While MAGA went gaga over Democrats’ secret plot “to turn Taylor Swift into an international pop star and the Kansas City Chiefs into a football dynasty so Swift could then date a Kansas City player and leverage the collective media coverage to get Joseph R. Biden, Jr. elected as President,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was throwing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe back in the U.S. Supreme Court’s faces.

Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled on Monday that a woman’s right to reproductive autonomy is “fundamental” (WHYY):

With four separate concurring opinions — three of which also dissented in part from the majority opinion — the 219-page decision in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. PA Department of Human Services is complex. However, the key — and unanimous — finding was that patients and abortion providers could challenge the state’s 1982 Abortion Control Act, which prohibits the use of Medicaid to cover funding for abortions.

The lower court, the Commonwealth Court, had previously said that access to abortion didn’t have anything to do with women’s rights or women’s equality and, therefore, the petitioners did not have merit to file the case — a decision the Supreme Court overruled.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in 1951. “Old times there are not forgotten,” wrote Daniel Decatur Emmett in “Dixie” a century earlier in 1859. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” wrote somebody, but not likely Mark Twain.

Totally recommend this podcast. It just posted today, with 7 episodes. Two reporters from NCPR have investigated and interviewed people in the North Country of NYS about far right ideology and the rise of extremist groups/militias.

As we all know, Elise Stefanik repeats far right talking points such as "replacement theory".

There are clips of the Lewis Co. sheriff, Mike Carpinelli, who is a constitutional sheriff and member of Oath Keepers. He refused to speak with the reporters, but there are clips of him at meetings threatening to go into schools and arrest teachers if they are caught talking about such things as gender identity.

Fulton Co. sheriff Rich Giardino is a member of Protect America Now, a far right sheriffs group. I used to ride for the FultonCo. Sheriffs K9 fundraiser. I won't do it anymore since Rich is getting more and more radicalized. At the last event, he pointed to his puppy and said "She's a girl now but the government says she can choose what she wants to be". How was that necessary and what did it have to do with anything? My uncle hangs out with Rich and I have noticed a change in him. I can't be around him because he espouses conspiracy theories and even made a comment about civil war.

The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “threw Donald Trump under the bus” in testimony to a grand jury investigating election subversion in Georgia, a new book reportedly says, saying the former president would have believed “martians came and stole the election” he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the US supreme court to block his grand jury subpoena – and losing … Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus’,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write in Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, Politico reported.
Trump the sinister playground bully in New Hampshire victory lap

“According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton county confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump ‘that martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you’. He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.”

The book, which cites “a source familiar with [Graham’s] testimony”, will be published next week.

A Colorado pastor who is charged with stealing more than $1m from his Christian community in a cryptocurrency scheme has admitted to the fraud but argued that God instructed him to carry it out.

Eli Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn, are charged with creating and selling their cryptocurrency, known as “INDXcoin”, to Christians based in their home town of Denver, Colorado, allegedly telling would-be investors that the Lord had told him people would become rich if they invested, the state’s division of securities announced in a press release on Thursday.

But INDXcoin was “practically worthless” in reality, prosecutors said in the statement. Investors lost millions of dollars while the Regalados used their investments for lavish living.

The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.

On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”

Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.

On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”

“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”

A Florida school district is facing a federal lawsuit after it decided to remove copies of dictionaries, encyclopedia and other books because the works included descriptions of “sexual conduct”.
US-POLITICS-CONGRESSUS House of Representatives member-elect Maxwell Frost (C), Democrat of Florida, arrives for a group photo with member-elect Harriet Hageman (L), Republican of Wyoming, outside of the US Capitol in Washington, DC on November 15, 2022. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Book bans use ‘parental rights’ as cover to attack civil liberties, Democrat warns
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The Escambia county school district, located in Pensacola, Florida, removed several dictionaries and encyclopedias from school libraries after school officials determined that the books violated Florida law HB 1069.

The law, signed by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, last year, restricts access to materials containing “sexual conduct” in Florida classrooms.

A Christian pastor’s recent trip to a McDonald’s in North Carolina ended in his arrest on allegations that he attacked his wife’s co-worker while threatening to put his head in a deep fryer.

According to authorities, Dwayne Waden’s arrest on 28 December occurred after he went into a McDonald’s restaurant in High Point, North Carolina, where his wife was training to be a manager. The visit was prompted by a call to Waden from his wife, who complained that her fellow employees were “disrespecting her”.

Waden, described as both a pastor of Elevated Life International Ministries and a semi-truck driver, went behind the counter after arriving and punched a worker several times. He then placed his hands around the targeted employee’s neck, led the worker to the deep fryer and threatened to submerge his head until the victim’s colleagues pulled Waden off, police alleged.