<....On the same day, senior assistant solicitor general Dennis Fan of AG James’ office, asserted that the gag orders were proper, and that Trump and his lawyers ignored “multiple warnings” not to disparage Engoron’s staff.

“The court issued its November 3 order, which prohibits the parties’ counsel from commenting on the principal law clerk’s communications with the court, after petitioners’ counsel refused to stop repeating unprofessional and vexatious arguments about the fact that the principal law clerk communicates with and advises the court — which is a significant part of her job,” the state opposition said. “Each of these orders properly imposed exceedingly limited restraints on speech to protect the safety of the court’s staff and preserve the orderly administration of the trial. Accordingly, petitioners’ free-speech arguments are meritless and the equities tip decisively against a stay.”

On Monday, Trump’s attorneys asked for the stay to remain in place pending the resolution of the petition, noting that Engoron on Nov. 17 denied the former president’s push for a mistrial.

“Justice Engoron has acted in excess of his jurisdiction in imposing and enforcing grossly overbroad restrictions on Petitioners’ speech and counsel’s advocacy during an ongoing trial in clear derogation of the freedom of speech guaranteed to Petitioners under the federal and state constitutions,” said the Trump memo in support of an interim stay, rejecting the state’s use of the term “vexatious” to describe the petitioner’s “expressed concerns.”

While acknowledging that Engoron clerk Allison Greenfield was the target of “disturbing, derogatory, and indefensible comments and threats,” Trump’s attorneys said that “none of the contemptible dross reflected in those messages can be attributed to President Trump or his counsel.”

“Nor have President Trump or his counsel ever made a statement referencing the Principal Law Clerk’s religion, appearance, or private activities,” the memo continued. “Rather, the speech prohibited by the Gag Orders concerns the Principal Law Clerk’s public social media posts in furtherance of her judicial campaign and in support of Democratic candidates, groups, and platforms — partisan advocacy that continued during the pendency of this action.”>

<Judge Tanya Chutkan just shut down Donald Trump's latest conspiracy theory.

According to a court filing, Trump requested that prosecutors turn over "missing materials" from the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack and attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.

But, according to a response from Chutkan Monday, those "missing materials" don't exist and thus can't be subpoenaed.

The committee's full investigation is online via Rep. Bennie Thompson's (D-MS) official congressional website.

"Defendant has not met his burdens with respect to his proposed Rule 17(c) subpoenas," Chutkan's ruling explained. "He has not sufficiently justified his requests for either the 'Missing Materials' themselves or the other five categories of documents related to them."

She cited the Scooter Libby case, which explained, “The first prong of this test — relevance — requires the Court to assess whether the documents sought have ‘any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.’”

Among the requests from Trump were any documents pertaining to subcategories — such as videos and transcripts of interviews, anything deemed private, or operational details pursuant to agreements with the White House and Department of Homeland Security.

"According to the letters Defendant cites, however, the Select Committee did not actually send any material under most of those subcategories," the judge wrote.

"With regard to the subpoena duces tecum for the written interview transcripts — subcategory (B) — the Government represents that it 'obtained these materials from the Select Committee, the White House, and the Secret Service, and it produced them to the defendant in its first discovery production more than two months ago,' itemized in a source log," it continues.

"Defendant does not dispute that report. ... The written transcripts are thus 'procurable reasonably in advance of trial by exercise of due diligence' and therefore a Rule 17(c) subpoena for those transcripts is unnecessary.">

<In a blistering column, Fox News analyst Juan Williams honored Rep Matt Gaetz (R -FL) as "2023's Politician of the Year" — but not in a good way.

According to Williams, Gaetz has been nothing but a disruptive force who has almost single-handedly thrown the House into chaos by leading the charge to oust now-former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from his leadership position and bring the possibility of any meaningful legislation to a halt.

In his column published in The Hill, he charged Gaetz with being both "dangerous and corrosive," adding, "Gaetz deserves a place in history. He is a living monument to an era of elected Republican officials with no interest in governing."

According to the Fox News regular, Gaetz edged out fellow House GOP bomb-throwers Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO), while the embattled and likely soon-to-be-ousted fabulist George Santos (NY) also received consideration.

"But Gaetz takes the prize, for successfully paralyzing the House for the entire year," he wrote. " With his hands on the wheel and driving toward revenge and chaos — all to raise his personal profile and stir up small, online donations — Gaetz crashed the House of Representatives in a ditch on a low road."

According to Williams, Gaetz's antics have been a contributing factor in multiple House members, both Republicans and Democrats, throwing up their hands and heading for the exits by not running again in 2024.

"Gaetz represents the empty heart of a Trump-led party that is only about Trump," he lamented, before concluding, "As we look to 2024, Gaetz and other Trump acolytes make up a disturbing preview of the future of the GOP. For that reason, Gaetz is 2023’s Politician of the Year.">

<THIS WAS THE YEAR that democracy failed. The year that, in the English-speaking world at least, citizens stopped being citizens. Exactly what we are turning into is not yet clear, but it’s unlikely to be anything good.

This is a harsh judgement, and hopefully, in our own case, a premature one. In the case of the United Kingdom and the United States, however, it is more than fair. The Brexit decision and the Trump triumph, on their own, constitute more than sufficient evidence to warrant the indictment of both the British and the American electorates.

If it is to work at all, democracy requires a citizenry who both understand and value the principles of representative government. An interested citizenry, who take care to inform themselves about what is happening in their country – and why. A well-educated citizenry, who seek after the truth and cannot be swayed by the cheap falsehoods and even cheaper promises of demagogues and charlatans. A proud citizenry, who prize the scientific, technological and cultural achievements of their nation’s history. A decent citizenry, unwilling, on principle, to use the franchise as a means of inflicting shame and injury upon individuals, groups and organisations which a fraction (maybe even a majority) of them distrust.

In all the long history of the world there has never existed a body of citizens which fitted perfectly this idealised description of a democratic people. Prior to 2016, however, there have always enough of them in the United Kingdom and the United States to ensure that the moral trajectories of those nation states traced an upward course.

The British people overcame the power of their kings and wrenched a welfare state from the pockets of a reluctant capitalist ruling class. The American people, likewise, made good the promises of their Declaration of Independence and abolished slavery – even if they had to fight a bloody civil war to do it. In the 1930s, rejecting the extremes of left and right, they embraced Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and, in the 1960s and 70s, as the world’s most affluent society, they gave birth to the “New Social Movements” of racial and sexual emancipation and environmentalism.

