Comment on West Virginia governor rambles, mixes messages on virus

Amid the escalating debate over whether to release a highly damaging report into allegations that he had sex with a minor, Matt Gaetz on Thursday announced that he was withdrawing from consideration to become President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general. “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Gaetz wrote on social media.

The long, strange saga of the “nonprofit-killer bill” continues. The legislation—officially called HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”—would give the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to designate nonprofits as suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organizations,” taking away their tax-exempt status unless they are able to prove they are not terrorist supporting. The bill was unable to meet the two-thirds majority vote it needed to make it through the House last week.

Of the many absurd things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said over the years—about vaccines, about 5G technology as a tool of mass surveillance, about Covid being an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—his claims about HIV and AIDS have been some of the most fact-free. “He is entirely unqualified.” Kennedy has suggested there are questions about whether HIV causes AIDS.

Hours before the results started coming in on November 5, when Democrats were still full of hope, the exit polls released by the major news networks contained a striking piece of data that gave supporters of Kamala Harris reason for optimism. Voters chose the “the state of democracy” as their top priority over any other issue.

Last Thursday, workers with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were told they would be laid off without severance and with little notice, according to the DNC’s union. The cuts included some longtime workers of the organization, the union said. With the election over, the DNC intends to downsize from about 680 staff to fewer than 200.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. When Miguel Zablah bought his five-bedroom home in Miami’s leafy Shenandoah neighborhood in June of 2020, he said he paid $7,000 a year for homeowner’s insurance. The house, built in 1923, sits on high ground and has survived a century of famously volatile South Florida weather.