Wisconsin prosecutors on Wednesday asked to issue another arrest warrant for Kyle Rittenhouse for violating his bail agreement. The 18-year-old far right, “Blue Lives Matter” advocate shot and killed two anti-racist protestors and injured a third during demonstrations against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha over the summer. Since then, Rittenhouse has been used as an example by both sides of the division stoked within the U.S.

But the need for Rittenhouse’s rearrest has also caused some confusion. The Kenosha County District Attorney’s Office said they were unable to locate Rittenhouse after he failed to disclose an updated address within 48 hours of moving, “preventing the Court from monitoring his whereabouts,” Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger wrote in a court motion. As a result, prosecutors are also seeking to increase Rittenhouse’s bond by $200,000 for violating the conditions of his bond. 

Binger wrote in the motion that the clerk of the Circuit Court mailed a notice to Rittenhouse’s home on December 22, 2020 “and the notice was returned unclaimed on January 28, 2021.” Then, Kenosha police were dispatched to the residence on February 2 when they learned he was no longer living at that address. 

Rittenhouse’s attorneys objected to the motion and said that “arrangements were made for the Rittenhouse family to reside at a ‘Safe House’” after the family received death threats. Attorney John Pierce, who left Rittenhouse’s legal team in mid-January said that when he went to post bond for Rittenhouse in November, and a Kenosha police captain advised him not to “provide the address of the Rittenhouse Safe House on the form, but to instead provide his home address in Antioch, Illinois.” The Kenosha Police Department could not immediately be reached for comment.

Attorney Mark Richards, who is currently representing Rittenhouse filed a motion on Wednesday objecting to the bond increase. Richards said that he “simultaneously filed a notice updating the court with the defendant’s current address” under a separate motion to keep the safe house address sealed. But Binger refused, according to Richards. 

Prosecutors sought to increase restrictions on Rittenhouse’s bond agreement last month after photos surfaced of the 18-year-old drinking and taking photos with the white supremacist Proud Boys militia at a Wisconsin bar. According to prosecutors, Rittenhouse was seen at the bar 90 minutes after his arraignment on January 5. He was charged with two counts of felony homicide for killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and one charge of felony attempted homicide for wounding Gaige Grosskruetz. 

Rittenhouse pleaded not guilty to the charges, with his legal team maintaining that he acted in self defense when he used an assault rifle to shoot and kill two unarmed protestors.

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Proud Boys Leader Arrested For Burning BLM Flag

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House To Vote On Marjorie Taylor Greene's Work

The House of Representatives will go on the record Thursday in a vote over the conduct of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Democrat-controlled chamber will decide whether to remove Greene from her assignments on the House Education and Labor Committee and the Budget Committee over her violent statements in support of conspiracy theories and violence against other members of Congress. 

Lawmakers will vote on the measure just one day after Republican House Minority Leader, California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, failed to take significant steps to address Greene’s misconduct. McCarthy said last week he planned to “have a conversation” with Greene. On Wednesday, McCarthy released a statement calling her past comments “deeply disturbing,” particularly statements Greene has made about “school shootings, political violence, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.” But McCarthy then went on to accuse Democrats of divisiveness over their decision to reprimand Greene in a House vote. 

After speaking with McCarthy on Wednesday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer motioned to strip Greene of her committee assignments. “I have been in the Congress for 40 years,” said the Maryland Democrat. “I can’t remember — and I’ve thought about it — any situation that I believe is analogous to what Ms. Greene has done before and after her being elected to the Congress of the United States.” Hoyer added there was “no alternative.” 

House Democrats say the vote is a necessary step toward accountability, despite pleas from the right that it could set a dangerous precedent. “A member of this House is calling for assassinations — that’s the new precedent,” said Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat and chairman of the Rules Committee. “If that’s the standard that we remove people from committees, I’m fine with that.” 