While in both the United Kingdom and the United States the popular struggle for human rights and social progress has endured many difficulties and delays, it has never been decisively reversed. As Dr Martin Luther King reassured all those still fighting for their share of the American dream: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

Or, so we thought, until this horrible year....>

<....Who is to blame?

The very question is emblematic of our malaise. So much of what went wrong in 2016 is attributable to an ever-increasing number of citizens’ furious quest for the causes of their besetting nightmares. Immigrants, Muslims, the undeserving poor, liberals, conservatives, Clinton, Trump: the dread creatures of our unease wear many faces. All of them, however, have one thing in common – they are to blame.

Progressives like to blame globalisation and its ideological bodyguard, neoliberalism. They point to devastated regions and hollowed-out communities filled with men and women psychologically paralysed by their diminished status and security. People mired in a crippling nostalgia for their vanished life-worlds. People frightened of the future. People hungry for some kind – any kind – of social and political revenge.

We are losing faith in collective efficacy. For the second time in a century, the future threatens. The first was after World War I, when the progressive belief that dramatic economic and technological change could be turned to the advantage of ordinary people, by ordinary people, faltered – and with it their faith in democracy. In Europe this disillusionment fuelled the rise of dictators. In the English-speaking world, however, ordinary people’s faith in democracy endured, and the totalitarian dictatorships were defeated.

In the twenty-first century, totalitarianism wears a different mask. Economic and technological change are no longer means to collective emancipatory ends, they’ve become ends in themselves. Winners find a place in the free-market system; losers get spat out. Thirty years of this inhuman political calculus have convinced voters that while they might change parties, they cannot change policies.

Except they can. Not in the progressive spirit of their ancestors, but in the spirit of an ignorant, illiberal and recklessly vengeful nihilism. If the “Establishment” urges them to remain in the European Union, then they’ll vote for Brexit. If Donald Trump represents the antithesis of everything the Establishment’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, stands for, then: “Let’s make America great again!”

As Plato predicted, more than 2,000 years ago, a democratic citizenry that loses faith in its own efficacy will voluntarily entrust its destiny to the first demagogue who learns to speak its language of despair. In 2016, this annus horribilis, those demagogues’ names were Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

<Fulton county prosecutors do not intend to offer plea deals to Donald Trump and at least two high-level co-defendants charged in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, according to two people familiar with the matter, preferring instead to force them to trial.

The individuals seen as ineligible include Trump, his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Aside from those three, the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis has opened plea talks or has left open the possibility of talks with the remaining co-defendants in the hope that they ultimately decide to become cooperating witnesses against the former president, the people said.

The previously unreported decision has not been communicated formally and could still change, for instance, if prosecutors shift strategy. But it signals who prosecutors consider their main targets, and how they want to wield the power of Georgia’s racketeering statute to their advantage.

A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.

Trump and 18 co-defendants in August originally pleaded not guilty to a sprawling indictment that charged them with violating the Rico statute in seeking to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the state, including by advancing fake Trump electors and breaching voting machines.

In the weeks that followed, prosecutors reached plea deals in quick succession with the former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro – who all gave “proffer” statements that were damaging to Trump to some degree – as well as local bail bondsman Scott Hall.

The plea deals underscore the strategy that Willis has refined over successive Rico prosecutions: extending offers to lower-level defendants where they plead guilty to key crimes and incriminate higher-level defendants in the conspiracy pyramid.

As the figure at the top of the alleged conspiracy, Trump was always unlikely to get a deal. But the inclusion of Meadows and Giuliani on that list, at least for now, provides the clearest roadmap to date of how prosecutors intend to take the case to trial.

The preference for the district attorney’s office remains to flip as many of the Trump co-defendants as possible, one of the people said, and prosecutors have asked the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee to set the final deadline for plea deals as far back as June 2024.

At least some of the remaining co-defendants are likely to reach plea deals should they fall short in their pre-trial attempts to extricate themselves from Trump, including trying to have their individual cases transferred to federal court, or have their individual charges dismissed outright.

The prosecutors on the Trump case appear convinced that they are close to gaining more cooperating witnesses. In recent weeks, one of the people said, prosecutors privately advised the judge to delay setting a trial date because some co-defendants may soon plead out, one of the people said.

On Monday, former Trump lawyer and co-defendant John Eastman asked the judge to allow him to go to trial separately from the former president, and earlier than the August 2024 trial date proposed by prosecutors. Eastman also asked the final plea deal deadline to be moved forward.

The court filing from Eastman reflected the apparent trepidation among a growing number of Trump allies charged in Fulton county about standing trial alongside Trump as a major Rico ringleader, a prospect widely seen as detrimental to anyone other than Trump.

In a statement, Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow suggested the former president was uninterested in reaching a deal. “Any comment by the Fulton county district attorney’s office offering ‘deals’ to President Trump is laughable because we wouldn’t accept anything except dismissal,” Sadow said.

But the lack of a plea deal would be a blow to Meadows. The Guardian previously reported that the former Trump White House chief of staff has been “in the market” for a deal in Georgia after he managed to evade charges in the federal 2020 election subversion case in Washington after testifying under limited-use immunity.

It was unclear why prosecutors are opposed to negotiating with Meadows, though the fact that he only testified in Washington after being ordered by a court suggested he might only be a reluctant witness. Reached by phone on Monday, Meadows’ local counsel declined to comment.

<Rep. Matt Gaetz's (R-FL) role as the ringleader behind the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has created enduring resentment among more than a few of the Florida Republican's House colleagues who have grown weary of his grandstanding ways.

According to a report from the Daily Beast's Sam Brodey, Gaetz's unpopularity among Republicans he serves with in the House has grown with one Republican telling the Beast, "There aren’t a lot of people who, you know, are gonna go out of their way to defend Matt Gaetz. I mean, he’s a pretty diabolical character.”

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who admitted Gaetz has almost been involved in two physical fights with colleagues, added, "The anger is pretty well with him. I just think there will be long memories because he did serious damage to our House conference.”

One person who appears to be working behind the scenes against Gaetz is McCarthy, whom Brodey described as stalking "...the halls like a ghost determined to avenge his own murder. In interviews, McCarthy has kept alive the idea that Gaetz and his allies deserve punishment, warning gravely that the party won’t heal 'if there’s no consequences for the actions.'"

McCarthy recently mentioned during a Fox News interview that Gaetz is still being scrutinized by the Ethics Committee, telling Maria Bartiromo, "Once that Ethics complaint comes forward, he could have the same problem as Santos and I think the conference would probably be better united to move forward and get this all done.”

