<Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, a Democratic member of the House Rules Committee, has blasted the Republican Party as the "most ineffective, incompetent" House majority in history.

"It has been nearly an entire year—an entire year, almost—since anything we've done in the Rules Committee has gone to the President's desk, and the last time it did happen it was with Democratic votes," the representative said on Thursday, during a meeting of the House Rules Committee. McGovern has been a member of the committee since 2018 and a representative of Massachusetts in Congress since 1997.

"Republicans have tried and failed to pass their own rules seven times this Congress—seven times this House has been stuck at a standstill because of their in-fighting. Before this Congress, it had been 20 years since a rule failed. It's been 50 years, half a century, since we've seen this many rules go down," he added.

McGovern added that while one, two or three times could be "just incompetence," failing to pass a party's own legislation seven times is "a disaster." He said: "Seven is paralysis, it means weeks and weeks of sitting around doing nothing because Republicans can't get their house in order and do their job."

Newsweek contacted McGovern's Washington office and the Rules Committee's office for comment by phone call early on Friday outside of working hours and received no immediate reply.

The Rules Committee—which is often considered one of the most powerful in Congress—decides on what order to schedule bills' consideration on the House floor, which means it has the ability to influence the introduction and process of legislation through the lower chamber. Before a bill is debated, the committee must pass a rule, or resolution, setting the parameters of the debate.

On Thursday, the committee met to discuss four pieces of legislation to be introduced to the House, including a new proposal to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This should reach the House floor for debate on Friday.

McGovern is hardly the first one to criticize the 118th Congress for a particularly unproductive season, due to infighting between moderate House Republicans and hardliners.

In October 2023, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted in a historic vote led by Republican hardliner Matt Gaetz of Florida—a move which put all business in the House of Representatives to a halt until a replacement for the California representative was found.

The election of a new speaker has hardly solved the growing tension within the House GOP. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a MAGA Republican, has threatened to file a motion to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican.

"Mike Johnson is not working for Republicans, he's not helping Republicans, he's not even listening to Republicans. Mike Johnson is doing the Deep State's dirty work," Greene wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, earlier this month. "We need a new Speaker of the House!"

Earlier this week, she accused Johnson of having "surrendered to Joe Biden at every turn and is no different than Nancy Pelosi." Newsweek contacted Greene's spokesperson for comment by email on Friday.

The result of these threats and infighting is that key legislation—like the passing of an aid bill to Ukraine, which is in desperate need of more ammunition to continue fighting the Russian invasion—is stalling in Congress.

Greene, like Donald Trump, has long been opposed to sending new aid to Kyiv.>

<[Event "56th New England Open"] [Site "Lowell Mass"]
[Date "1996.09.01"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Shapiro, Daniel E"]
[Black "Foygel, Igor"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "E72"]
[WhiteElo "2330"]
[BlackElo "2500"]

<[Event "56th New England Open"] [Site "Lowell Mass"]
[Date "1996.09.01"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Shaw, Alan"]
[Black "Casella, Michael"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "B22"]
[WhiteElo "2175"]
[BlackElo "2345"]

<Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has taken aim at the federal government over its spending as Tax Day approaches on April 15.

The Georgia Republican has said taxation powers should be taken away from the federal government, lamenting the trillions of dollars collected in 2023 to fund essential tenets of American society, such as healthcare, Social Security and the military.

Taking to X, formerly Twitter, Greene wrote: "The April 15th tax deadline is two days away. The U.S. federal government collects an average of $4.7 trillion annually from Americans and this is the result of your hard earned tax dollars. It's absolutely shameful." She went on to suggest that the federal government should be reduced in size by a half, with more tax powers given to individual states, although she did not outline how this would be achieved.

She also posted an infographic outlining federal government taxation, spending and the U.S. national debt. The infographic claims the national debt, which it lists as $34.6 trillion, amounts to $102,969 per U.S. citizen and $266,951 per taxpayer. Newsweek has been unable to independently verify these figures at this time, and it is unclear where the infographic was sourced from. Newsweek has contacted representatives for Greene for clarification and comment via email outside of normal working hours.

The infographic also draws attention to government spending figures for the 2023 fiscal year, and while they are not far off official Treasury totals, they are not the same. The federal government spent $6.3 trillion last year, a decrease from the 2022 figure of $6.48 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. Greene's infographic lists the national spend as $6.5 trillion.