McGovern added that members of both parties had been stripped of their committee assignments in the past, including Democratic Rep. William Jefferson and Republican Rep. Steve King. He explained that in the face of previous transgressions, “leadership on both sides always did the right thing.” 

As for Greene, she hasn’t shown remorse for her violent behavior or remarks — including her incitement of violence at the Capitol on January 6 by objecting to the 2020 presidential election results, and her endorsement of comments threatening violence against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama. 

Instead, Greene is using the House vote as an opportunity to fundraise. “We owe them no apologies,” Greene tweeted earlier this week. “We will never back down.” As of Tuesday, Greene said that she had raised “over $160,000 to send a message to the Democrat mob.”

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Can Marjorie Taylor Greene Be Removed From Office?

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After weeks of mostly silence from former President Donald Trump, it seems he’s trying to get back into the media spotlight. But MSNBC’s Brian Williams (allegedly) used the opportunity to poke fun at Trump’s meeting with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy at the Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach on Thursday, where the two apparently met to discuss winning the House majority in the 2022 midterms. 

Instead of cutting to footage of their very important political meeting, Williams “accidentally” rolled a scene from the movie Jerry Maguire. Williams told his guests, comedian Baratunde Thurston and conservative pundit Bill Kristol, they were about to see “what I’m told is the first exclusive video out of this meeting today between McCarthy and Trump.” He added, “We’ll watch it and react on the other side.” 

What happened next was a delightful troll of the former president, who loves media attention but doesn’t like to be the butt of the joke. Williams went on to air a clip from the 1996 classic, during which Tom Cruise’s character tells Renée Zellweger’s, “You complete me.” Zellweger responds through tears, “Shut up. You had me at hello. You had me at hello.” 

@MSNBC / @BWilliams with exclusive video from today’s McCarthy/Trump meeting. Brian Williams is on fire! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/xzTTN9uSfw

— Doremus Jessup (@itdidhappenhere) January 29, 2021

“Obviously we have rolled the wrong clip,” said Williams. “We were sold a bill of goods here,” he added. “I thought this was going to be of the McCarthy and Trump meeting and someone’s gonna be, of course, in big trouble.” In truth, the clip that aired on MSNBC was probably pretty close to what actually went down. Williams then went on to continue poking fun at the meeting, and suggested that McCarthy is perhaps a bit of a Trump sycophant, because he went “down to kiss the ring, and God knows what else, meeting with the deposed former president in his underdecorated Florida home.” Ouch.

The actual clip, which would have been far less entertaining, was supposed to show Trump and McCarthy’s meeting to discuss electing Republicans to the House and Senate in 2022. The former president used the opportunity to talk himself up, as his Political Action Committee Save America said in a statement that his “popularity has never been stronger than it is today, and his endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time.” Of course that couldn’t be farther from the truth — Trump left office with a 57.9% disapproval rating.

McCarthy’s visit with Trump comes three weeks after the former president incited a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. He will face an impeachment trial starting next month to determine whether he should ever be allowed to hold federal office again. The fall-out from the attempted coup has resulted in a rift within the Republican Party, as ten House Republicans voted to impeach Trump and all but five Republican senators voted that a trial would be unconstitutional. 

In any case, Brian Williams appears to be having a good time discussing the former president’s whereabouts. Perhaps in his next segment we will see a clip of The Notebook in place of Trump’s meeting with Rudy Giuliani to discuss the upcoming Senate impeachment trial.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren is once again going after the wealthiest Americans with her proposal for an Ultra-Millionaire (two cent) tax. So, basically it’s Thursday.

During an interview with CNBC, Warren was asked how to contend with the fact that wealthy Americans would allegedly leave the country if they were taxed at the higher rate that she proposes. The anchor who questioned Warren seemed to suggest that the Massachusetts senator’s tax proposal would lead to national economic collapse as the wealthiest Americans fled for tax havens. Of course, Warren wasn’t having any of it. 

