The confirmation for President Donald Trump’s top choice for the next head of the Department of Homeland Security is off to a rocky start, thanks to one Republican senator.

Trump tapped Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma to replace current DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. While most of Mullin’s Senate colleagues have praised Trump’s choice, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was not keen on the nominee.

‘Seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us.’

Paul opened the confirmation hearing Wednesday by challenging Mullin to disavow political violence. Paul was specifically asking Mullin to address alleged past comments in which he said he “completely” understood why Paul’s neighbor attacked him in 2017, leaving him with severe injuries including broken ribs.

“You have never had the courage to look me in the eye and tell me that the assault was justified,” Paul said of Mullin’s comments. Paul also claimed Mullin referred to him as a “freaking snake.”

RELATED: Noem is OUT — and Trump has named her replacement

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Mullin addressed Paul’s claims, insisting that he and Paul had a conversation about their differences when Mullin was still a member of the House. Mullin also looked directly at Paul and said, “I’m very blunt and direct to the point. And if I have something to say, I’ll say it directly to your face.”

Mullin then added, “Seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us.”

Paul later said he would note vote for Mullin’s confirmation, saying Mullin’s “temperament was not suitable” and that his “anger issues are a problem.”

“They’ve had to have known for weeks that I couldn’t be real happy about a guy that won’t apologize and thinks that my assault was perfectly understandable,” Paul said.

A “no” vote from Paul could cost Mullin the confirmation. Mullin first needs to be approved by a simple majority of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Paul chairs. If senators vote on party lines, just one Republican defection could throw the whole nomination.

RELATED: Trump’s unusual Cabinet meeting may reveal which officials are on thin ice

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If Mullin’s nomination advances through committee, he will need a simple majority in the Republican-controlled Senate.

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​Donald trump, Kristi noem, Department of homeland security, Dhs, Rand paul, Senate republicans, Markwayne mullin, Trump nominee, Senate confirmation, Confirmation hearing, Political violence, Politics 

Every March, without consent, the federal government steals an hour of sleep from hundreds of millions of people. Every November, it hands the hour back, as if that settles the debt. It doesn’t. The damage is already done. The bodies counted. The fender-benders filed with insurance.

This is the absurdity of daylight saving time: a policy dressed up as convenience that functions, in practice, as a twice-annual public health hazard. Two states — Hawaii and Arizona, apparently the adults in the room — do not participate.

The trade: preventable deaths in exchange for slightly earlier winter sunsets. It’s not a close call.

The carnage is well documented and almost comically avoidable. Heart attacks spike in the days after the spring shift. Strokes climb. Traffic fatalities rise during that first fog-brained week, when reaction times slow to something approaching drunk driving. Workplace injuries surge. Emergency rooms fill.

Physiological shock

The mechanism isn’t mysterious. The human body is exquisitely calibrated to light cycles, and ripping away an hour mimics the physiological shock of being flung across time zones overnight. Stress hormones spike. Melatonin craters.

The body’s rather elegant machinery gets jammed with a wrench — annually, on a schedule — by people who will never be held responsible for any of it.

If a pharmaceutical company produced a drug with this side-effect profile, the FDA would pull it from the market within a week.

Classroom chaos

Children absorb the worst of it. After the spring shift, school buses roll before sunrise, hauling kids whose biology insists it’s still the middle of the night. Adolescents — already sleep-deprived by group chats and the algorithmic abyss of TikTok — get hammered hardest. Attention fractures. Memory slips. Impulse control dissolves.

The classroom after the time change looks less like a learning environment and more like a hostage situation.

Billions get poured into fixing education, while a mandated sleep disruption quietly picks its pockets twice a year. The policy eats the investment. Test scores dip, classrooms destabilize, and learning suffers.

All to preserve someone’s evening tee time.

Mental health follows the same logic. Circadian misalignment fogs the mind. It destabilizes mood, amplifies anxiety, and deepens depressive episodes.

The human standard

Standard time — anchored to the sun rather than legislative preference — flips that script. Earlier morning light stabilizes serotonin, steadies metabolism, and synchronizes human rhythms with the environment humans actually evolved under.

The benefits aren’t philosophical. They’re measurable, reproducible, and stubbornly indifferent to the opinions of state legislators.

Enter California’s Senate Bill 1197.

What makes this legislation notable — beyond its merits — is who is championing it: Republican senators who actually read the research.

Not a talking point. Not a culture-war signal. Just data, reviewed and acted upon.

In a political climate where bipartisan cooperation on health policy feels about as common as a lobbyist who forgot to file paperwork, a group of Republican legislators looked at the peer-reviewed evidence on sleep disruption, cardiovascular events, traffic fatalities, and childhood cognition and reached the obvious conclusion: This is stupid, and we should stop doing it.

RELATED: Trump ‘fully on board’ with legislation to make daylight saving time permanent, senators say

Photo by SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images

Votes are in

California voters agreed back in 2018. Legislative inertia is the only thing standing between the state and sanity.

The science here isn’t complicated, contested, or politically inconvenient. Even Sacramento should be able to handle that.

The economic case is just as compelling. Productivity losses from post-shift disruption cost tens of billions nationally every cycle. Sick days multiply. Error rates climb. Health care spending ticks upward.