As the Beast's Brodey notes, McCarthy may have a point, reporting that "Ethics is looking into a much broader range of potential violations, many of which could be deeply embarrassing and reputation-harming for Gaetz—including an allegation that he showed inappropriate sexual content to colleagues on the House floor."

The report also notes that, while Gaetz represents a solidly Republican district, voters appear to be getting tired of his act too.

"A new poll from Florida Atlantic University found that, statewide, Gaetz only had a 21 percent approval rating, with 57 percent of voters disapproving of him. Notably, Gaetz was polarizing even in his own party, breaking almost exactly even among GOP voters," Brodey reported.>

No more congressional impunity for you, <boy>!

<The New York judge overseeing Donald Trump's trial in the Stormy Daniels case appears to be unwilling to delay those proceedings.

Justice Juan Merchan signaled in September that he would consider pushing back the trial date from March, which could potentially overlap with his federal trial in the D.C. election subversion case, but he ultimately rejected that and ordered both sides to meet in court a month before that after Trump's lawyers tried to take a peek at his private conversation with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, reported The Daily Beast.

“No further disclosure is required,” Merchan wrote in a Nov. 9 order.

Merchan also argued that Trump had so many legal problems that he might as well keep the original trial date rather than complicate matters further.

“Indeed, adjourning this trial prematurely can only serve to further muddy your client's already crowded trial calendar and possibly result in even further delay,” Merchan wrote.

That order came after the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office argued that Trump was delaying trial dates after overbooking his top defense attorney Todd Blanche, who's representing him in the hush money case, the election subversion case and the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

"[Trump] chose all of the eleven attorneys representing him in this case—not merely the attorney who is also engaged on the D.C. and Florida criminal cases,” argued assistant district attorney Caroline S. Williamson. “The ten other attorneys on the defense team include experienced and capable counsel, many of whom have represented defendant and the Trump Organization for years.”

Blanche and his team asked Merchan in August to move up the scheduled check-in much sooner than February, pointing to the private phone call the judge had with Chutkan over the summer and asking to know exactly what they discussed.

Prosecutors expressed surprise in a Nov. 2 filing that the issue had not come up sooner, because the federal judge brought that up in August when she noted that she's spoken briefly with Merchan to let him know she was considering a trial date that might overlap with his schedule, and a federal court transcript shows defense attorneys did not raise any objections.>

<Former President Donald Trump is testing out a new defense in the Georgia election racketeering case, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday: the First Amendment.

"In a filing on Monday in Fulton County Superior Court, Trump attorney Steven Sadow said the former president will challenge his indictment on racketeering, conspiracy and other charges by asserting his right to political speech and expressive conduct," reported David Wickert.

He noted that "Trump relied on numerous false claims of voting fraud as he tried unsuccessfully three years ago to convince the Georgia General Assembly and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow victory," and the current charges against him allege these efforts amount to an organized criminal enterprise under Georgia law.

Unfortunately for Trump, argued Georgia State law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis, that defense is likely to fall flat.

"This is an argument [that] won’t carry water. The First Amendment does not shield acts of corruption. Trump could have complained about the election or made false allegations about the outcome all he wanted. He had no free speech rights to initiate *acts* to overturn the election," wrote Kreis.

That argument could defend him against arguments that he incited the January 6 attack, Kreis continued — but it doesn't really defend the concrete plans he allegedly made to have votes thrown out.

"There is a critical distinction between airing false grievances to the public and submitting materially false information to official governmental entities to induce them to act corruptly. That is not protected speech. It is unlawful fraud, if proven," Kreis continued. "This would be the functional equivalent of letting a hopeful bank robber enter a bank, pretend to assert a lawful claim to monies held in a bank account, and walk away from the attempted fraudulent act without culpability because it was only speech and the criminal act failed."

All of this unfolds as Trump simultaneously faces a separate criminal case about his efforts to overturn the election, filed in Washington, D.C. by special counsel Jack Smith. That case is currently entangled in a fight over a gag order imposed on the former president, currently on hold pending a decision by the D.C. Court of Appeals.>

Maybe he is telling the truth, this once; after all, the only loyalty he knows is to himself.

<Donald Trump's legal team has argued against an attempt to have him thrown off the presidential ballot in Colorado in 2024 by suggesting the wording of the U.S. Constitution's insurrection clause does not apply to him.

The Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal on a lawsuit filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) watchdog group and Republican figures, who argue that Trump's actions on January 6, 2021, violated Section Three of the 14th Amendment and therefore he should be prohibited from running for the White House again.

The section states a person who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" after taking an oath of office to support the Constitution should be barred from running for office again. In a previous ruling, lower court judge Sarah B. Wallace said that Trump had "engaged in insurrection" on January 6, the day of the Capitol riot, but should remain on Colorado's primary ballot as the wording of the 14th Amendment does not specifically mention preventing people from running for the presidency.

In their appeal against the Colorado lawsuit, Trump's lawyers reiterated that the wording of Section Three does not apply to people running for president and that Trump technically did not swear an oath to "support" the Constitution. Instead, during his January 2017 inauguration, Trump swore to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution during his role as president.

"The framers excluded the office of President from Section Three purposefully," Trump's legal team wrote. "Section Three does not apply, because the presidency is not an office 'under the United States,' the president is not an 'officer of the United States,' and President Trump did not take an oath 'to support the Constitution of the United States.'"

Newsweek reached out to Trump's legal team via email for comment.

The argument that Trump did not support the Constitution in his oath has been criticized on social media.

"Wow in a legal proceeding Trump is now arguing he didn't violate the 14th Amendment by inciting the Jan 6 insurrection because he 'never took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States.' This treacherous criminal is head of the Republican Party," Democratic New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Tristan Snell, a lawyer and former assistant attorney general for New York state, wrote: "Donald Trump is arguing the president is not an 'officer of the United States' — and so he can't be disqualified from office under the 14th Amendment for his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. Yes, you read that correctly. This is how bad his legal arguments are."

Former federal and state prosecutor Eric Lisann posted: "Crazy as it sounds Trump made that exact same argument to the Colorado trial judge and somehow it is the only argument the judge agreed with him on."

Trump, the front-runner in the GOP presidential primary, has denied all wrongdoing in connection to the January 6 attack and has described attempts to prevent him from running for office again by citing the 14th Amendment as a "trick" to prevent him winning the 2024 election.