“There is no evidence that anyone is going to leave this country because of a two-cent wealth tax,” Warren asserted. “Can we just keep in mind right now in America who is paying taxes?” The senator explained that 99% of Americans paid roughly 7% of their total wealth in taxes in 2020. On the other hand, she said, the top one-tenth of the 1% paid only 3.2% of their total wealth in taxes. “If they added a two-cent wealth tax, they’d still be paying less than most of the people in this entire nation,” Warren argued. 

Warren’s two-cent tax is pretty straightforward. Families with a net worth of more than $50 million would pay a 2% tax on every dollar of their net worth above $50 million, which comes out to a whopping two cents on every dollar. And the handful of billionaires across the country would pay a 6% tax for every dollar above $1 billion. 

“Look, someone has to pay to keep this nation going,” said Warren, and according to her, it’s time for the wealthy to start doing exactly that. “What they want to do is not only keep their wealth, they want to keep building their wealth faster than anyone else. All I’m saying is, can we have just a little fairness here?”

The senator’s proposed wealth tax couldn’t come at a better time. As we approach 11 months of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, with many people facing evictions and food insecurity. While the working class struggles to make ends meet with little financial assistance from the federal government, American billionaires have collectively become $1.1 trillion wealthier. They can probably afford a two-cent tax. 

Moreover, wealthy Americans won’t likely be leaving the country anytime soon, because it’s not actually as simple as just leaving the country. People trying to evade a two-cent tax would also have to renounce their citizenship to skip out on paying them.

“You’re telling me that they would forfeit their American citizenship if they had” to pay a little bit more in taxes, said Warren. “I’m just calling your bluff on that.” And she’s not wrong to do so. Wealthy Americans have threatened to leave the country before when faced with proposed wealth taxes. But most of them didn’t actually follow through.

Warren’s interview comes as we are in the middle of a wild time on Wall Street, thanks to the GameStop controversy, which has served as a reminder that wealthy investors get really upset once it turns out ordinary people have also figured out how to game the system, too. But so upset they might leave the country? Probably not. 

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Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal advocate of the far right QAnon conspiracy theory, has seen her fair share of public backlash in recent weeks. The congresswoman, representing Georgia’s 14th District has been shrouded in controversy over comments on her social media accounts prior to running for office. According to a CNN investigation, Greene “liked” comments on Facebook that threatened violence against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and claimed the “stage is being set” for the executions of Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama over the Iran Nuclear Deal. On Wednesday, Greene faced another round of backlash after a video went viral on Twitter of her harassing David Hogg, a gun safety activist who survived the Parkland, Florida school shooting in 2018. 

As a result, advocacy groups are calling for her resignation, while lawmakers seek to have Greene removed from office just three weeks after she was sworn in. The calls for her removal first came from gun safety groups, including March for Our Lives-Parkland, Moms Demand Action, and Everytown for Gun Safety; as well as from the NAACP, and the advocacy organization People For the American Way (PFAW). 

Several Democrats have also argued for Greene’s removal, with California Congressman Jimmy Gomez on Wednesday introducing a resolution to have Greene removed from office. Citing Greene’s alleged comments about executing political figures, Gomez said in a statement that Greene’s “advocacy for extremism and sedition not only demands her immediate expulsion from Congress, but it also merits strong and clear condemnation from all of her Republican colleagues.” 

Likewise, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock said Greene’s rhetoric and behavior are “dangerous and unacceptable,” and added that she is fanning the “flames of division and we’ve just seen how deadly those flames can be.” Warnock referred to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, of which Greene has been accused of inciting after she objected to the 2020 presidential election results. Colorado Democratic Rep. Jason Crow also suggested expulsion from the House for Greene, and GOP leadership, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he “plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman” over her comments. 

