House Republicans voted to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from their leadership team over her repudiation of Donald Trump’s election lies, formally welding the GOP to Trump’s election-stealing agenda. U up, Joe Manchin?
 

• On the eve of her cancellation, Cheney once again rang alarm bells over her party’s obvious endgame, saying on the House floor: “We must speak the truth. Our election was not stolen...I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president's crusade to undermine our democracy.” (It would be neat if Cheney also spoke the truth about, say, climate change, but at least she is perfect in every other way.)
   
• Republicans demoted Cheney in a 15 minute meeting behind closed doors on Wednesday morning. Afterwards, Trump issued a statement celebrating his successful revenge campaign, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) gloated while somehow fucking up the simplest song lyrics ever written, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tossed one more lie on the teetering stack: “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with.” That time we fired a lady for saying the election was legitimate? Why, that was hours ago.
   
• McCarthy officially endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to replace Cheney over the weekend, and now that it’s made a solemn promise to have no firm principles, the GOP conference is expected to vote her in as chair on Friday. Not everyone in the party is thrilled about all this: More than 100 Republicans, including some former elected officials, have threatened to form a third party unless the GOP starts distancing itself from Trumpism (lol). Cheney has said she’s determined to run for re-election, and will work to keep Trump out of office. 

In spite of Kevin McCarthy’s super consistent stance that the 2020 election was free and fair, some backwards GOP state legislators are still passing laws animated by the lie that it wasn’t.
 

• Lord knows where they got such an idea, but on Tuesday, Gov. Doug Ducey (R-AZ) signed into law a bill that will seemingly purge tens of thousands of voters from Arizona’s early voting list. Until now, voters on that list were automatically sent a ballot for every election. Starting after the 2024 elections, the new law will require that voters be kicked off the list if they don’t vote early at least once in two consecutive two-year election cycles, or respond to a notice from election officials. U up, Kyrsten Sinema?
   
• While Arizona Republicans were rushing that bill to Ducey’s desk, the For The People Act advanced out of committee—sort of. All nine Republicans on the Senate Rules Committee voted against the bill even after Democrats agreed to adopt some GOP amendments, yielding a predictable party-line 9-9 vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can bring it to the floor anyhow, but unless someone can convince Joe Manchin to a) accept that this will not be a bipartisan bill, because one party wants to destroy democracy and b) ditch the filibuster, because one party is using it to destroy democracy, that’s as far as it’ll go.

Republicans have turned down every opportunity to jettison Donald Trump from their party, and on Wednesday, they jettisoned a top member for publicly criticizing his attempted coup. If you don’t think that’s a prelude to a future coup, boy, have we got a houseboat to sell you. Otherwise, it’s a beautiful day to call your senators and find out where they stand on doing something about it.

On a new Pod Save The World, Palestinian foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal joins Tommy and Ben to discuss the context for the latest outbreak of fighting in Israel and Palestine and her hopes for peace in the region. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts →

After punishing Liz Cheney for calling out the lies that fueled a violent insurrection, House Republicans returned to their regularly scheduled programming of denying that an insurrection ever took place. Former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller testified about his actions on January 6 in a House oversight hearing, during which Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ)  and Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) claimed that the Trump supporters storming the Capitol were the real victims that day. Rep Andrew Clyde (R-GA) compared to the rioters to normal tourists, and Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) insisted that they were just “a mob of misfits.” Miller, for his part, omitted a line from his written testimony stating that he believed Trump’s comments encouraged the rioters, and when pressed about it by Democrats, claimed he had simply “reassessed.” Honest, courageous stuff.

• The violence between Israel and Hamas has continued to escalate, and risks spiraling into a full-scale war. The Biden administration has dispatched an envoy to urge de-escalation. Since the fighting began, Israeli airstrikes have killed 65 Palestinians, including 16 children, and Hamas rocket attacks have killed six Israelis, including one child.
   
• The WHO has warned that B.1.617, the coronavirus variant first identified in India, could be highly contagious. That variant has already spread to at least 49 countries, which doesn't sound not contagious.
   
• A Georgia district attorney will seek hate crime charges and the death penalty against the Atlanta spa-shootings suspect, who was indicted on murder charges by two separate grand juries on Tuesday.
   
• The Colonial Pipeline is back up and pipeline-ing, but panic-buying caused more than 1,000 gas stations in the southeast to run out of fuel. The Biden administration has waived a number of restrictions to speed deliveries of supplies.
   
• Andrew Yang walked back his cringey statement on the violence in Israel-Palestine after it received plaudits from the likes of Stephen Miller, and an “utterly shameful” designation from AOC.
   
• The judge who oversaw Derek Chauvin’s murder trial ruled that there were several aggravating factors in George Floyd’s death, which will allow him to give Chauvin a longer prison sentence than Minnesota's sentencing guidelines recommend for somebody with no prior criminal record, if he chooses. 
   
• A Michigan GOP lawmaker has introduced a bill that would require fact checkers to register with the state, which (fact check us here) seems like the subtlest of First Amendment violations? 
   
• Ellen DeGeneres will end her talk show after its upcoming season, but not because the workplace was exposed as a toxic hotbed of sexual misconduct and racism. It's because of other, vaguer reasons.
   
• A terrible nightmare fish has washed up in California and announced its candidacy in the gubernatorial recall election. 
   
• A 28-year-old woman tried to blend in at a Florida high school in order to pass out pamphlets promoting her Instagram. A real teen, of course, would only ever hand out TikTok pamphlets.

Oh, you thought we were done with looming-democracy-implosion news for the day? Think again, baby. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel has written an analysis of how Republicans’ new voter-suppression rules would have reshaped the 2020 election, and found that in several states, President Biden’s margin of victory just about disappears. In Georgia, if you take out all votes cast at mobile voting units and with provisional ballots at the wrong precinct—two methods axed by Georgia’s new law—the state flips to Trump. In Texas, one out of 10 Harris County voters used drive-through voting sites that are poised to become illegal. The wacky coincidences continue! Democrats and voting groups would of course work to educate those voters on how to cast their ballots going forward, but in a functioning democracy, those targeted hurdles don’t exist to begin with. 

In 2021, mental health is finally a thing, especially as people are not feeling like their normal selves. Let’s support one another and talk openly. Whether or not therapy is your thing, knowing it’s available and affordable is important, for you or perhaps a loved one.  

Millions of people are trying and loving online therapy. It doesn’t have to be sitting around just talking about your feelings.

So, what is therapy, exactly? It’s whatever you want it to be.

You can privately talk to someone if your stress is too much to manage, you’re battling a temper, having relationship issues, anxiety, depression, etc… Whatever you need, there’s no more shame in these normal human struggles. We take care of our bodies, why not our minds, too? Without a healthy mind, being truly happy and at peace is HARD.

BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist, so you don’t have to see anyone on camera if you don’t want to. It’s much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours.

It’s always a good time to invest in yourself, because you are your greatest asset. See if online therapy is for you by heading to BetterHelp.com/crooked for 10% off your first month.

Ohio will give five vaccinated people $1 million each in a weekly lottery program, revolutionizing the jab incentivizing game. 

Mississippi organizers have begun gathering signatures to put Medicaid expansion on the November 2022 ballot.

The FCC has approved $7.17 billion in funding to help students, school staff, and library patrons access better remote learning equipment.

President Biden has released a third round of judicial nominees that includes Lauren J. King, who would become the first Native American federal judge in Washington state history.