So far in the current 2024 fiscal year, which runs from October 2023 to September 2024, the Biden administration has spent $3.25 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. Spending has increased by $103 billion over the same period of the prior year.

It is isn't [sic] the first time Greene has expressed her displeasure with tax systems in the U.S., having previously called for Americans to revolt against taxes in certain states. In December, the Georgia representative encouraged Californians to forgo paying taxes after the state said it will offer free health care to undocumented immigrants.

Sharing an article from the New York Post about the expansion on X, she wrote: "It's treason. No other way to say it. And now California is going to give illegals free healthcare, but nothing is free, the California taxpayers have to pay for it. The border crisis is the top issue and I want to impeach but can't get the votes. Would a tax revolt stop it?">

<As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.

Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades, propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle.

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)

Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them. Neil Patel, a co-founder (with Tucker Carlson) of the Daily Caller, told me that the tech giants want “to crush any independent media that was perceived to have been helpful to Trump’s rise.” Patel calls this a form of “Big Tech–driven viewpoint discrimination” that “should scare any fair-minded individual.”

A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.

And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has mostly continued south. Among the big losers over the past year are The Washington Free Beacon, whose traffic was down 58 percent, and Gateway Pundit, down 62 percent. Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate’s was up 14 percent.....>

<...For conservative media publishers, the financial consequences of such a steep decline in readership are hard to know for certain. None of the best-known names publicly reports revenue figures, and many are supported by rich patrons who may not be in it for the money. But the situation can’t be good. Digital media still rely on advertising, and advertising still goes to places with more, not fewer, people paying attention. Traffic also drives subscriptions.

More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful by recirculating, amplifying, and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.

The Daily Caller’s Patel insisted that faltering traffic alone isn’t a death sentence for the onetime lords of the conservative web. With the addition of a subscription service and tighter financial management, the Daily Caller’s financial health is solid and improving, he said. Outlets like his own can still succeed with people who “have lost trust in the corporate media and are actively seeking alternatives.”

The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times, and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble. “There’s a lot of choice,” Polskin said. “Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there.”

The DIY ethic is embodied by the likes of Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Steve Bannon, and Carlson, who became conservative celebrities while working for established media organizations but have maintained their profiles after leaving them in disgrace. Since being fired by Fox News last year, Carlson has moved his contentious commentaries and interviews (including one with Vladimir Putin) to X. Kelly has come back from a messy divorce with NBC in 2019 (which followed an unhappy exit from Fox News in 2017) to host a massively popular podcast. O’Reilly, likewise forced out of Fox in 2017, has kept talking via newsletters, video streams, and weekly appearances on the NewsNation cable channel. And Bannon, the former Trump consigliere who left Breitbart, which he founded, after publicly criticizing the Trump family, has gone the podcaster route himself; his War Room podcast was ranked as the leading source of false and misleading information in a broad study of the medium by the Brookings Institution last year.

The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.>

<Senate Republicans are preparing to go on the record in favor of gouging Americans with sky-high "junk fees," just months before a major presidential election where the economy will play a deciding role.

In a recent report in the American Prospect, reporter David Dayen delved into the GOP's response to a new rule from President Joe Biden's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) capping credit card junk fees at $8, helmed by Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina). Scott — the Senate Banking Committee ranking member who is thought to be on the short list of potential running mates for former President Donald Trump — is leading the charge on a bill to scrap the rule. His one-page bill deems that the CFPB rule limiting junk fees "shall have no force or effect."

"Lawful and contractually agreed upon payment incentives promote financial discipline and responsibility, and this rule shows that the CFPB is more focused on scoring political talking points than policies that protect consumers," Scott said in a statement posted to his website.

Scott's push to overhaul the Biden administration's limit on junk fees has the full support of the banking industry's top lobbyists and trade associations. Scott's statement noted that his bill was supported by the "Consumer Bankers Association, America’s Credit Unions, Independent Community Bankers of America, Bank Policy Institute, American Bankers Association, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce."

Adam Green, a progressive activist who helped Biden organize events in the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania to highlight his opposition to junk fees, told Dayen that the GOP openly railing against junk fees is a gift to Democrats ahead of the November election.