The question now remains: Can Greene actually be removed from her Congressional seat? In short, yes. Expulsion is the harshest form of disciplinary action that can be taken against a representative and requires a two-thirds majority vote from the legislative body seeking removal. According to House records, expulsion “serves principally to protect the reputation of the institution and to preserve the dignity of its proceedings.” But the House is also careful to respect the people’s vote and has never expelled a lawmaker for their conduct prior to taking office. The House has only used its expulsion powers five times over the last 200 years — the last time was in 2002 when Democrat Jim Traficant was removed from office after he was convicted for bribery, racketeering, and tax evasion. 

If the House were able to effectively remove Greene from office, she would, in her own mind, become just one more victim of the so-called radical left’s “cancel culture.” But until then, lawmakers are looking into their disciplinary options.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene Harassed Parkland Survivors

Marjorie Taylor Greene's Facebook Is Resurfacing

Marjorie Taylor Greene Wants Biden Impeached

As lawmakers are preparing to hold former President Donald Trump accountable on impeachment charges of inciting an insurrection, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke out on Friday after Pelosi said she would deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate.

Schumer announced the news on the Senate floor Friday morning, telling lawmakers that he was in discussions with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on how long the trial will last and when it will begin. “But make no mistake, a trial will be held in the United States Senate, and there will be a vote whether to convict the president,” Schumer told the Senate.

Then, something special happened: It was Schumer’s next line in his address to US senators that caused a much-needed laugh for some, if not a moment of (humble) embarrassment for the Senate Majority Leader. “When that trial ends, senators will have to decide whether they believe Donald John Trump incited the erection — insurrection — against the United States.” It was an unfortunate, yet hilarious, gaffe in the very serious matter of convicting a former president on charges of inciting the violent siege of the US Capitol. But it was the gaffe we all needed after a very serious week.

I regret to inform you that Chuck Schumer just said ‘erection’ instead of ‘insurrection’ on the Senate floor pic.twitter.com/U5xRRnkaQg

— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) January 22, 2021

In seriousness, Schumer is currently in talks with McConnell to solidify a start date for the trial after receiving a proposal from the Senate Minority Leader requesting to start the trial on February 13. But Schumer reportedly rejected McConnell’s last-minute request and is attempting to push forward with the trial. Whether or not both parties ultimately agree on whether to push the start date back, sources told CNN the articles will be read and senators and the presiding officer will be sworn in Tuesday afternoon. 

The House voted to impeach the former president on January 13, just one week before President Joe Biden was inaugurated on the 20th. While Trump is no longer a sitting president, the Senate now has an opportunity to make sure he will never again be legally allowed to become president, after encouraging his supporters to overthrow the 2020 election results by force. 

While Schumer was noticeably embarrassed by his “erection” comment, it was also a moment of levity that many people needed on this first Friday in Joe Biden’s America. And for that, we thank him.  

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Trump Made One Last Pardon Before Leaving Office

On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she will deliver articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate this coming Monday, which sets a timeline for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to agree on rules for the trial. Per Pelosi’s delivery, the impeachment trial could begin as early as Tuesday, unless McConnell and Schumer reach another agreement. McConnell is reportedly pushing to delay the proceedings until early February to give the former president time to prepare his defense. 

“We are respectful of the Senate’s constitutional power over the trial and always attentive to the fairness of the process, noting that the former president will have had the same amount of time to prepare for trial as our Managers,” Pelosi said in a statement. 

But because Trump is no longer in office, this impeachment will be different than the last one. When the House of Representatives brought forth articles of impeachment against Trump in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the main question was whether he should be removed from office. Now, the key difference will be that the second impeachment trial, which charges the former president with inciting an insurrection, will seek to block Trump from ever running for federal office again.

Further, during Trump’s first impeachment proceeding, a Republican majority in the Senate made it harder to convict the president at the time. During a normal impeachment, the House of Representatives can vote to impeach with a simple majority and then will send the matter to the Senate for trial. But a conviction in the Senate can be an uphill battle because two-thirds of the Senate must vote in favor of a conviction. For these reasons, the Senate acquitted Trump on both charges during his first impeachment, meaning he was impeached in the House but was not removed from office. 

