.

A top Senate waste-watcher says the Biden administration is in the process of signing more long-term agreements with federal employee unions letting them work from home. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, wrote to 24 agencies on Thursday demanding they cease efforts to bind President-Elect Donald Trump’s hands before he takes office in a month. “I am calling on you to stop all collective bargaining or any other contractual arrangements related to telework for federal employees extending beyond the few weeks remaining in the Biden administration. Giving bureaucrats another four-year vacation from the office is unacceptable. Bureaucrats have had enough gap years—it’s time to get them back to work. Americans are tired of being put on hold by bureaucrats who are phoning it in,” she wrote. She said a whistleblower told her that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is on the verge of signing a contract that would run through 2029, “the top four priorities of which are, in order: solidifying telework and remote work privileges, limiting accountability through hamstringing employee performance review processes, maximizing use of taxpayer-funded union time, and lastly, permitting the use of agency facilities for union offices.” The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) is frantically working to unionize lawyers at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and Environment and Natural Resources Division, explicitly using the potential of continuing to work from home to gain buy-in, she added. A union representing hundreds of Bureau of Land Management employees who work at its headquarters are also “scrambling” to sign a deal with the Biden administration, with a union head calling on Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to do a deal before Biden’s term ends. Ernst cited The Daily Wire’s report highlighting the circumstances behind the Social Security Administration signing a telework deal through 2029, which suggested that it was not a compromise between management and labor, but rather a deal worked out between people who were both sitting on the same side of the table. Martin O’Malley, the agency head appointed by Joe Biden, partied with the union at a junket in Florida, signed the contract days later, then immediately resigned his post to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee — being owed favors from politically connected unions could help him attain the DNC chair.  The contract shows that the work-from-home agreement was structured as a settlement resolving years-old allegations of racism, meaning O’Malley could have signed it previously — but chose not to take away his own management prerogative, only those of his successor. Ernst said other agencies have also recently finalized such deals. On December 3, 2024, the National Park Services (NPS) signed a contract with two unions representing Washington, D.C.-based employees that would also, coincidentally, run through the entirety of the Trump administration. One of the unions said to expect “virtually all NPS positions” to be “eligible for telework,” with no requirement to come in more than once a week. An American Federation of Government Employees union representing 1,000 employees of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission earlier this year signed an agreement stretching into 2030, with the union highlighting that employees would only need to come to work one day a week. The agency is among those who are also on a last-minute hiring spree loading up the federal agency with DEI employees, searching for a “recent graduate” to pay $88,926 as a  “diversity data analyst.” Ernst said government employee union leaders are ungrateful and insatiable. The union representing employees at the Department of Labor — which is headed by the fiercely pro-union Julie Su — is fighting with Su, saying her request that employees come to work half the time is draconian, engaging in “a fruitless 11-hour mediation session.” Taxpayers actually pay for employees to do union work,  like advocating for contracts, instead of their actual jobs. For many years, the Office Personnel Management published data about how much money was spent on taxpayer-funded union time, or “official time,” but the Biden administration stopped that transparency practice. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE The latest available figures are from 2019, when agencies spent $135 million paying employees who were actually conducting union work, plus $25 million in office space and other goods. Ernst said that after repeated inquiries, HUD gave limited, more recent data, showing that it paid employees for between 27,000 and 41,000 hours of union work per year. “Among the HUD employees who did claim [Taxpayer-Funded Union Time], one was paid for sitting in a jail cell, another is running a real estate business in Florida, and a third is supposed to be in Colorado but allegedly routinely goes on paid vacations, including spending a week on the beach in Puerto Rico,” Ernst wrote. In the letters sent to two dozen agencies, she demanded that they not sign union contracts tying Trump’s hands, that they provide final and draft copies of union agreements, and that they produce data about taxpayer-funded union activity. In a statement, she said, “The entire concept of public service is being perverted by public employee union bosses who forget the obligation of government workers is to serve the American people, not themselves.” “The one government employee who won’t have to worry about coming back into the office ever again after January 20, 2025, is President Biden. But as for the millions of others on the public dole, they work for taxpayers … and soon, for President Trump, not the president of a labor union,” she said. Ernst worked with inspectors general to conduct a large-scale investigation that found that federal employees never returned to the office after the COVID pandemic. It found that only 6% of federal employees report to work in person every day, that one-third are still fully remote, and that the government spends $16 billion a year on office buildings with a 12% occupancy rate. She said some of the employees who are “working remotely” aren’t doing much at all, which she said has contributed to citizens receiving a frustrating lack of services. Related: Government Union’s Top Workers’ Rights Official Mistreated Employees, Probe Finds

When this little girl has a bad day, her cat is right there to cheer her up! Mom caught the most precious footage of her daughter, Emma, snuggling with her four-legged friend, Keanu. This sweet kitty gave the child his undivided attention during her time of need. Your heart will melt when you watch the video below! @rosaremma Making sure his baby feels better I feel blessed and lucky to have such an amazing cat to love and protect my children. Sometimes i think Keanu forgets he is a kitty #fyp #fypシ #cats #catsoftiktok #catsmoves #catlover #catlovers #tabbycat #tabbycatsoftiktok #loveableanimals #lovestory #toddlersoftiktok #truelovestory #bestfriendsforever #animalsoftiktok #animallovers #cutiepies ♬ Youll be in My Heart Phil Collins Tarzan STILLMAN – Stillman In the clip, Mom explained that her little girl was having a rough time, so Keanu the cat decided to offer some much-needed emotional support. He lay down in the child’s lap and let her hold him just like a real-life stuffed animal! “Emma isn’t feeling well today,” the kid’s mother wrote over the video. “Keanu is right by her side, making sure she is ok.” What happened next will make you say, “Aww!” As if this wasn’t cute enough, something even more heartwarming happened when Mom went into the other room, leaving the little girl alone with the cat. Emma curled up on the couch to take a nap, and Keanu remained in her arms. When the parent returned to see how her daughter was doing, she found this adorable pair fast asleep! “I feel blessed and lucky to have such an amazing cat to love and protect my children,” Mom said in her caption. Screengrab from TikTok It wasn’t clear whether Emma was feeling physically or emotionally unwell, but Keanu had her back either way! Commenters were touched by the incredible friendship these two seemed to have. Some were especially impressed by how this cat responded to the girl’s crisis. “He’s a father in this moment,” wrote one user. Another joked, “I’m sending this video to my cat so he understands how I want to be cuddled.” Some pets are truly great with kids. This little girl is very fortunate to have such a loving cat around while she grows up! You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Cuddly Cat Refuses To Leave Little Girl’s Side When She’s Upset appeared first on InspireMore.