"We’ve seen Democratic unity on fighting surprise junk fees and naming corporate villains like credit card companies, banks, and airlines," Green said. "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

Dayen further explained that because the US Senate is controlled by Democrats, Scott's bill is virtually guaranteed to fail passage. According to Dayen, all the "doomed vote" on the bill would accomplish is putting Republicans officially on the record in favor of jacking up excessive fees on Americans. He added that even 72% of self-identifying Republicans polled in December of 2023 were in favor of banning junk fees.

"If you can believe it, Senate Republicans are actually trying to increase credit card fees for Americans. Democrats will not allow this bill to become law," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) tweeted.

The White House also weighed in on the bill, with spokesperson Michael Kikuwawa saying Biden "strongly supports the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s work to lower costs for consumers and take on corporate greed."

"Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans are siding with special interests and big corporations to try to undercut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would raise costs and reduce options for consumers," Kikuwawa added. "The President won’t let Republicans undercut hardworking families for the sake of corporate profits.">

<Donald Trump again slammed the judge overseeing his first criminal trial during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, comments that portend a rough-and-tumble several weeks ahead as the former president gears up for court.

Trump is expected to be in Manhattan on Monday for the beginning of the trial, a case involving hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

The former president has frequently attacked Justice Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the past, accusing both men of exhibiting political bias against him.

Merchan in late March issued a gag order preventing Trump from making public statements about witnesses concerning their potential testimony and about prosecutors, court staff and their family members, if those statements are meant to interfere with the case.

On April 1, Merchan extended that gag order to include members of his own family, after the former president disparaged his daughter, who runs a digital marketing agency that works with Democratic candidates and nonprofits. The order excluded Merchan himself.

"I have a crooked judge. This has never happened before, you do know that, right?" Trump told supporters on Saturday night in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Allentown.

"Fully gagged before a highly conflicted and corrupt judge, who suffers from TDS. Does anyone know what TDS is? Correct. Trump Derangement Syndrome."

During the speech, Trump briefly referenced Iran's recent drone and missile attack on Israel, saying that it would have never happened under his watch.

"They're under attack right now," Trump said. "That's, that's because we show great weakness. This would not happen, the weakness that we've shown, it's unbelievable, and it would not have happened if we were in office."

Trump's visit to Pennsylvania, which also included a fundraiser, will be closely followed by President Joe Biden, who will make three stops in the battleground state next week, speaking first in his hometown of Scranton about his push to reform the U.S. tax code.....>

Time to hit the sumbitch in his wallet, a language he understands.

<....With 19 electoral votes - one of the highest counts among all 50 states - and voters that swing between backing Democrats like Biden and Republicans like Trump, Pennsylvania is a top prize in the 2024 presidential election and is likely to see many more visits in coming months.

Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by less than 1.5%, or roughly 80,000 votes, after Trump beat Hillary Clinton there by less than 45,000 votes in 2016. State opinion polls taken in March swing from showing Biden with a 10-percentage-point lead to Trump up 4 points, election data site FiveThirtyEight shows.

Democrats are betting on a strong turnout in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs, a region that accounts for 33% of all voting registrations, to offset losses throughout much of the rest of the state. Trump and Republicans are looking to run up huge margins in less populous, largely white counties to offset urban votes.

Biden, who has been to Pennsylvania four times so far this year, will also travel to the Pittsburgh area and Philadelphia over three days, the White House said on Friday.

Trump's Saturday rally at Schnecksville Fire Hall targeted the Lehigh Valley, a mix of Rust Belt cities, sprawling suburbs and rural towns. It includes Northampton County, one of two counties Biden flipped in 2020, which has long been a reliable bellwether of statewide success.

"If you win Northampton County, you are likely to win the state. It's that important of a location," Chris Borick, a political science professor at Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg University, said of Trump's rally.

The former president attended a fundraiser before his rally in Bucks County, another bellwether region that Biden narrowly won in 2020. The event was hosted by Jim Worthington, a wealthy gym owner who has pressured Trump to stop criticizing mail-in voting.

Pennsylvania is a sprawling, politically complex place where voters historically have often elevated consensus-minded statewide candidates, a history that could affect the closely watched U.S. Senate race.

Incumbent Bob Casey, a Democrat, will battle Republican Dave McCormick, a wealthy former hedge fund executive, one of just a handful of races in 2024 that will decide who controls the Senate.

During his rally on Saturday night, Trump offered his endorsement to McCormick, even though the two men have had a complex relationship at times in the past.

"He's given up a lot to do this, and I'll tell you what, he's the nominee of the Republican Party," Trump said.

