Nicole Lafond
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stepped in it/spilled it/has soup on her face/etc.
The QAnon congresswoman is known for her various unhinged diatribes, usually packed with some layer of confusing racism or anti-Semitism or Nazism.
Today during an interview with the far-right Real America News outlet, Greene was attempting to comment on Rep. Troy Nehls’ (R-TX) recent bizarre claims that Capitol Hill police took unauthorized photos of his office last fall and that Capitol law enforcement is engaged in some deep state plot to “destroy” him. The Capitol Police pushed back on the allegations saying an officer merely locked the congressman’s office door when it was left wide open during Thanksgiving break. TPM’s Josh Kovensky got a copy of a Capitol Police report and he explains the whole faux-outrage incident in depth here, but essentially Nehls and other far-right lawmakers are seizing on Nehls’ accusations as fodder for their campaign to blame the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Police as they flail to divert blame for the attack away from Trump and his supporters.
Read MoreArizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) has made quite the name for herself in the far-right, Big Lie corners of the Republican Party in the last year. As a key figure in the state’s phony election “audit,” Rogers knows how to aggressively captivate her audience.
She’s injected herself into several election-overturning causes in recent months. In the waning days of the sketch audit of 2020 election results in Arizona’s Maricopa County, Rogers suggested imprisoning members of the Republican-majority board of supervisors when the county rejected the state Senate’s subpoena for additional election-related materials. The Trumpian state lawmaker has since proposed legislation that would make it easier for the governor’s office to investigate so-called instances of election “fraud,” setting state Republicans up to try to Big Lie their way out of any 2022 disappointments for the party.
Now, she’s getting involved in the Canadian anti-vax trucker protests in Ottawa that have devolved into a reckless display of Big Rig power over the course of the last 12 days with thousands of protesters flooding the area surrounding Ottawa’s Parliament building.
Read MoreWhat started as a messaging effort by activists and good government lobbyists pushing Congress to reform the Electoral Count Act has turned into a fairly common talking point for Republicans in a matter of months. It’s been a little surprising to witness.
Read MoreYou know the news by now: Over the weekend, former President Trump told a crowd of supporters that if he runs/wins in 2024 he will pardon insurrectionists charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. It’s egregious enough on its own, but a report surfaced yesterday revealing that Trump’s been talking about this for a while: in the waning days of his presidency, just after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol trying to do a coup, Trump was obsessing over the idea of potentially offering a blanket pardon to his supporters who attacked the Capitol.
Read MoreOn the first day of Black History Month this week, there were a string of bomb threats made targeting historically Black colleges and universities in the U.S. The FBI announced today that it would be looking into those threats and investigating them as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism and hate crimes.”
“This investigation is of the highest priority for the bureau and involves more than 20 FBI field offices across the country,” the FBI said in a statement, noting the probe was “of the highest priority for the bureau.”
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Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is set to headline the Federalist Society’s annual conference in Florida over the weekend. It’s closed to the press. And while it may not be a great look for a sitting Supreme Court justice to speak at an ideological event, it’s not uncommon. Gorsuch has spoken at Federalist Society events in the past. In fact, all of the conservative justices on the Court currently have ties, in some form or another, to the conservative organization.
But part of what makes this year’s confab so intriguing are the prominent conservative names he will be sharing the program with.
Read MoreOver the summer, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) signed a GOP-backed bill into law that mirrors many anti-Critical Race Theory bills that have passed in the last year or are still being considered in Republican states around the U.S. The text of the law, House Bill 2, the “Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education,” is mild in comparison to other red states’ attempts at silencing discussions of issues like systemic racism and modern racial tensions in public schools.
Read MoreSome conservatives weren’t thrilled in the Reagan-era, but not in the overwrought way on display today.
The gist: Republicans don’t seem to have any satisfying path forward for carrying out their typical obstruction of a Democratic president’s SCOTUS nominee. So they’re tossing their outrage into a tired bucket: Whoever President Biden chooses as his pick to replace retiring-Justice Stephen Breyer will be a Radical Left Activist! The only discernible reason for this assumption is weird and racist: Biden today reaffirmed his campaign vow to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court during his presidency, if the opportunity arose. It has.
And in a 50-50 Senate, Republicans are aware there’s not much they can do to Merrick Garland their way out of handing Biden a Supreme Court appointment win — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) admitted as much mere hours after Breyer’s retirement news broke yesterday. And so, instead, they’re getting a head start on the party’s 2022 messaging, vowing that Democrats will PAY in the Midterms … for doing exactly what Trump did three times during his presidency (i.e., part of his job).
Read MoreHe should’ve known.
As we know, Virginia’s new Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is working furiously to make good on his campaign promise to essentially make combatting Republican grievances, real and imagined, the top priority of the Virginia state government. We wrote recently about his reversal of the state’s universal masking policy for schools. He also moved to ban the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts” (read: “Critical Race Theory”) in public schools on Day One.
During an interview with conservative radio host John Fredericks earlier this week, Youngkin announced a new tip line his administration had set up, asking parents to notify the state government with reports of public teachers “behaving objectionably,” aka talking about race and systemic racism in the classroom, concepts that the GOP continues to squeeze beneath the ill-suited label “Critical Race Theory” — an academic framework that’s ruffled the right into hysterics in recent months.
Read MoreBut some Republicans are already using the Biden administration’s new, common sense decision to pour gasoline on their baseless federal overreach fights.
The Food and Drug Administration removed two monoclonal antibody therapies from its list of approved treatments for COVID-19 this week, at least temporarily. Citing clinical data, the FDA said in a statement that it has found two of the treatments “are highly unlikely to be active against the omicron variant, which is circulating at a very high frequency throughout the United States.” HHS sent out a letter to state officials this week, alerting them that the federal government would stop handing out the treatments made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly to states for now, according to the Washington Post which obtained a copy of the letter.
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