Geoffrey Blue, a Colorado-based attorney for Trump, previously used the same argument as to why the 14th Amendment cannot be cited to stop Trump from the presidency again in an October 9 filing to try to have the lawsuit thrown out.

"Because the framers chose to define the group of people subject to Section Three by an oath to 'support' the Constitution of the United States, and not by an oath to 'preserve, protect and defend' the Constitution, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment never intended for it to apply to the President," Blue wrote.

"If they wanted to include the President in the reach of Section Three, they could have done so by expanding the language of which type of oath would bring an 'officer under the strictures of Section Three. They did not do so, and no number of semantic arguments will change this simple fact. As such, Section Three does not apply to President Trump."

Oral arguments are scheduled to begin on December 6 after the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal on Wallace's decision that Trump can remain on the ballot in the Centennial State.>

<Donald Trump had a “good faith” basis to question the results of the 2020 election, his lawyers said in demanding that prosecutors turn over any evidence related to voting irregularities and potential foreign interference in the contest won by Democrat Joe Biden.

A defense motion filed late Monday in federal court in Washington asserts that Trump was not obligated to accept at face value the judgments of government officials who found no widespread fraud in the election. It raises the prospect that foreign actors might have influenced the race and alleges that the federal government gave “false assurances" to the public about the security of the election that exceeded what was actually known.

“It was not unreasonable at the time, and certainly not criminal, for President Trump to disagree with officials now favored by the prosecution and to rely instead on the independent judgment that the American people elected him to use while leading the country,” the lawyers wrote.

The filing is the clearest indication yet that Trump’s lawyers are hoping to sow doubt before a jury in the legitimacy of the race or at make the case that his skepticism was justified and not motivated by criminal intent. The lawyers seek permission to force special counsel Jack Smith's team to produce vast swaths of information that they say could aid his defense, including the “the impact of foreign influence" and “actual and attempted compromises of election infrastructure” as well as evidence of potential “political bias” that could have shaped the intelligence community's assessment of the election.

Courts around the country and Trump's own attorney general have found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome, and the Homeland Security Department's cybersecurity arm pronounced it “the most secure in American history.” Smith's team alleges that Trump, a Republican, ignored all of those findings and launched an illegal plot to undo the election and block the peaceful transfer of power.

But the Trump team asserts in the 37-page filing that he had reason to question the results.

The motion recounts Russian efforts in 2016 to undermine confidence in that year's election, though it glosses over the intelligence community's assessment that Moscow had a “clear preference” for Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

It also revisits the intelligence community's effort in 2020 to discern potential interference by countries including Russia, China and Iran. It quotes from a Jan. 7, 2021 memo from John Ratcliffe, the then-director of national intelligence and a close Trump ally, that said China sought to influence the election. And it seeks information from prosecutors about a Russian cyberespionage campaign in 2019 and 2020 that affected numerous federal government agencies, saying that intrusion calls into question the confidence being expressed by officials at that time in the security of the election.

“The Office cannot blame President Trump for public discord and distrust of the 2020 election results while refusing to turn over evidence that foreign actors stoked the very same flames that the Office identifies as inculpatory in the indictment,” the motion states.

It goes on to say: “The Office cannot rely on selected guidance and judgments by officials it favors from the Intelligence Community and law enforcement while ignoring evidence of political bias in those officials’ decision-making as well as cyberattacks and other interference, both actual and attempted, that targeted critical infrastructure and election facilities before, during, and after the 2020 election."

Defense lawyers are also seeking to force prosecutors to turn over documents related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when pro-Trump loyalists stormed the building in a violent confrontation with police in an effort to disrupt the counting of electoral votes. The attorneys are looking in part for statements by prosecutors that they say could conflict with the Smith team's assertion that Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol that day.

The Trump lawyers have already asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to dismiss the indictment, saying he is shielded from prosecution by presidential immunity and arguing that the charges violate his First Amendment rights. Those requests are still pending.>

<A contingent of right-wing Republicans wants to remove the leaders of the Minnesota Republican Party, including Chair David Hann, at the Dec. 9 meeting of the State Central Committee. A group of delegates and alternates to the State Central Committee laid out their case in a letter for removing Hann, who was elected in 2021 after a federal sex trafficking scandal and allegations of a toxic work environmentled to the fall of former Chair Jennifer Carnahan.

The state Republican party has been financially struggling — in part due to the cost of dealing with the Carnahan fallout — and divided over former President Donald Trump.

The insurgent group claims Hann failed to responsibly manage GOP resources and maximize support for 2022 candidates, contributing to a dismal election for Republicans in which Democrats won a trifecta.

Hann said everything alleged in the document was “well known” when state officers were elected in December.

“There’s nothing of substance in it,” he said. “I just would hope no journalist would report allegations without any basis.”

Larry Doose, chair of Mille Lacs County Republicans and a State Central Committee delegate, said he is one of over 100 delegates and alternates to the State Central Committee who signed onto the letter seeking new leadership, out of about 900 total. They need two-thirds to vote with them to succeed.

Doose said that’s a high bar, but he’s hopeful that “once people see the truth,” they’ll vote for new leadership.

“If they survive this then the people like me that have a problem can at least say we got heard … and we can all move on,” he said.

He said the group — which has dubbed itself Rebuild the MNGOP and is predominantly made up of the MAGA wing of the party — has been pushing to correct the problems for a couple months, and finally decided to go public.

“There’s a lot of displeasure with our leadership,” Doose said. “Basically we want to move on and elect our candidates and not have this be a distraction.”

He said Rebuild the MNGOP is composed of newer people in the party, like him, who got involved after the 2020 election “because of what we saw happening” as well as other longer term Republicans.

“What unites us the most is the leadership; we have recognized that the leadership will not own up to problems or mistakes that they’ve made,” he said. “And there’s this sense of entitlement among them.”....>

<....The complaint alleges Hann has mismanaged donations to the party, jeopardizing its ability to raise money and receive national committee funds next year. They say the party paid off millions of dollars in debt from 2017 to 2021, but is now again hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red. That’s in part because the party paid $52,000 to vote electronically at the 2022 convention — instead of using “tellers” as was the procedure for decades — and spent $128,000 for audio/visual services at the convention instead of using the Rochester Civic Center’s audio/visual equipment.

Federal Election Commission reports show the party with $145,000 cash on hand, but $414,000 in debts. The most recent state campaign finance report, which doesn’t include any 2023 data, shows $8,000 cash on hand, and $76,000 in debts.

Doose and other signatories want details on attorneys working on litigation for the party, including their billable rates.