At this juncture, there is a Constitutional debate over whether the Senate can even hold such a trial for an ex-president. Some experts say that the now-Democratic majority Senate’s decision to hold a trial is a move into somewhat murky territory. Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s most loyal allies in Congress, suggested that Trump should use that in his favor and argue that a trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in office. Nevertheless, the courts have no role in determining how lawmakers will wield their constitutional powers. 

Moving into the next two weeks, Pelosi said, “Our Managers are ready to begin to make their case to 100 Senate jurors through the trial process.” The House impeachment managers will be Jamie Raskin, Diana DeGette, David Cicilline, Joaquin Castro, Eric Swalwell, Ted Lieu, Stacey Plaskett, Madeleine Dean and Joe Neguse. Each of the impeachment managers and jurors were victims of the January 6 attack, making this trial even more unconventional. 

“This was the most serious presidential crime in the history of the United States of America. The most dangerous crime by a president ever committed against the United States,” Raskin told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union. He later pointed out, “I don’t think anybody would seriously argue that we should establish a precedent where every president on the way out the door has two weeks or three weeks or four weeks to try to incite an armed insurrection against the union or organize a coup against the union, and if it succeeds, he becomes a dictator, and if it fails, he’s not subject to impeachment or conviction because we just want to let bygones be bygones.” 

For now, Democrats and Republicans will have to come up with a timeline to prepare for and start the trial, with Republicans pushing for a delay that Democrats are unlikely to agree to. Convicting Trump of inciting an insurrection will still be an uphill battle for the Senate, which will need a supermajority in favor of conviction, because the Senate is evenly split between both parties. But Pelosi maintains, “We are ready.”

As for Trump? Not so much. The former president has only just started to hire his legal team.

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Who Did Trump Pardon On His Last Day In Office?

Nancy Pelosi Has A Lucky Impeachment Suit

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Just one day after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, newly-minted Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, has apparently filed articles of impeachment against him. Ironically, Greene’s aggressive action against the new president comes amid calls from advocacy groups for her own resignation. 

In a video she posted on Twitter on Thursday, Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, announced, “I just filed articles of impeachment on President Joe Biden. We’ll see how this goes.” Greene added in a statement that she believes Biden should be removed from office for “enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits — including financial compensation — from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.” 

Despite repeated claims from some right-wing Republicans that Biden used his position as vice president to promote his son Hunter’s business interests, a GOP-led investigation into the matter found no evidence of any such wrongdoing, The New York Times reported. The FBI and federal prosecutors issued a subpoena in 2019 for a laptop and hard drive that reportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, but upon examination, federal agents found nothing to further their investigation into Hunter’s alleged money-laundering. Most of Greene’s impeachment filing hinges on unsubstantiated allegations, based on a New York Post story placed last year by Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. 

Nevertheless, Greene appears to be using the impeachment filing against Biden as a fundraising opportunity — as if QAnon influencers haven’t already grifted enough. The congresswoman asked her supporters to sign a petition and donate funds to her push for an impeachment; however, the donation page states the funds will go to “Greene for Congress,” according to Business Insider. 

The congresswoman faced calls for her own resignation this week from several gun safety advocacy groups after the progressive media watchdog, Media Matters for America unearthed various false and insulting statements Greene made about the Parkland school shooting. The comments came from a 2018 Facebook post where Greene agreed with a conspiracy theory that the shooting was staged. She also claimed without evidence in another post from December 2018 that “Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.” 

As of Thursday, advocacy groups, including March for Our Lives-Parkland, Moms Demand Action, and Everytown for Gun Safety, had called for Greene’s resignation. And they’re not alone. The NAACP also started circulating a petition in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, demanding the immediate resignation of lawmakers, including Greene, who objected to the 2020 presidential election results, even after the siege. 

