When I first met Bill Morlin, he was already a legend among news reporters in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll admit I was a bit starstruck: This was the man—on paper, a simple crime reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review, but much more than that—who had relentlessly covered the Aryan Nations and The Order. He was the first to report on the Ruby Ridge standoff, before it was even a standoff. His journalism was not just first-rate, it was courageous and groundbreaking.

Republicans have argued for decades that what we used to call global warming and now call climate change is a hoax. And for all those decades, they’ve been, and still are, wrong.

Climate change is real. Human-driven climate change is real. So far, humanity has failed in its custodial duty to the planet and the ecosystems that have provided us with existence for some six million years.

Welcome back! It’s been quite a while since we last met. Like, a while. How have you been? Yeah, me too. It happens.

Back when the days when there had not yet been an insurrection on American soil during the new millennium, and we were only dealing with a deadly worldwide pandemic, we started a wee holiday project of introducing more people in America to the best of what anime, the colloquial U.S.

Depending on your age and where you live, multilevel marketing schemes (also known as MLMs) might be ubiquitous in your life. Or you might be thinking: Wait, those still exist? They do exist, although companies get away with not being pyramid schemes largely thanks to legal technicalities. Some of the older brands in the MLM game include companies like Amway and Tupperware (yes, really), and those fancy knives people used to sell at parties out of their living rooms (Cutco).

NBC News’ Nicole Acevedo reports that Maryland mom María Esther Roque Díaz is strongly urging pregnant individuals, “particularly other Latinas,” get the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s because she gave birth to her child while on life support after contracting the virus. Roque Díaz gave birth to Dylan via cesarean section in December 2020. She would not fully reawaken until mid-February 2021.

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, the legendary bomb-thrower who carried the far right’s banner in Congress before the Tea Party wave and the Donald Trump era reshaped the Republican caucus, announced Monday night that he would challenge scandal-ridden Attorney General Ken Paxton in the March primary rather than seek a 10th term.

Gohmert joins Land Commissioner George P. Bush and former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman in trying to deny renomination to the Trump-endorsed incumbent.

Millions of disenfranchised minorities have been sitting out elections, and the Republican state legislatures have initiated an avalanche of voter suppression laws to keep it that way while our Democratic leadership has done nothing to respond. In fact, our leaders are defending the filibuster and telling minority activists that they just need to “out-organize” the GOP in lieu of legislation.