In the news today: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tried yet another anti-Biden, anti-pandemic-reality stunt this week, barring employers from requiring vaccinations for their workers. It didn’t work: The state’s largest employers are ignoring him in favor of employee safety (and the federal mandate they are required to comply with). Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has long had near-total control of his caucus, but that status is in jeopardy as the party adopts full-on Trumpism.

What? Forty thousand Brazilian fashionistas are keen to move to Connecticut, and Republicans want to stop them? Why? That’s the best news I’ve heard in months! Where, exactly, are they crossing? I’d like to meet them. Maybe they can help me get into some of the A-list clubs I’d normally have no chance of setting foot in because I smell like Kirkland jeans and Prell and have a head the size of an Igloo cooler.

A Trump-loving Republican candidate for state legislature in Virginia has some interesting thoughts on climate change. Replace the word “interesting” with “painfully ludicrous” and add some sarcastic quotation marks around “thoughts.” Scott Pio is running for state rep. against incumbent Democratic Del David Reid in Loudoun County’s District 32.

Joe Biden’s criminal justice reform platform pledged to “end the federal government’s use of private prisons,” saying that if he were to be elected president, he would “make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.

While Alaska leads the country in COVID-19 cases, the state’s Republican lawmakers continue to talk out of both sides of their mouths. On the one hand, they remain steadfast in their calls to forgo mask and vaccine mandates. On the other, they’re demanding easier access to unproven and unauthorized medicines such as ivermectin to treat the virus they’re downplaying.

Welcome to Tuesday, everybody! The legislative branch of the government was able to take time away from not getting anything done to lift the debt ceiling, so that’s something. Centrist—or more honestly, conservative—Democrats continue to hide behind their even more cowardly Republican counterparts. Corruption pays in Florida. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the blinding hypocrisy of Texas Gov.

At the start of 2019, Jim Yong Kim “made the surprise announcement” that he would be stepping down at the end of January after six years as the president of the World Bank. Kim was not due to leave until 2022, and that institution’s leadership has always been something the United States—and more specifically the acting president of the United States—gets to choose.

The largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S. announced last week that it’s cutting off ties with Facebook, following a recent whistleblower report confirming the social media giant intentionally puts profits over combatting the lies and hate speech rampant on its platforms. The group calls the report “the last straw.