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QAnon's Big Inauguration Day Theory Was Wrong

Here's Why TERFs Are Already Mad At Biden

Trump Made One Last Pardon Before Leaving Office

As Joe Biden was inaugurated on Wednesday, some people breathed in a sigh of relief to see that the Trump administration had finally come to its end. Others, like followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory completely melted down as they realized the so-called “Great Awakening” they had been waiting for wasn’t coming after all. 

Followers of the conspiracy theory have long believed that Democratic politicians and celebrities were involved in a Satanic international child sex trafficking network. They were also holding out hope that on January 20, 2021, Donald Trump would declare martial law and round up his political enemies for execution at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. 

Some adherents prepared for a nationwide blackout ahead of the inauguration, as they believed Trump would alert them that the arrests were being made. On Wednesday morning, they remained encouraged that those arrests were coming, noting that Trump had 17 flags with him onstage at his farewell event at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. They noted that Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet and therefore, this could not be a coincidence. 

Among the Democratic elite who were supposed to be arrested and executed, according to the conspiracy theory, was the incoming president. Instead, Biden’s inauguration went off without a hitch and the former president took off for the last time from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. 

If any of us are lucky, we won’t hear from Trump again, but QAnon supporters were a wreck as everything they believed in fell apart. “It’s done and we were played,” one person wrote in a Telegram channel. Another wrote, “I just want to throw up. I’m so sick of all the disinformation and false hope.” Ironically, it was disinformation that led people to the QAnon conspiracy theory in the first place. 

The QAnon conspiracy theory first started gaining traction in right-wing spaces in October 2017 after Pizzagate went viral the year prior. At the time, some people were led to believe that Democrats were running a child sex trafficking network out of the D.C.-based pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong. Since then, supporters of the theory have made a number of predictions, including that Hillary Clinton would be arrested for her role in the activities (which do not actually exist) and that the government was preparing for riots. 

None of these things happened, of course, and a lot of QAnon followers are expressing anger and disillusionment as a result. Many people who follow the conspiracy theory said they were “sick to [their] stomach” on forums and that it was the “Worst day in American history” after the mass arrests didn’t happen, according to a tweet posted by Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer. One post on the Great Awakening forum was titled, “If Q Was a Fake, Why Didn’t Trump Denounce It?” 

Meanwhile, a moderator of the forum warned that posts questioning the validity of Q would be banned, writing, “this IS NOT over HAVE patience,” Slate reports. Some followers still have hope and have started coming up with new theories. “Like many of you, I am in shock by today’s [events] and then I realized why it had to happen and that Q told us it would happen and, why this NEEDED to happen,” read one post on a QAnon forum, according to The Guardian. The post went on to explain the new theory in detail. 

Despite the major Q theory unraveling, researchers of the far right are concerned about where these splintering supporters will go next. Following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, QAnon communities have made their way to platforms that are less regulated when it comes to white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizing. And while the theory is already thriving on antisemitic tropes, some people worry adherents of Q are only a few clicks away from entering and radicalizing further to the right in white nationalist digital spaces.

It’s unclear what will happen next with Q, QAnon, or the fake satanic cabal of Democrats they seem to believe is running the world. What we do know is that QAnon will probably live in the dark corners of the internet (or Facebook) for a little while longer, though hopefully only to fade from memory, much like Donald Trump himself.

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President Joe Biden is already busy undoing some of the legislative harm caused by the Trump administration in his first 24 hours in office. He has signed executive orders to help Americans facing financial stress during the coronavirus pandemic, and ended Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and his construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. While Republicans are up in arms about many of these orders, they’re also particularly irate over Biden’s executive order to rejoin the Paris climate accord. 

Trump loyalists, including Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Rep. Diana Harshbarger both criticized the move. In a tweet, Blackburn said the decision to rejoin the agreement — an international treaty on climate change — would “cost American jobs and force households and small business to pay higher utility bills.” Harshbarger echoed Blackburn’s rhetoric, and claimed that “Instead of putting Americans first, [Biden’s] implementing a liberal agenda to score points with the international community.” 

