On Thursday morning, Politico reported that Kevin McCarthy had promised Donald Trump that he’d hold a House vote to “expunge the two impeachments against the former president” before the August recess, in an attempt to get back on Trump’s good side after suggesting the ex-president might not be the best candidate for the 2024 GOP nomination. Hours later, McCarthy denied this.
At this time you might be wondering, as part of that denial, did McCarthy forcefully insist that expunging Trump’s pair of impeachments—the first for trying to extort Ukraine into digging up dirt on his political rival, the second for inciting an insurrection—would be some thoroughly repugnant Orwellian shit? Did he point out that it would be an insult to the brave law enforcement officers who protected his congressional colleagues on that dark day in January? Did he unequivocally deny he would ever be part of a movement to do the very thing Politico reported he’d promised to do? Uh, not exactly!
Instead, he merely denied that an official deal to expunge Trump’s impeachments had been struck while nevertheless noting that he would absolutely love to see it happen.
“There’s no deal, but I’ve been very clear from long before—when I voted against impeachments—that they put them in for purely political purposes,” McCarthy told reporters. “I support expungement, but there’s no deal out there.”
Of course, McCarthy’s claiming that there isn’t an actual deal does not mean that’s true. The reason we know that is because he’s been caught lying in the past, like when he forcefully denied a New York Times report saying he had told colleagues that Trump was at fault for “inciting people” to attack the Capitol building and that he was going to advise Trump to resign…only to be caught on tape saying the things the Times had reported.
Furthermore, there’s obviously no reason whatsoever to give McCarthy—who, again, publicly stated that he does, in fact, want Trump’s impeachments expunged!—the benefit of the doubt here, given that he voted to overturn the 2020 election in January 2021; refused to meaningfully hold Trump accountable for the insurrection during the impeachment proceedings; lied about the riot to get on Trump’s good side; and claimed this week that Trump is only facing an indictment for his attempt to overturn the election because he’s so very popular.
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Surprise: A criminal Trump pardoned has been charged with committing fraud again
Weinstein has been accused of “falsely claiming” he and the individuals with whom he formed Optimus Investments had “lucrative deals” on N95 masks, “scarce baby formula,” and “first-aid kits bound for Ukraine.” According to the FBI, the group also schemed to hide Weinstein’s assets that were supposed to go toward restitution he owed the victims of his previous Ponzi scheme.
Weinstein was one more than six dozen criminals Trump pardoned on the way out the door in 2021. Others included Jared Kushner’s father, Steve Bannon, and Medicare fraudsters who collectively stole more than $1 billion.
Ron DeSantis’s Florida will teach kids that there were upsides to being a slave, and no, that’s not a joke
When the Florida State Board of Education announced earlier this year that it would ban the College Board’s AP American Studies course from its public schools, claiming it lacked “educational value,” the collective response from non-bigots was basically, “Wow, you can’t get much more f--ked up and racist than that.” To which Florida decided to respond, “Oh no, we can!”
Per The Washington Post:
If you can’t quite believe what you’re reading, we’ll repeat it again for emphasis: Florida schools are now required to teach students that there was a bright side to being forced into slavery. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the new rules also dictate that, per when teaching about mob violence against Black people—like, y’know, lynchings—teachers should also note “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
Last year, The New York Times reported that as a teacher at a private school in Georgia, DeSantis stuck out to students thanks to his views on the Civil War and slavery:
Meanwhile, DeSantis’s point of view on slavery was apparently so well known that ”students made a satirical video about him” in which a student meant to be DeSantis is heard saying, according to the Times, “The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North….”
On Wednesday, Florida Education commissioner Manny Diaz insisted that the new rules make the state’s Black history curriculum more “robust,” saying, “I think this is something that is going to set the norm for standards in other states.” State representative Anna Eskamani, stating what should be but apparently is not obvious, told the Times the notion of teaching students that enslaved people learned important life skills “is inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish.”
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