- House Speaker Kevin McCarthy talking about…Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)...

The Republican Party, like the Arizona Diamondbacks, is in a rebuilding year. (See? I can do sports references.) It’s useful for the rest of us to know where they’re headed because folks, it’s not good. 
 

• In the House, the MAGA faithful and the Freedom Caucus are driving the bus, and Speaker Kevin McCarthy is just sort of along for the ride. McCarthy has developed a disturbingly close camaraderie with QAnon shamaness Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whom he gave even-more-disturbingly high-ranking committee assignments like Oversight (!) and Homeland Security (!!). The two often have regular one-on-one meetings, and McCarthy has adopted Greene’s dangerous stances on opposition to vaccine mandates, “skepticism” about funding the war in Ukraine, and her call to “reinvestigate” the January 6 insurrection to show “the other side of the story.” Sure, let’s ask the ghosts of early Nazi Party members to tell us their account of the Beer Hall Putsch while we’re at it. 
   

• In fact, Greene herself said McCarthy’s agenda, through her influence, will prove that she “moved the conference to the right during [her] first two years,” in the House minority while being barred from committees (because she tacitly endorsed political executions of Democrats on social media). The MAGA psychos wing of the Republican Party has been ascendant for some time now, growing even in the absence of Donald Trump in the White House, and they have moved their party’s already extreme agenda to the right. But Greene and her ilk are so fringe that even the Trump 2024 campaign has had a hard time getting off the ground, as many GOP voters are waiting for a new standard-bearer of these batshit ideas.
   

• Democrats may feel mostly comfortable with control of the Executive Branch and a slim Senate majority, but we shouldn’t, because Republicans are gearing up to hit them where it hurts in 2024. Not only is the narrow Republican House majority already holding the entire country hostage, the party is clearly carving out a larger national strategy to build out its base that very well may work if Dems don’t have an effective counter-punch.

The next GOP presidential nominee may not be an incoherent orator like Trump or have Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Did 9/11 even happen?” crazy eyes, which will make them all the more dangerous.
 

• Many GOP strategists believe that the most successful roadmap for 2024 can be found, where else, in Florida, where Republicans are riding high on a trifecta of supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature and the staggering 20-point reelection of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). DeSantis has been picking up rabid support for stoking cultural resentment instead of pursuing a single shred of policy that could actually help his constituents, the Republican Special™. Most recently, DeSantis blocked the state’s public schools from offering a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, calling the curriculum “a political agenda.” But mandating teaching that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were opposed to slavery or that the Founding Fathers actually didn’t want to separate church and state surely isn’t political or counterfactual, is it, Ron? Unfortunately, DeSantis’ politics of resentment song-and-dance works with Republicans, especially aggrieved white voters who make up so much of the party’s base. 
   

• But even the empty-heads over at GOP headquarters know they can’t rely on white voters alone to win in the coming election cycles, so they’re taking their grift to a broader audience. For several election cycles, Republicans have been making substantial gains with Hispanic voters and now, Americano Media is looking to become the country’s Spanish-language Fox News. The network launched last March, and is expanding its radio presence to television with a $20 million marketing campaign to draw in new viewers, and by the year’s end is expected to have multiple studios nationwide. The network explicitly targets working-class Hispanic people who are either more centrist or not particularly political at all, with the aim of yanking them rightward and sending them to the voting booth.

As the Republican Party becomes increasingly fringe and dominated by conspiracy theories, Democrats will need to find a way to reach voters with substantive ideas and messaging that cuts through the noise and the Fox News coverage of “Woke M&M’s,” or Marjorie Taylor Greene might be the moderate House GOP member one day.

We see all you friends of the pod out there, growing and improving in the new year. The Crooked Store decided to follow suit and update our Friend Of The Pod merch for our ever-evolving listeners. The new and improved pieces include classic t-shirts, crewnecks, and hats in fresh new colors. There’s even some camo so you can blend in with the forest and/or your uncles who like hunting. 
 

It’s all available now at crooked.com/store.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain is expected to step down in the coming weeks after two years in the role, and will be replaced by Jeff Zients, who steered the Biden administration’s pandemic response. 

Germany’s foreign minister signaled that the country would not stand in the way if Poland chose to send German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, a possible breakthrough for Ukrainian defense munitions. 

NATO and U.N. members Estonia and Latvia told their Russian ambassadors to leave after the Kremlin announced it is downgrading diplomatic relations with Estonia, accusing the country of “total Russophobia.”

Audio streaming giant Spotify announced 600 layoffs, about six percent of its workforce, amid a growing wave of layoffs in the tech sector. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump was pictured with infamous Philadelphia mob boss and ex-con Joey Merlino at his golf club in West Palm Beach, FL. Just another person of sterling character in the Trump fan club!

Red states in “America’s Heartland” are attracting most of the clean-energy investment projects created by the Biden administration’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act due to their ample available land, sun, and wind, despite the fact that the IRA passed without a single Republican vote. 

The former head of FBI counterintelligence in New York has been charged in two separate indictments accusing him of taking secret cash payments of more than $225,000 in bribes, money laundering, violating sanctions, and other charges related to working with Russian nationals whom he was supposed to be investigating, including during the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

Democratic lawmakers are seeking to ban those who participated in the January 6 insurrection from holding public office, premised on the *wild* idea that if you tried to overthrow the government you shouldn’t be allowed to then run it.

Since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, 13 states have almost fully banned abortion, and about half of those states provide exceptions in certain circumstances such as protecting the life of the pregnant person, or in the case of rape or incest. As more and more states look to put bans on their books, exceptions remain at the heart of the debate. But even when those common-sense exceptions are in place, patients often cannot find a doctor willing to perform the abortion, either because there are none left in their states, or because doctors they do find are unwilling to test the rules in a climate where Republican politicians routinely promise to prosecute them. Thousands of patients have likely qualified for the exceptions to state abortion bans in the months since Roe was overturned, but due to lack of access or flat-out refusal, few have actually been granted. This means what reproductive access have always warned it would mean: forced birth for victims of rape and incest, in the face of life-threatening pregnancies, and when a fetal birth defect is known to be fatal, even in states where those explicit exceptions are supposed to be made.

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The insurrectionist who was photographed lounging behind the desk in then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was convicted today of eight federal crimes, including four felonies.

Four members of the far-right Oath Keepers group were convicted of seditious conspiracy today, joining their leader Stewart Rhodes in guilty verdicts for their crimes at the January 6 insurrection. Federal prison is about to get an influx of neck-beards the likes of which it has never seen!