Candidate For PA Lieutenant Governor Slapped With Protective Order After Wife’s Abuse Allegations

Teddy Daniels, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Pennsylvania, was ordered to temporarily leave his home and stay away from his wife and child after his wife acquired a court order against him this week.

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‘Well B*tches I’m Back’: Stone Bragged About Returning To Twitter Right Before He Got Banished Again

Convicted Trump ally Roger Stone, who’s been permanently banned from Twitter for five long years, apparently believed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy the social media giant meant his banishment was over.

He was almost immediately disabused of that notion on Thursday when Twitter squashed his attempted comeback.

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The Blueprint for Stealing the 2024 Election

I wanted to flag your attention to a relatively little seen op-ed by a former federal judge named J. Michael Luttig. The title of the piece: “The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election.” Pretty red meat, right? His focus is something we’ve talked about before, the so-called “Independent State Legislature” doctrine. This is the idea — a truly absurd and tendentious reading of the constitution — that holds that state legislatures are the arbiters of the conduct and also the results of federal elections, entirely independent and above the laws of the given state and even the state’s constitution. But before we get into that, let’s get back to Luttig himself who I’ve rather breezily described as a “former federal judge.”

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A Reader’s Guide To The Jan. 6 Committee Hearings: Here’s What You Should Know

The chair of the congressional Jan. 6 committee said Thursday the committee will hold primetime hearings in June. Here’s what we know so far: 

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Dems Demand TSA Crack Down On ‘Repeat Offenders’ With Guns At Airports After Cawthorn Incidents

Democratic leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee are demanding answers after Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) was caught carrying a loaded gun at an airport security checkpoint earlier this week for the second time.

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‘I’m Not Getting In That Car’

Earlier this week, Chris Hayes did a nice job pulling together the various elements surrounding Vice President Mike Pence’s movements (or lack thereof) during the Jan. 6 attempted coup. Some of this has been known for months, other pieces of it have been revealed more recently, but I haven’t seen anyone else bring it all together in one place:

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Liberty University’s Handling Of Sexual Assaults Under Investigation By Education Dept

This article first appeared on ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

The federal Department of Education has begun investigating Liberty University’s handling of student reports of sexual assault. In a statement to ProPublica, the school pledged its “full cooperation” with the investigation.

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Conservatives Keep Pretending Elon Musk Freed Them From Twitter Jail

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Weird Theater

Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk, who was temporarily suspended by Twitter in March for violating its hateful conduct rules, triumphantly announced on Thursday that he was “back” on Twitter “Due to New Management” several days after Tesla CEO/”free speech” messiah Elon Musk made a $44 billion deal to buy the social media giant.

  • Yeah, there’s no “new management” at Twitter. Musk’s deal with Twitter won’t close for at least another three months, so he doesn’t have the power to unsuspend anyone at the moment.
  • Kirk was able to come “back” because he complied with Twitter’s requirement that he delete the tweet that got him suspended. The tweet had misgendered and deadnamed U.S. assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine, who is a transgender woman.
  • Fox News host and testicle-tanning enthusiast Tucker Carlson put on the same show on Monday.
  • By the way, you’ll be shocked to discover that Musk, who’s worth about $246 billion, really isn’t the free speech warrior he claims to be when it comes to unions and labor rights.

Russia Strikes Kyiv During UN Visit

Russian forces fired missiles into Kyiv during United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ visit to the Ukrainian capital on Thursday.

House Jan. 6 Panel To Begin Public Hearings In June

We’ve reached the public testimony stage of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation: Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) announced on Thursday that the panel is slated to hold eight public hearings in June, starting June 9. He also said that the committee will reach out this week to more House and Senate Republicans that panel members want to speak to.

Dem Calls Out GOPers’ Racist Private Talking Points Prepped For Hearing

During the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) pointed out that a certain internal memo showed that the Republicans on the committee may not be acting in 100 percent good faith with their questions.

  • The memo is a 60-page document prepped by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) that outlines specific talking points Republican committee members ought to deploy during the hearing to paint migrants as dangerous and make the Biden administration look soft on immigration.
  • The memo was marked “CONFIDENTIAL — FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY,” and it was leaked to the New York Times, which reported on the document last week.

Biden Says He Won’t Cancel $50K In Student Debt

The President confirmed on Thursday that while yes, he is weighing “some debt reduction” for student borrowers, he isn’t considering going as far as forgiving $50,000 per borrower, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has proposed.

  • Biden said he would announce his decision on debt forgiveness in the next couple of weeks. He didn’t say how much cancellation he was looking at in the meantime.
  • The President had promised to cancel $10,000 in student debt during his campaign. That would wipe out almost 12 million borrowers’ debt entirely, but 70 percent would still be in debt, according to CNBC.

Must Read

“Florida gave voting rights to people with felony convictions. Now some face charges for voting.” – News From The States

Cawthorn Doubles Down On Suggesting Scandalous Behavior By GOPers

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), in the crosshairs of the rest of the GOP for alleging that lawmakers privately used coke and had orgies, tweeted on Thursday night that “many of my colleagues would be nowhere near politics if they had grown up with a cell phone in their hands.”

  • Cawthorn didn’t offer any specifics on that point, but the subtweet came after a video apparently filmed on a phone went viral: The video seemed to show a man putting his hand on Cawthorn’s crotch and the two of them seemingly flirting jokingly.
  • The video just happened to resurface amid the Republicans’ ongoing oppo campaign against Cawthorn; The homophobic idea of leaking the video to embarrass the lawmaker on the basis of queerness echoed in the similarly salacious photos of Cawthorn wearing lingerie that got leaked to Politico last week.

Biden Proposes Selling Russian Oligarchs’ Yachts To Pay For Ukraine Aid

The President put out a new set of proposals for Ukraine aid on Thursday that, among other things, proposes that the U.S. government sell the seized yachts and other assets belonging to sanctioned Russian oligarchs to fund the aid.

  • Here are the fancy megayachts that’ve been seized by the U.S., U.K. and E.U. so far.

How Wokeness Plagues Pools

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) has no respect for those rabbit food-eating Twitter “wokers” who don’t belly-flop into swimming pools:

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