The complaint also alleges Hann violated the rights of state convention delegates in May 2022 by extending the raucous convention an hour past the set adjournment time, even though many delegates had left. They claim changes to the constitution made in that last hour were invalid, including extending certification of affiliates from one year to two and initially certifying the Hispanic Republican Assembly of Minnesota.

Doose said after delegates were told to leave, the convention reconvened and they “rammed through” a bloc of amendments. The group alleges Hann did not properly re-certify affiliate groups.

Doose said it’s important because once the party aligns with an affiliate group, that gives the affiliate influence in the party and a vote at the state convention, so when re-certifying them, “We are taking a look at their values and making sure they align with our party.”

In the runup to the convention, the State Central Committee failed to formally recognize a number of affiliate groups that add diversity to the party, including the Log Cabin Republicans of Minnesota and Asian American Republicans of Minnesota. The complaint demands to know how many events were held by the party to support affiliates last year, and how many events are planned next year.

The convention — where many candidates appealed to the very loud MAGA segment — was so heated that convention-goers were warned to leave their sling shots, flamethrowers, potato guns, large knives, irritant sprays and “hoards of insects” at home. (Real guns were fine.)>

'Hoards' of insects? Really?

Maybe they're vermin.

Perhaps <ursus banalus> can weigh in with his .00000000002 on the matter. (rolls eyes)

<Last winter there was misery in the Alps. A shortage of snow led to predictions of a disaster under such headlines as “Is this the end of skiing?” They were accompanied by photographs of thin strips of artificial snow on slopes usually buried under feet of the white stuff. Over the New Year, parts of north-west Switzerland recorded temperatures close to 20C.

The BBC reported: “Many resorts are aware that they only have two options: close or adapt their business model to cope with mounting climate threats.”

Well, this year the northern Alps have more pre-season pistes open than at any time in recent history after days of heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures.

The point of this story is not to deny that there is a global warming trend, but not to confuse weather with climate. Nowadays, every storm, blizzard, flood, dry spell, forest fire or deluge is attributed to climate change.

This means it is often hard to discern a long-term change from a short-term event. When fires in parts of the world where they have been commonplace for centuries – and are a key to plant growth – are said to be solely the consequence of warming, people are being deliberately misled. This apparent inability to distinguish between the vagaries of the weather and climate change does not help in the debate about what to do about it.

Neither, in truth, do the annual jamborees organised by the UN for the past quarter of a century and whose latest iteration starts in Dubai tomorrow. Most people would regard a refusal to see every unusual weather event as a symptom of global warming as common sense. It is possible to acknowledge long-term trends without seeing normal autumn gales and winter storms in the context of climate change.

But the zealots think differently. A group called Climate Genocide Act Now, which is linked to Extinction Rebellion, is planning legal action against this newspaper for what it calls misleading and inadequate coverage of climate change. It wants the case heard, believe it or not, in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and says it has a professional legal opinion noting that policies causing climate change can be prosecuted as crimes against humanity.

This includes questioning the cost of getting to net zero, challenging the timetable for introducing electric cars and reporting on the difficulties of installing heat pumps. The failure to connect weather events like the recent Storm Ciaran to the broader narrative of climate change is another point of criticism, as are adverts encouraging people to take a foreign holiday....>

<.....“We’re planning to get a dossier of evidence covering six months, and submit a case to the International Criminal Court to say that this is evidence of incitement of crimes against humanity. We think we’ve got a chance of getting there,” the group’s leader said. At least it will be good work for the lawyers.

This is clearly a tiny group of fanatics, and yet such people increasingly wield an inordinate amount of influence in many walks of life, not least the arts world. Ahead of the Cop 28 conference in Dubai, the actress Olivia Colman is appearing in a campaign video dressed up as a latex-clad oil executive, criticising the relationship between pension funds and the fossil fuel industry.

“The cash from your pensions has helped us dig, drill and destroy more of the planet than ever before. We’ve even managed to build a few little wind turbines to keep Greta and her chums happy,” she says. “Every little drop from your precious nest egg adds up, so while the global temperature may go up a teensy, weensy degree or two our profits are literally soaring.”

When it comes to misrepresentation, there is quite a lot in that statement. We have built more than a “few little wind turbines” and we need oil and gas to keep the lights on, so either we import it or extract it from our own territory. Our pension funds need to be profitable to sustain an ageing population. But I suppose these considerations don’t matter to the eco-fanatics, not least when the Bank of England itself has a specific climate change remit.

We give too much credence to these small but very vocal campaign groups. One of the most potent is Stonewall, which seems to have managed to bludgeon the public and corporate sectors into spending vast sums to conform to its demands for diversity and inclusivity. Most major companies employ people whose only (well-paid) job is to impose a particular ideology on its workforce.

The NHS, struggling to clear a record backlog of cases, employs hundreds of diversity officers while many businesses covet Stonewall’s imprimatur as a diversity champion. Schools and colleges still seem to be enrolled on Stonewall programmes to promote transgender inclusion. But its reach is wider still. Yesterday, we reported how the UK’s human rights watchdog, the EHRC, could be blacklisted by the UN apparently after Stonewall objected to the way the organisation defended biological sex.

Why do we allow these pressure groups so much influence? The guilt generated by Black Lives Matter, an anti-capitalist movement that wanted to dismantle the police, has caused normally rational people to hand over their life savings to atone for their family involvement in slavery hundreds of years ago.

Universities ban speakers because they refuse to say a man can menstruate; the police arrest preachers for saying something disobliging about Pride marches; teachers are unwilling to tell parents that their eight-year-old boy wants to be a girl; and we are accused of genocide because we point out the cost of heat pumps.

It is telling that these pressure groups never take their climate change campaign on to the streets of Beijing or protest for trans rights in Jeddah or demand reparations for slavery from the oil-rich Arab nations. They target the West because it provides them the latitude to make a very nice living from their insidious social engineering while the majority is cowed into silence.

I hesitate to say this, but there is a small chance it might snow here in the next few days, which is unusual this early in the winter though hardly unprecedented. That’s another offence to be taken into consideration by the ICC in The Hague.>

<Kevin McCarthy used his brief tenure as speaker of the US House of Representatives to wage a culture war against what he decried as “woke indoctrination in our schools.” Borrowing a page from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other right-wing firebrands, the Republican speaker went out of his way to attack critical race theory and the honest teaching of American history.

McCarthy is no longer second in the presidential line of succession, but the former speaker is still trying to replace facts with fantasy.

On Sunday, McCarthy posted a video of himself explaining that “in every single war that America has fought, we have never asked for land afterward — except for enough to bury the Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.”

