The tactic doesn’t always work, but this was a clever one.

“She was just annoyed at having to see her ex-lover’s face on billboards as she drove around Plano.”

According to the Dallas Morning News, that was Plano, Texas resident Tania Joya’s justification for spilling the beans about an affair she had with incumbent Rep. Van Taylor (R-TX) to one of his opponents ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

Look, we’ve all been there.

But there’s a lot of other stuff going on here — far more, in fact, than Joya’s very valid logic. Let’s unpack.

Over the years, Pat Robertson and other fringe evangelicals and non-serious Christian scholars have become known for exegesis-ing any and all current news events into some sort of Biblical End Time prophesy. For some, COVID vaccines are the “Mark of the Beast.” For others, President Obama was the anti-Christ. (Trump got that distinction, too). The legalization of gay marriage in the U.S. was believed to be a signal that some hybrid Sodom and Gomorrah/rapture-induction event was imminent.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted triumphantly this afternoon that he rejected the Biden administration’s request for states to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. ahead of Tuesday’s State of the Union speech.

As we’ve noted in our live coverage of Russia’s declaration of war and subsequent full-scale military attack on Ukraine in the last 24 hours, there is a schism growing in the Republican Party on whether Vladimir Putin is a mortal enemy, or a brilliant friend. The wildly divergent thinking within the GOP has been on display repeatedly in recent days and weeks.

Ex-President Trump’s long-awaited, much-heralded (in some circles) social media app Truth Social has debuted. And it is, in short, a large glitch fest.

The new social network, which essentially looks like an off-brand version of Twitter, was supposed to launch on Monday, available for download in the Apple Store. Now the Trump Media & Technology Group’s CEO (and former U.S. representative from California) Devin Nunes is suggesting it could be another month before the website is ready for primetime.

The New York Times Magazine published a piece this afternoon that reveals new information about Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the extent to which she was involved in Big Lie-related events leading up to, surrounding and following Jan. 6.

Ginni Thomas’ conservative activism has been eyebrow-raising for years, but in recent months we’ve seen several new in-depth reports that delve deeply into her work and the conflicts of interest they could present for Justice Thomas’ role on the high Court, especially in cases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

If we’ve learned anything about the former president, we know that accountability for his various wrongdoings are often a far-off pipe dream. He tends to find various loopholes to endlessly delay legal proceedings or politically squirm his way out of repercussions.

But today there were two bits of news that suggest he might soon have to answer for at least a fraction of his alleged financial misconduct over the years.

The MyPillow Guy was def just trying to tend to the weary and spiritually malnourished. It was def not a stunt, and how dare you insinuate such a thing.

The details: The MyPillow CEO and Big Lie Guy Mike Lindell, a videographer, an American truck driver and a truck full of “10,000 pillows” were reportedly stopped and denied entry to Canada last night after attempting to cross the Port Huron-Sarnia border into Ottawa. According to the conservative Canadian news outlet The National Post, Lindell was attempting to deliver a bunch of “pillows and Bibles” to anti-vax trucker protesters in Ottawa, but was turned away because he himself is not fully vaccinated and he didn’t have proof of a negative PCR COVID-19 test with him at the time.

It’s hardly a surprise: More than half of the funds donated on at least one crowd-funding website raising money for protesters involved in the Canadian anti-vax trucker demonstrations came from U.S. donors.