But it was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — who has become perhaps the biggest Trump sycophant — whose take was worthy of some severe mockery from New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cruz released a statement on Wednesday arguing that by rejoining the Paris climate accord, Biden is “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh.” But the Paris agreement does not only represent the views of Parisians — 189 countries have signed on to the treaty, in a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Still, Cruz went on to claim that the “agreement will do little to affect the climate and will harm the livelihoods of Americans.” 

It didn’t take long for Ocasio-Cortez to come back with an expert jab, as she is known to do. “Nice tweet Sen. Cruz,” she started, before asking, “do you also believe the Geneva Convention was about the views of the citizens of Geneva?” She then took it even further, and added, “Asking for everyone who believes US Senators should be competent and not undermine our elections to incite insurrection against the United States.” 

Nice tweet Sen. Cruz! Quick question: do you also believe the Geneva Convention was about the views of the citizens of Geneva?

Asking for everyone who believes US Senators should be competent and not undermine our elections to incite insurrection against the United States https://t.co/mMf8iDo72G

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 21, 2021

Ocasio-Cortez was, of course, referring to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol led by thousands of Trump supporters, white nationalists, and QAnon believers. Cruz has received backlash from Congressional Democrats, including the New York congresswoman, over his complicity in Trump’s effort to essentially steal the 2020 presidential election. The Texas senator stood by the president in his false accusations and furthered them, while also objecting to count the electoral votes of key states, like Arizona. 

This isn’t the first time AOC and Cruz gone head to head, either. In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, Ocasio-Cortez confronted Cruz over his refusal to condemn the fact that literal Nazis were involved in the planning and carrying out of the violent siege. After Cruz expressed contempt at Biden for referring to some of the attackers as such, Ocasio-Cortez chimed in. “They wore Auschwitz shirts, erected gallows, and tried to hang the Vice President,” she said. “Your continued excusal and denial of Wednesday’s Neo-Nazi presence is abhorrent and dangerous.” Unfortunately for Cruz, he will never stand a chance against his colleague’s sharp words. 

Nevertheless, Biden’s decision to sign back on to the Paris agreement is one small step in the right direction when it comes to the existential threat of climate change, in a continued global effort to move away from fossil fuels. And regardless of what Cruz thinks, even Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto supported the initiative in a series of tweets. “Are you kidding me? Here we go, again…” Peduto wrote in response to Cruz. He later added that despite being a city once fueled by coal and nuclear energy, “Pittsburgh has exceeded our Paris commitments.”

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AOC Thought She Was Going To Die During The Siege

AOC Wants New Leadership In The Democratic Party

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With six days left before President Donald Trump leaves office, the United States government is expected to execute Dustin Higgs on January 15. The Trump administration has carried out an unprecedented number of federal executions after ending an informal 17-year moratorium on capital punishment. As a result, the Department of Justice announced plans last year to move ahead with six federal executions before the end of Trump’s presidency. 

This week, Higgs is scheduled to be killed by the federal government. More than 20 years ago, a Maryland jury found him guilty of 15 counts for the first-degree murder and kidnapping of Tamika Black, Mishann Chinn, and Tanji Jackson in 1996. The victims had been fatally shot after partying with Higgs and two of his friends, Willis Haynes, and Victor Gloria at Higgs’ apartment the night before the murder. 

Though Higgs was convicted of overseeing the kidnapping and murder of the three women, there is no proof that he himself killed anyone — a fact no one has ever disputed, including both Haynes and Gloria, and prosecutors, New York Magazine reports. Higgs’ lawyers have argued that this fact alone should clear him for clemency.  

The night before the murder and before the women left his apartment, Higgs and Jackson reportedly got into an argument. According to a report, Higgs and his friends had been drinking and Jackson had rebuffed an advance from Higgs. At the time, Gloria testified that Jackson had made a threat to Higgs, which prompted the men to follow them. He said that when they found the women, Haynes persuaded them to get into the van with the men who drove them into the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge. There, Gloria said Higgs handed a pistol to Haynes and instructed him to kill the women.  