A crowd of fans applauded the assertion, which undoubtedly fit their right-wing worldview. The problem, of course, was that they were applauding a claim that—even by the diminished standards for veracity associated with House Republicans—was wildly inaccurate.

The United States, which took its current form via a “westward expansion” that displaced native peoples from coast to coast, has a very long record of making post-war land claims. The Revolutionary War was settled with the 1783 Treaty of Paris in which, according to the US Department of State, “The United States succeeded in obtaining Newfoundland fishing rights (and) a western border that extended to the Mississippi River with rights of navigation.” Ensuing centuries would see the US take control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and, for a time, the Philippines.

But the war-related land claim that McCarthy should be most familiar with is closer to home. The House district he represents is in California, a state that was a part of Mexico until the US invaded and took it.

The US-Mexico War of the mid-1840s, which was launched amid a slurry of lies from President James K. Polk, ultimately seized a vast stretch of northern Mexico in an imperialist land grab so blatant that abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said “every lover of Freedom and humanity” should oppose it. Among the many critics of the war was a one-term US representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who with other members of the former Whig Party decried it as a crude scheme by Polk—a Tennessean who has been aptly described by the White House Historical Association as “a profit-hungry slave owner”—to expand slavery into newly-conquered territories. Henry Clay, one of McCarthy’s predecessors as speaker of the House, declared, “This is not a war of defense, but one of unnecessary and offensive aggression.” A US Army lieutenant in the war, Ulysses S. Grant, would observe years after its conclusion that, “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”

A young writer from Concord, Massachusetts, was so horrified by the invasion of Mexico that he refused to pay war taxes. After being arrested and jailed for his protest, Henry David Thoreau wrote “Civil Disobedience,” the broadly influential essay in which he declared that, “when a sixth of the population of a nation, which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”

McCarthy may not have read Thoreau quite so closely as did Mahatma Gandhi or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But he might at least have recognized that, in the Golden State’s Kern County, which he has represented for decades in the state legislature and the US Congress, President Polk’s war of conquest made vast swathes of land that had been on the northern cusp of Mexico—including Ranchos Los Alamos Y Agua Caliente, Rancho El Tejon, and Rancho Castac —a part of the new American state of California.

But, of course, he didn’t. That has inspired a flurry of offers from American historians who are prepared to give him a refresher course, including Columbia University professor Karl Jacoby, who said Monday that he “Wanted to thank ex-speaker McCarthy for reassuring me that Americans needs my forthcoming book on the U.S.-México War.”>

<A vote to expel the mendacious Rep. George Santos (R-NY) is coming as soon as later today, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is angry that the GOP majority in the House is even thinking about removing Santos but won’t pass her articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden.

“Let me get this straight,” she wrote on X. “The Republican majority controlled Congress has ousted a Republican Speaker and is now on the verge of expelling a not yet convicted Republican member, but we can’t even impeach [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro] Mayorkas or Biden or stop the weaponized DOJ against Trump and all their political enemies?”

Shortly after Santos was elected to Congress in 2022, several articles in the New York Times brought his lies to national attention. He lied about where he went to school, who he worked for, his family background, and even about being a star volleyball player.

Then came the accusations that he had been scamming people – or just outright stealing from them – for years. He also faced allegations of sexual harassment this year from his time in Congress.

Later in the year, Santos was charged with 13 – and then ten more – federal criminal charges in connection to various alleged schemes to enrich himself at the expense of his campaign donors and the government.

Earlier this month, the House Ethics Committee released its report where the committee voted unanimously that there was “substantial evidence” that Santos used campaign funds for his personal expenses and “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”

Santos has already said that he won’t seek reelection next year. Still, he refuses to resign, arguing that the House voting to expel him before his criminal trial has commenced is a violation of due process, even though the House has already completed its investigation.

Throughout it all, Greene has defended him. Last December, she said that “the real reason [Democrats are] attacking George Santos is that he is the first openly gay Republican elected and they hate him for it” and that he deserves “grace” because he “is admitting and apologizing for lying about his resume.”

As the House voted repeatedly for a new speaker in January, Greene and Santos were often spotted hanging out together in the chamber.

In May, after House Republicans blocked the first resolution to expel Santos, Greene got into a shouting match with Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) to defend Santos.

Santos and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) reportedly had a conversation over Thanksgiving weekend about the Ethics Committee’s report on Santos.

“I’ve spoken to Congressman Santos at some length over the holiday and talked with him about his options,” Johnson told The Hill about their conversation. “But we’ll have to see. It’s not yet determined, but we’ll be talking about that when we get back tomorrow.”

Santos has already survived two attempts to expel him, the first time in May when several out LGBTQ+ Democrats filed a resolution to expel him and the second time earlier this month after several New York Republicans filed a resolution to expel him. But even Santos himself is saying that he doesn’t expect to survive this time.

“I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” Santos said last Friday. “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”

While not even a majority voted to expel him the first two times – two-thirds are needed to expel him – many Republicans who voted against his expulsion the last two times have changed their minds now that the House Ethics Committee’s report has been made public.

If he is expelled, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) can issue a proclamation for a special election to find someone to replace him for the remainder of the congressional session.

Greene, along with many other far-right Republicans, doesn’t like Secretary Mayorkas because they blame him for undocumented immigration into the U.S. It’s not clear if that qualifies as an impeachable offense – Greene argued that Mayorkas is not fighting undocumented immigration enough to meet the requirements of the 2006 Secure Fence Act – and it’s unlikely that the Democratic Senate will vote to remove him. Greene filed a resolution to impeach him earlier this month, which got referred to committee, where it’s expected to languish.>

<On Saturday’s coffee klatch, I mentioned a speech I gave almost exactly 29 years ago that predicted Trumpism. The speech made headlines — and also made the White House furious. Many of you wanted to know more.

As secretary of labor, I thought it important to explain why the Democrats had lost both the House and the Senate in the 1994 midterm elections. I attributed it to the fact that many Americans felt angry and frustrated about not getting ahead, and they took it out on Democrats who had been running Congress for many years.

I also felt it necessary to sound the alarm about the future:

“My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays, and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?”

I was tragically prescient.

Speeches by Cabinet members were supposed to be approved in advance by the White House, but in this case I doubted the White House would approve my speech because it was so foreboding. So I sent to the White House a different speech — one that was anodyne and boring.

I thought I could get away with this because I doubted the media would pay much attention to my speech.

I was wrong. It made headlines.

