Mike’s Blog Round-up

Weekend Fox News host Pete Hegseth has already been an exceedingly controversial choice as Donald Trump’s pick for his Secretary of Defense. Hegseth and the Trump camp have spent recent days push back against two simultaneous controversies: allegations that Hegseth has “extremist” tattoos, as some critics have charged, and news broken by Vanity Fair on Thursday that Hegseth was previously investigated by police in California over a sexual misconduct claim.

On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding.

As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term, the reasons people voted him into office are becoming more clear. jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/listen?uf=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast&ge=prx_149_0e22e666-6615-4c37-b7e1-24072da95dde", "prx-0", "embed")});Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. For Micki Witthoeft, it’s cause for celebration. Her daughter, Ashli Babitt, was shot and killed by a police officer after storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As the clock winds down on Democratic control of the U. S. Senate, upper chamber lawmakers on Thursday confirmed President Joe Biden's nomination of David Huitema, head of the State Department's ethics program, to lead the Office of Government Ethics for a five-year term. Senators voted 50-46 in favor of Huitema's confirmation to head the OGE through the duration of Republican President-elect Donald Trump's tenure, averting at least temporarily a scenario in which the winner of the 2024 election—who has refused to sign required transition-related ethics agreements and whose first term saw thousands of conflicts of interest—would be empowered to fill or stonewall the post. If we learned anything from Trump's presidency, it's that he uses his power to enrich himself and his buddies.

What do you get when you add a man accused of drunk driving and trafficking underage women, a woman who supported Assad gassing his own people and parrots Putin propaganda all day and all night long and a guy with a weird history of crossing paths with dead bear cubs, whale heads, brain worms and assorted other beasts we can only assume (especially since going MAGA).

A leftist congressman names gamy Democrats he'd like to put in his shadow cabinet.