Haynes confessed to killing the women in a statement he gave to the FBI and the US Park Police at the time. While defense attorneys argued that Haynes acted out of fear of Higgs, in a 2012 affidavit, Haynes wrote, “the prosecution’s theory of our case was bullshit. Dustin didn’t threaten me. I was not scared of him. Dustin didn’t make me do anything that night or ever.” Haynes was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, with Higgs sentenced to the death penalty. 

In just the last month, the Trump administration has carried out three federal executions of incarcerated people on death row. Forty-year-old Brandon Bernard was killed on December 11, 2020; 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois was killed the next day; 52-year-old Lisa Montgomery was killed on January 13, 2021. This week, two more people will be executed by the State: 52-year-old Corey Johnson and 48-year-old Higgs, who were both diagnosed with COVID-19 last month are scheduled for lethal injection this week. 

Higgs’s lawyers appealed his death sentence last month, stating that the state of Maryland abolished the death penalty in 2013. They argued, “Federal law provides that a federal execution shall be carried out in accordance with the laws of the state in which the defendant was sentenced.”

Further, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the US district court on Tuesday ordered for both Higgs’ and Johnson’s executions to be delayed until March, arguing in accordance with medical experts that the coronavirus could cause the men undue suffering from lethal injections, according to The Guardian. Lawyers for both men also filed further petitions on Thursday asking for a rehearing en banc. In a statement, Shawn Nolan, a federal defender representing Higgs said, “We will ask the full court to step in to reinstate the stay, but it is time for the government to stop carrying out super-spreader executions.”

With few days left of his administration, Trump, a longtime advocate of the death penalty, is using his final days in office to cement his legacy as one of brutal violence against Black people.

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Over the last four years, the Trump family has made everyday life even more difficult for most people, including those working to protect them. In the latest, strange chapter of this Trumpian dystopia, it has come to light that U.S. Secret Service agents assigned to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have apparently had to come up with some creative ways to simply use the bathroom. 

Despite the fact that Trump and Kushner have more than six bathrooms in their Kalorama neighborhood home in Washington, D.C., secret service agents have been instructed they’re not allowed to use any of them, the Washington Post reports. Instead, agents have had to go to great lengths to find a bathroom on the job. According to the Post‘s report, in 2017, Secret Service agents relied on a restroom in a garage in former President Barack Obama’s house. They also had to make the one-mile drive to the home of Vice President Mike Pence to use a bathroom in a stand-alone guard station.

Since then, the federal government has been forced to implement some changes. Trump and Kushner’s Secret Service detail is still not allowed to use any of the restrooms inside their home, sure, but they can use one that’s apparently costing taxpayers upwards of $100,000. According to the report, the federal government has spent $3,000 a month since September 2017 to rent a basement studio from the Kushner family’s neighbors, just so they would have easier access to a nearby restroom. Lucky!

“It’s the first time I ever heard of a Secret Service detail having to go to these extremes to find a bathroom,” said one law enforcement official familiar with the situation.

The bathroom saga shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though. After all, Trump and Kushner seem to think of themselves as royalty, as one of their former neighbors said. In the midst of a global pandemic, the Kushners transferred their three kids to a different school after other parents complained the couple wasn’t complying with COVID guidelines. 

Likewise, Ivanka is so out of touch that in an interview with Yahoo! Finance last year, she described her pandemic lockdown experience as similar to “pretty much every parent around the country.” This couldn’t be farther from the truth. The First Daughter, whose net worth is roughly $375 million is having a far different experience during the pandemic than the millions of Americans now facing unemployment. 

Neighbors of the Kushner family, like Marti Robinson, a trial attorney and Obama-appointed member of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission told the Post they just want their “nice, quiet neighborhood back.” And they might be in luck. Last month, the couple bought property in a “Billionaire Bunker” enclave in Southern Florida, where they’re already having trouble with their new neighbors. Yikes!

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