Not surprisingly, I was ordered to the White House — where an ambush awaited me. Clinton’s chief of staff Leon Panetta, his economic adviser Bob Rubin, his political adviser George Stephanopoulos, and other top advisers told me in no uncertain terms that I had violated White House rules.

They accused me of not being a team player and barred me from making any further speeches.

I told them I didn’t work for them. I had been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and they had no power over me. I’d be silenced only if the president directed me to be.

Well, that was the end of it. I knew Bill Clinton wouldn’t tell me to stop speaking my mind.

But his top advisers did have a point. Cabinet officers must be team players. Otherwise, the executive branch can’t function. In this instance, I wasn’t a team player.

I never regretted giving that speech.>

<Seems a couple of the conservatives on this page are becoming stale. So as a public service, I'm posting a section of Newt Gingrich's seminal 1996 GOPAC memo, "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Of course language has evolved (oops, I mean "changed"), and new words such as "socialist," "Marxist," "Kenyan" and "Natsocrat" have become effective.

<Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

<Donald Trump's lawyers accused former Vice President Mike Pence of colluding with President Joe Biden so he could avoid charges for allegedly being in possession of classified documents after leaving the White House, according to a new court filing.

"The potential criminal charges faced by Vice President Pence gave him an incentive to curry favor with authorities by providing information that is consistent with the Biden Administration's preferred, and false, narrative regarding this case," the filing, which was first reported by Politico, reads.

In the new motion, which was filed on Monday, November 27, Trump's attorneys raised questions about Pence's credibility as it pertains to the 2020 election, which Trump claims was rigged even though there is no evidence to support this.

Trump was later indicted on four counts for allegedly overturning the election results.

On January 26, 2021, Pence was planning on certifying Biden, 81, as winner of the 2020 election, but according to a new report, this wasn't always how it was supposed to go.

ABC News spoke to sources close to Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation into an alleged plan Trump and his associates had to overturn the election results. Smith's team received notes written by Pence prior to January 6 where the former VP was not going to attend the certification proceedings.

The note reportedly said Pence thought there were "too many questions" about the election and attending would be "too hurtful to my friend," likely referring to Trump.

As OK! previously reported, Pence spoke about January 6 and how he didn't agree with Trump's motives.

“President Trump was wrong,” Pence, 64, said during remarks at the Gridiron Club dinner, which took place in mid-March. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

“Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace,” Pence continued. “And it mocks decency to portray it any other way.”

In November 2022, Pence was upset with Trump, as he didn't try and stop the riots and violence from occurring.

"I mean, the president's words were reckless. It was clear he decided to be part of the problem," Pence told ABC's World News Tonight anchor David Muir.

"I turned to my daughter, who was standing nearby, and I said, 'It doesn't take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law,'" Pence said of the people who stormed the Capitol in 2021.

"The president's words were reckless and his actions were reckless," he continued. "The president's words that day at the rally [before the riot] endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol building.">

<Donald Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination next year, but that hasn't stopped President Joe Biden's campaign, noticing a recent surge in the polls from Nikki Haley, from offering a view of what running against the former governor would look like.

Haley received an endorsement from Americans for Prosperity Action on Tuesday, a key cog in the universe of groups aligned with the Kochs [sic], the anti-Trump family who have a significant network of donors and have personally poured millions into Republican efforts over the last few years. In their announcement, the group cast Haley as the best general election candidate in the Republican field and someone who could help the party move on from its Trump domination.

While the endorsement is sure to open a potent spigot of money for Haley, her odds of winning the nomination remain long given poll after poll shows Trump with a lead in all early nomination states and nationally.

But Democrats, both inside and outside Biden’s campaign, acknowledged Tuesday there are plans on how the president’s reelection would run against Haley, with most of the ideas centering around tying her to Trump both on policy - they agree on scores of issues - and personally – she served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“It’s no surprise the Koch network, architects of Trump’s MAGAnomics agenda, found their match in Nikki Haley, who checks all of their boxes: slashing taxes for the ultra-wealthy, gutting Social Security and Medicare, and ripping health care away from millions of Americans,” said Sarafina Chitika, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.

As unlikely as it is that Haley would become the nominee, some Democrats privately acknowledge that she would likely represent a worrisome opponent for Biden, citing polling that shows the former governor as the best-positioned candidate to unseat the sitting president in the general election.

A poll this month from The Marquette Law School found Haley with 55% support from a national sample of registered voters, compared to 45% for Biden, giving the former governor a ten percentage point lead. The same poll found Trump leading Biden by 4 percentage points and DeSantis leading the president by 2 percentage points.

While other polls have found a tighter race between Biden and Haley, a Fox News survey released this month found the former South Carolina governor with a 9 percentage point lead over Biden, compared to only 4 percentage points for Trump and 5 percentage points for DeSantis.

Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokesperson for Haley's campaign, cited these polls in their response to the Democratic attacks.

“Everyone knows why Joe Biden and the Democrats are attacking Nikki Haley—because they’re terrified of running against her," said Perez-Cubas. "The polls show it and Democrats have admitted it. Nikki will not only beat Joe Biden, she’ll help Republicans win up and down the ballot.”....>

Backatcha.....

<“We are going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning,” presidential candidate Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters in April 2016. For any other politician, it would have been an unusual boast. But not for Donald Trump.

Because winning, at any cost, is all that matters for him. It’s his white whale. Even before launching his campaign, he told biographer Michael D’Antonio: “If you have a record of winning, people are going to follow you.” But, he quickly added, “if you lose a lot, nobody’s going to follow you, because you’re looked at as a loser.”

As ABC’s Jonathan Karl outlines in his powerful new book, “Tired of Winning” — Karl’s third book on the Trump presidency, and his best yet — more than anything else, those 10 words — “if you lose, nobody’s going to follow you, because you’re looked at as a loser” — explain Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election and during the last two years. It was all driven by one obsession: his determination not to go down in history as a loser.

And yet — and here’s the truth he cannot bear — he is a loser. And not just a loser on Nov. 3, 2020. Donald Trump is, Karl concludes, “the biggest loser in the history of American politics.” For himself and his entire universe. “His losses are so big and so thorough,” notes Karl, “they have infected just about everything and everyone he’s touched.”

After looking back with Karl on Trump’s last days in the White House and his mad antics since, we’re lucky we even survived them. His desperate attempts to remain in office were even more dangerous than previously reported. Two prime examples.