Population shifts could affect the races here. Pennsylvania's population topped 13 million in 2021, but has declined in the two ensuing years, finishing at 12.96 million people last year. Declines since 2020 have come from counties that Biden won, according to an analysis by Franklin & Marshall College.

Democrats continue to lose their voting registration advantage in the state as they face defections from rural and blue-collar voters, who are joining Republicans or registering as unaffiliated, according to state voter data.

In 2020, Democrats held a roughly 700,000-voter registration advantage, but that has narrowed to 400,000 this year as Democratic voters switched to unaffiliated.

The defections are due to voters who supported Republican candidates but never bothered to change their party status until now, some political analysts believe.>

Don't like the content, <boys>? Stay the f*** away!

<Former President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have a joint appearance at Mar-a-Lago Friday afternoon where they are discussing "election integrity."

The topic is a chief priority for Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, who continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election. Trump's calls for "election integrity" come in an election year when there is expected to be another tight matchup against President Joe Biden.

Johnson has echoed Trump's calls for "election integrity" and was one of the 147 GOP lawmakers who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He also led the charge to get 125 of his Republican colleagues to sign an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, supporting Texas' lawsuit that would have invalidated the election results in key battleground states.

ABC News is fact checking some of Trump's previous and false comments on elections and voting ahead of the joint appearance with Johnson.

State and federal courts have dismissed more than 50 lawsuits across six states from Trump and his allies aiming to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In many of the cases, Trump pushed thinly supported allegations of election misconduct and fraud.

An Associated Press investigation found fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud in six battleground states during the 2020 presidential election -- a number far too little to have make any different in the outcome of that election. Arizona had the highest number of potential fraud cases of the states AP examined with 198 of the 3.4 million votes cast -- and that amount of potential fraud cases comprised less than 2% of the margin by which Biden won, according to the AP. In Nevada, the AP found that local officials identified between 93 and 98 potential fraud cases out of 1.4 million ballots cast, representing less than one-third of 1% of Biden’s margin of victory.

Trump has continued to falsely claim he won the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, but he lost all three of those states in the last presidential election. In Pennsylvania, Biden won by 81,660; in Michigan, Biden won by about 21,000 votes; in Wisconsin, Biden won by more than 20,000.

The United States National Intelligence Council, comprised of the United States' intelligence and security agencies, announced in 2021 that it found "no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 elections."

Trump has also criticized voting methods.

Trump routinely disparages mail-in voting and has made unfounded claims about the process which he claims, in part, led to his 2020 election loss. Despite his repeated claims about mail-in vote fraud, no widespread fraud has been found. A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center found that there were 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. That comes out to 0.0025%.

"Mail-in voting is totally corrupt. Get that through your head. It has to be," Trump said at a rally in Michigan in February, repeating unfounded claims about mail-in voting.

"I will secure our elections. We are going to secure our elections. Our goal will be one-day voting with paper ballots -- very simple -- and a voter ID, but until then, Republicans must win. Landslide. We want it to be too big, too big to rig," Trump said at an April 2 rally in Wisconsin, where he continued to falsely claim he won the state in 2020.

However, the vast majority of Americans already vote with hand-marked paper ballots or on touch-screen machines that print one.

Trump and his allies have claimed that Democrats are "importing voters" to allow non-U.S. citizens participate in the U.S. elections.

"That's why they are allowing these people to come in -- people that [sic] don't speak our language -- they are signing them up to vote," Trump said at a January rally in Iowa.

While election officials and law enforcement authorities have found cases of non-citizens voting or attempting to vote over the years -- either by mistake or with malicious intent -- it has not been enough to affect the any outcome of an election, the Washington Post reported.

PolitiFact reported that it has found no effort by Democrats to register people in the country illegally.

"Most noncitizens don't want to risk jail time (or deportation if they are here illegally) by casting a ballot. Election officials take several steps to ensure that only eligible voters cast ballots," PolitiFact reported.

<Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is spreading the propaganda of American adversaries on social media, knowing those countries will amplify her messages for impact they wouldn’t otherwise have, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former assistant director for counterintelligence.

In Monday’s debut of The Defiant Podcast with Brooklyn Dad Defiant, shared in advance with Raw Story, Frank Figliuzzi tells host Majid Padellan, “What we’ve caught Russia and China doing … is they’ll take a statement from Marjorie Taylor Green [sic]— or someone like her, someone who doesn’t deserve a particular amount of attention — and then those foreign intelligence services amplify it across social media.