Sleep debt correlates with obesity, metabolic disorders, and long-term cognitive decline — costs that don’t show up in the week of the shift but accumulate quietly across years.

Opponents of the bill will likely invoke evening leisure — longer summer nights for golf, grilling, gender-reveal parties, and so on — as if that justifies annual cardiac events and crashed school buses.

An obvious trade

Standard time still delivers long summer evenings. Sunset in Los Angeles in late June arrives around 8 p.m. under standard time. Nobody’s barbecue is getting canceled. Nobody’s constitutional rights are being trampled.

The trade: preventable deaths in exchange for slightly earlier winter sunsets. It’s not a close call.

The federal government could authorize a national fix tomorrow. Congress has simply chosen not to. In the meantime, California’s bill offers a replicable model: well researched, cross-partisan, and focused on whether a policy actually helps people rather than whether it polls well in October.

Pass S.B. 1197. Encourage every statehouse still running this cruel charade to follow.

The science on this one isn’t contested or nuanced. It’s stacked, overwhelming, and pointing in one direction.

Let noon mean noon. Let light arrive when it’s supposed to. And let people sleep without the government scheduling their insomnia.

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The residents of a small town in Alabama were shocked to discover that a police officer and four faculty members of their school district were accused of possessing child sex abuse material.

The four teachers, as well as the police officer and school basketball coach, worked for the Pickens County School district in Aliceville, a town of only about 2,000 residents.

The officer had also worked as an assistant basketball coach at a Pickens County school.

Three of the teachers worked at the Aliceville High School, another worked at the Aliceville Elementary School, and the police officer worked for the Aliceville Police Dept.

The five suspects faced charges related to child sexual abuse material and are being held at the Pickens County Jail.

Math teacher Roderick Granger, 41, was arrested Jan. 30 for possession of child pornography, failure to report, and an ethics violation. Online records indicate he was given a $1 million bail.

Aliceville High School teacher Antavious Belgrave, 28, faces a number of charges:

Three counts of failure to report;Three counts of sexual misconduct;Three counts of ethics violations;One felony charge for indecent exposure; andThree felony counts of distributing a private image.

Belgrave was also given a $1 million bail.

Fourth-grade teacher Lakethia Wilkins was charged with use of position for personal gain, possession of child pornography, and intent to disseminate pornographic and obscene matter.

High school employee Winston Bishop, 58, was charged with solicitation of child pornography, possession of child pornography, distribution of a controlled substance, and providing a minor with drugs. He was also given a $1 million bail.

Police officer Caminion Gary, 24, was given a $1 million bail and charged with the following:

Solicitation of child pornography;Sexual abuse, a first-degree felony;Production of child pornography;Felony count of transmitting obscene material to a child by computer; andFelony count of child molestation/enticing a child.

Aliceville Police Chief Tonnie Jones said the allegations were serious and Gary had been placed on unpaid administrative leave.

“We’re asking everyone who can — if you believe — to pray because there are a lot of a victims, a lot of victims,” Jones said.

RELATED: Elementary school teacher allegedly possessed thousands of files of child sex abuse material

Gary had also worked as an assistant basketball coach at a Pickens County school.

The Pickens County Sheriff’s Office said the Department of Homeland Security was assisting with the investigation as well as the State Bureau of Investigation and the Aliceville Police Dept.

Pickens County District Attorney Andy Hamlin said there may be more arrests and charges as the investigation continues.

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BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is raising concerns over disturbing scenes of youth violence, pointing to viral footage from spring break in Daytona Beach and the Washington Navy Yard as evidence of what he sees as a growing cultural crisis.

“I see these videos, I see these events, and it breaks my heart. And it breaks my heart because nothing’s being done about it,” Whitlock says.

“If you do any research, the first eight years of a child’s life — critical to their development. And if both parents aren’t on that job those first eight years, you virtually have no shot with course-correcting or fixing or properly adjusting that child,” he continues.

And when Whitlock plays a clip of spring break in Daytona Beach, gunshots ring out, teens are scattered all over, and he describes “women losing their weaves as they run away.”

In another video from the Washington Navy Yard, a fight breaks out between teenagers who appear to be, like in the Daytona clip, majority black.

“Oh, the black kids fighting each other. I’ve never seen that. That’s so unusual,” Whitlock says sarcastically.

“Part of the reason I bring this up is, like, there is an enjoyment that black people clearly have about seeing other black people fight with each other. We whip out our phones, and we record it. No one does anything to stop the fights or break them up,” he continues.

“It’s a recording opportunity,” he adds.

However, while Whitlock is pointing out his disappointment with how the next generation of black kids are turning out, plenty of people don’t seem to want to hear it.

“People are upset with me right now for talking about it,” he says, adding that people often point out that white kids have problems too.

“They have problems. Drugs, you know, sexual degeneracy and all that, feminism. They have problems, but they’re just not as acute because they still have families,” he says. “They still have mom and dad in the home in relatively large numbers.”

“There’s a crisis of black fatherhood, of divorce, dysfunction, kids unsupervised, kids raised by televisions and video games and iPhones,” he continues.

“This is the pandemic, the real pandemic, and it’s not being discussed,” he adds.

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