First, when Trump and his loyalists were having a hard time persuading state election officials to “produce new votes,” Trump tried a bolder tack. With his blessing, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, suggested that the military could declare martial law — and force a “rerun” of the 2020 election in several key states.

Appalled, Army Chief of Staff James McConville and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy issued a flat denial: “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”The action so outraged the commander in chief that he directed his new personnel director John McEntee to tell the secretary of Defense that any other Pentagon leader who showed such “disloyalty” would be fired.

Second, as late as March 2022, 14 months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Trump told Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) he would have to do four things to retain Trump’s endorsement for his Senate campaign: call for rescission of the 2020 election; call for immediate removal of Biden from the White House; demand that Donald Trump be reinstated as president; and call for a special rerun of the presidential election. All of which are both unconstitutional and impossible. Brooks refused. Trump unendorsed him.

What’s truly remarkable about Karl’s book is that the most damning comments about Trump come from those closest to him, including this from one identified only as having served “at a high level in the Trump White House”: “He lacks any shred of human decency, humility or caring. He is morally bankrupt, breathtakingly dishonest, lethally incompetent, and stunningly ignorant of virtually anything related to governing, history, geography, human events or world affairs. He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation and represents a clear and present danger to our democracy and the rule of law.”

“Tired of Winning” should be required reading before voting in 2024.>

<The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an @#$%*@!.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.

12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.>

<In the aftermath of MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough's scathing rebuke of Donald Trump's divisive rhetoric, and the subsequent Twitter tirade from the former president, The Atlantic magazine writer Peter Wehner has taken the opportunity to hit back. The feud escalated when Trump targeted the outlet labeling it a "THIRD RATE MAGAZINE" and accusing it of failing at an unprecedented level. The trigger for Trump's outburst was reportedly Wehner's article titled, "Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?" which delved into the former president's open admissions of his affinity for authoritarianism.

Wehner's response seems to resonate with the concerns raised by Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski about the Trump administration's tactics, as per Raw Story. In a revelation, the Morning Joe hosts claimed that White House officials had threatened them with negative news coverage unless they tempered their criticism of Trump. Brzezinski recounted how calls were made to her children and close friends, attempting to pin a damaging story on her ex-husband. Scarborough revealed that high-ranking administration figures pressured him to call the president, a request he declined.

The clash between Trump and the media extends beyond Twitter spats to the tabloid realm, with Trump's alleged influence over the National Enquirer coming into play. Brzezinski and Scarborough disclosed that the tabloid ran a false story about Scarborough buying beer at a convenience store, a narrative the hosts vehemently refuted, as per CNBC. Additionally, the National Enquirer published a story insinuating an extramarital affair between the hosts, a claim the duo did not acknowledge on Friday.

The intensity of Trump's attacks on Morning Joe has led Wehner to theorize that the former president may be a "sociopath." This assessment follows Scarborough's condemnation of Trump's threats to execute military officials for treason and his disturbing remarks about an assailant attacking Representative Nancy Pelosi's husband. The escalating tension has prompted Scarborough and Brzezinski to express their concerns about Trump's stability and the potential impact of his social media outbursts on both domestic and international fronts.

Trump's posts on Truth Social have not only drawn criticism from the media personalities he targeted but also from a bipartisan spectrum. Republicans and Democrats alike condemned the president's personal attacks, prompting Scarborough and Brzezinski to publish an op-ed in The Washington Post titled, "Donald Trump is not well." In the op-ed, they express their worries not just for their personal well-being but for the nation as a whole.

Despite the political and personal implications of this feud, Scarborough, a lifelong Republican, underscores the frustration over Trump's actions diverting attention from critical issues such as healthcare, tax reform, and infrastructure. The ongoing clash between Trump and the media serves as a microcosm of the broader political landscape, contributing to the deepening partisan divide. As this media feud unfolds, it underscores the broader challenges facing American politics, where personal attacks and Twitter wars often take precedence over substantive policy discussions.>

<A couple of months into his tenure as House speaker, Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy thought it’d be a good idea to give Tucker Carlson exclusive access to Jan. 6 security camera footage. The results were predictable: The host, before his departure from Fox News, cherry-picked footage that allowed him to tell the deceptive story he set out to tell, sparking outrage from both parties and law enforcement.

Nearly 10 months later, McCarthy’s successor, House Speaker Mike Johnson decided it was time to go a step further and release thousands of hours of security footage to the public. The results were again predictable: As The New York Times reported, the move has “fueled a renewed effort by Republican lawmakers and far-right activists to rewrite the history of the attack that day and exonerate the pro-Trump rioters who took part.” The Times added that many on the right, as if on cue, are “using the Jan. 6 video to circulate an array of false claims and conspiracy theories about the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.”

House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner was asked if he’s comfortable with this. The Ohio Republican’s answer left much to be desired. The conservative Washington Times reported:

Using careful language, Turner said the discussion surrounding Jan. 6 has been “fraught with an unbelievable amount of misinformation and untruths,” and with the footage released, the public won’t be “depending upon really partisan descriptions of what happened.”

When NBC News’ Kristen Welker noted that some of Turner’s Republican colleagues have “cherry-picked some of the images to frankly further some conspiracy theories,” the GOP congressman replied, “I think it’s been cherry-picked by both sides,” before quickly referring to the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee, which he accused of giving “just one view.”

Turner concluded by again reiterating, “I think it’s important that the speaker has taken this step because now people can see the truth.”

At face value, such rhetoric might seem relatively anodyne, but there are two key problems to keep in mind. The first is the idea that there was something untoward about the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee’s work. To date, neither the House Intelligence Committee chairman nor any of his Republican colleagues have uncovered any meaningful flaws in the panel’s hearings or final report.

The committee might’ve provided “one view,” to borrow Turner’s phrasing, but with reality in mind, it also provided the accurate view.

Similarly, the Ohioan might like the idea of blaming “both sides” for cherry-picked misinformation, but if there’s any evidence of Democrats engaging in such tactics with Jan. 6 footage, the GOP has kept it well hidden.

But what stood out as especially notable was the Ohio Republican’s repeated reference to “truths.” Turner said, “I think it’s important for Americans to know the truth. ... [N]ow people can see the truth.”

In reality, we’ve already seen the truth. As a Washington Post analysis explained this week, “There is no mystery about the Capitol riot. There is nothing intangible, no unseen engine for what occurred. There is no uncertainty about what happened and why.”

To argue that Americans will “now” know what happened is to suggest that there were some unanswered questions about the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol nearly three years ago, which can now be answered. For those genuinely interested in the truth, no such questions exist.>