“So she has immediate amplifying support out there. She knows when she spouts something ridiculous there’s [sic] going to be foreign adversaries who blow up her message so we can’t avoid it.”

Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Raw Story.

In the podcast, Figliuzzi, who works for NBC News, emphasized China’s role in spreading misinformation and disinformation.

“We focus almost exclusively on Russia at our own peril,” Figliuzzi said. “Because recent reporting, including from my outfit, NBC News, has pointed out that the Chinese are already at it — already fully engaged in attempting to mess with our next election. It’s chaos they want to sew [sic].”

Padellan said Figliuzzi described the situation by using a phrase he coined: “spamoflage,” a cross between spam and camouflage.

“He said they’ll create a clone of, say, CNN’s website and post information that’s kind of true but kind of not true,” Padellan said. “He said by the time people figure out it’s a bogus site, it’s already done its damage.”

Figliuzzi told Padellan that China wants Trump to win.

“Because he is more easy to manipulate, he’s more susceptible to influence,” Padellan said.

Padellan is a staunch progressive and social media influencer who has 1.3 million followers on X, formerly Twitter. In 2021, the New York Post attacked him for taking money from a pro-Democrat political action committee, Really American, in 2020. FEC records show the total was $59,088.

Padellan responded that he was always open about the affiliation. He did design and social media work for the organization. FEC records show no payments since then to Padellan.

He said his motivation is his five children, three adults and two teenagers.

“I feel a very strong sense of responsibility about the kind of world I’m passing on to them,” Padellan said. “This is personal. I have skin in the game. I feel like it’s my civic duty to do everything possible to illuminate the truth, to make sure I do what I can to cut through the (bs).”>

1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 Nc6 3.f4 g6 4.Nf3 Bg7 5.d3 Rb8 6.Be2 b5 7.O-O b4 8.Nb1 a5 9.Qe1 d6 10.Nbd2 h5 11.Qg3 e6 12.Nc4 h4 13.Qf2 Ba6 14.f5 gxf5 15.exf5 Bxc4 16.dxc4 exf5 17.Bd3 Nge7 18.Bg5 Qd7 19.Rae1 h3 20.gxh3 Bxb2 21.Kh1 f6 22.Nh4 Ne5 23.Bf4 Bd4 24.Be3 Qc6+ 25.Ng2 Bc3 26.Re2 Rxh3 27.Bxf5 Rf3 28.Qg1 Rxf5 29.Rxf5 Nxf5 30.Qf2 Nxe3 31.Qxf6 Nxg2 32.Rxg2 Kd7 33.Qg7+ Kc8 34.Qa7 Qb7 0-1>

This is an REMF free zone.

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 g6 3.c3 Bg7 4.d4 cxd4 5.cxd4 d5 6.exd5 Nf6 7.Bb5+ Nbd7 8.Nc3 O-O 9.d6 exd6 10.O-O Nb6 11.d5 a6 12.Be2 Bg4 13.Be3 Rc8 14.Qb3 Nfd7 15.Qb4 Bxf3 16.Bxf3 Nc4 17.Qxb7 Nxe3 18.fxe3 Nc5 19.Qb4 Nd3 20.Qg4 Nxb2 21.Nd1 f5 22.Qh3 Nc4 23.Rc1 Qb6 24.Kh1 Nxe3 25.Nxe3 Rxc1 26.Rxc1 Qxe3 27.Rf1 Re8 28.g4 Rf8 29.Bg2 Qd2 30.gxf5 Qxa2 31.fxg6 Rxf1+ 32.Bxf1 Qxd5+ 33.Qg2 Qxg2+ 34.Kxg2 a5 35.Bc4+ Kh8 36.gxh7 Kxh7 37.Kf3 Kg6 38.Ke4 Kg5 39.h3 a4 40.Be6 a3
41.Ke3 Kh4 42.Ke4 Kg3 43.Ke3 Bf6 44.Ke4 Kf2 45.Bd5 Ke2 46.Kf5 Bh4 47.Ke6 Bg3 48.h4 Kd2 49.h5 Kc3 50.h6 Kb2 51.h7 Be5 52.h8=R Bxh8 53.Kxd6 a2 54.Bxa2 Kxa2 1/2-1/2>

Horror of horrors: I am now well over 51,000 posts, a fact sure to elicit outrage from one particular quarter.