Word that the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial ruled this week that those shot by the 17-year-old could not be called “victims” during the trial brought a swift reaction from Rittenhouse defenders who claimed there was nothing unusual about that order. That includes the part where Judge Bruce Schroeder informed the defense that in their closing arguments, they could call those shot by Rittenhouse “looters,“ “rioters,” and “arsonists.

If there’s one thing Republicans absolutely positively don’t want over the next year, it’s a cycle in which the party’s de facto leader Donald Trump is on the ballot in every single race across the country.

Senate Republicans are using every trick in the book to steer attention away from Trump and back to President Joe Biden.

Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric.

Patti Hidalgo Menders, president of the Loudoun County Virginia Republican Women’s Club, is the worst kind of Karen. She believes that teaching the racist history of America makes white kids feel bad, and Black and brown kids fall into victimhood—therefore it simply shouldn’t be taught.

In the news today: Rep. Mo Brooks was a speaker at the Jan. 6 rally in which Donald Trump implored his crowd to “march” on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt recognition of Trump’s November election loss, leading to violence and deaths. Brooks now continues to be extremely squirrelly about just how involved he and his staff were in those events.

Thomas Sibick is accused of ripping off DC Metro Police Officer Michael Fanone’s badge and radio during the melee that left Officer Fanone unconscious. The Buffalo, New York, resident tried to lie his way out of an arrest, after video evidence—including images of Sibick showing off a stolen riot shield after the attack—was shared with the FBI online. Sibick faces up to 15 years in prison for his part in the Jan.

During interviews earlier this month with the House select subcommittee on the pandemic, Dr. Deborah Birx conceded that the Trump administration was “distracted” from its work on COVID-19 because of the election, and that the administration’s early failures likely led to as many as 130,000 unnecessary deaths.

As Daily Kos has covered, Republicans are eager to attack trans folks via a handful of approaches at the state level. Banning trans girls from participating in girls’ sports teams, for example, tends to get a lot of national media coverage.

A leaked internal government report obtained by BuzzFeed News continues to confirm what advocates were long saying when the anti-asylum Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) policy was in effect: There were particularly vulnerable adults and children who under “guiding principles” should have been exempt from the program, but weren’t.