This is a developing story that may be updated as more information becomes available.

An arrest has been made in the recent Molotov cocktail throwing incident at a synagogue in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

An FBI spokesperson identified the suspect as Nicholas Malindretos, a 25-year-old from Clifton, according to NBC New York. He is expected to face federal arson-related charges. NBC reported that he was tracked partly through video of his Volkswagen going to and from the synagogue.

In a Facebook post Wednesday afternoon, Bloomfield Mayor Michael Venezia wrote the suspect was in the custody of the FBI and the Bloomfield Police Department. He did not identify the suspect, but said more information was forthcoming.

Temple Ner Tamid president Josh Katz confirmed the arrest in an email to congregants Wednesday and in a subsequent interview with the Forward.

“I’m still very angry,” Katz said. “But I’m also very, very grateful.”

The Bloomfield Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A press conference was held Jan. 29, 2023, outside Temple Ner Tamid In Bloomfield, New Jersey. Photo by Jodi Rudoren

Video surveillance showed a person wearing a ski mask and black hoodie light a bottle and throw it at the door of the Reform synagogue at about 3 a.m. Sunday, hours before Hebrew school at Ner Tamid was set to begin. The bottle broke, but did not cause any damage and no one was hurt.

The incident prompted a visit to the synagogue Tuesday from New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who called the incident “absolutely despicable.”

Katz told the Forward that it was the first antisemitic incident at Ner Tamid, which has about 540 member families, that he could remember in his decade in the synagogue’s leadership.

“My initial reaction was almost disbelief — but not,” he said. “We all know this has been happening in many places, so there’s that dichotomy of feeling like I can’t believe this happened, but knowing that this is the reality we live in.”

The post Arrest made in Molotov cocktail incident at New Jersey synagogue appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) — Three nurses were removed from a Veterans Affairs hospital in Atlanta following a federal investigation into a scheme that awarded fake nursing diplomas to thousands of people across the country.

In a statement to NewsNation, Department of Veterans Affairs press secretary Terrence Hayes said the nurses were fired “within days” of the VA learning about the scheme.

“Their removal is very unfortunate but patient safety is and must be our primary responsibility at VA,” Hayes said.

Monique Franklin recently went to that VA hospital in Atlanta with her father for routine blood work. She said he was paired with a nurse who missed his veins so badly the appointment ended up being an all-day event.

“The first thing that came to my mind was maybe that’s what happened to my dad,” Franklin said about the experience. “I mean, we were there like six or seven hours. And my dad, it was swollen, it was really huge, and he said he was in pain.”

She now wonders if he was in the hands of one of those fake nurses.

“You’re scared to trust people, you’re scared to trust the nurses because you don’t know if they’re legit or not,” she said.

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office identified 22 people in the state who received fake diplomas, and 17 of those who obtained their license. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said those 17 people have been asked to return their licenses.

“We are going to proceed posthaste and make sure they’re brought to justice and penalties are paid,” Raffensperger said. “They will not be practicing nursing here in the state of Georgia.”

The findings were announced last week in what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services dubbed Operation Nightingale.

A ring of 25 people tied to three South Florida nursing schools have been charged, accused of selling more than 7,600 fake diplomas and transcripts to aspiring nurses who sometimes forked over between $10,000 and $15,000.

“These individuals basically catered to folks that wanted to shortcut,” said Omar Perez Aybar, a special agent in the DHSS. “They never attended class, never attended a clinical, the work that they needed to do.”

Officials said people who acquired the bogus credentials used them to qualify to sit for the national nursing board exam. Upon successful completion of the exam, they became eligible to obtain licensure in various states.

Federal officials have found about 2,400 of the students passed their licensing exams, and so far investigators have not found any harm caused to patients. Many are expected to lose their certification but not to be criminally charged.

Ukraine’s military said its forces repelled an attack in the area of Blahodatne in the eastern part of the Donetsk region, while Russia’s Wagner private military group said it took control of the village.

* Russia accused the Ukrainian military of deliberately striking a hospital in a Russian-held area of eastern Ukraine on Saturday in what it said was a war crime that killed 14 people and wounded 24 patients and medical staff. There was no immediate response to the allegations from Ukraine. Reuters was not able to independently verify the report.

* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described the situation at the front as “extremely acute“, especially in the eastern Donetsk region where Russia is stepping up an offensive.

* Tearful mourners in Kyiv commemorated a British volunteer aid worker, Andrew Bagshaw, killed while attempting a rescue mission from the eastern Ukrainian town of Soledar.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin is open to contacts with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz though has no phone call scheduled with him, a Kremlin spokesman said. Scholz, who last week approved providing Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukrainian forces, was quoted in a published interview as saying he would speak to Putin again but the onus was on the Russian leader to withdraw troops from Ukraine “to end this horrendous, senseless war…”

* Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov will hold a meeting with Lynne Tracy, the new U.S. ambassador, early next week, RIA news agency reported.

* Zelenskiy condemned the idea of neutrality in sports at a time when his country’s athletes fight and die in war, while their Russian counterparts might be allowed to compete.

* Russia said it will not hold annual talks with Japan on renewing a pact that allows Japanese fishermen to operate near disputed islands, saying Japan had taken anti-Russian measures.

* Expedited talks are under way among Ukraine and its allies about its requests for long-range missiles that it says are needed to prevent Russia from destroying its cities, a top aide to President Zelenskiy said.

* German arms-maker Rheinmetall is ready to greatly boost output of tank and artillery munitions to satisfy strong demand in Ukraine and the West, and may start producing HIMARS multiple rocket launchers in Germany, CEO Armin Papperger told Reuters.

* Ukraine has been promised 321 heavy tanks by several countries, its ambassador to France said.

* Poland will send an additional 60 tanks to Ukraine on top of 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks it has pledged, the Polish prime minister said in an interview with Canadian television.

* Ukraine imposed sanctions on 182 Russian and Belarusian companies, and three individuals, in the latest of a series of steps by Zelenskiy to block their links to his country.

* On a trip to Turkey and the Middle East this week, the U.S. Treasury Department’s top sanctions official will warn countries and businesses that they could lose U.S. market access if they do business with entities subject to U.S. curbs as Washington cracks down on Russian attempts to evade sanctions.

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• Meta said it would slash its spending in 2023, with Mark Zuckerberg touting an efficiency drive.
• Investors cheered, sending Meta’s stock up nearly 19% in after-hours trade.
• More job cuts could also be on the line after the company slashed 11,000 at the end of 2022.

Meta said Wednesday it would put the brakes on spending this year. Investors reacted with a cheer, sending the stock nearly 19% higher in after-hours trade.

The company said it expected capital expenditures to fall by $4 billion from what it had previously expected.

And CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was calling 2023 the “year of efficiency.” That means more job cuts — and lower operating costs — could also be in the pipeline after Meta already cut 11,000 jobs in November.

Some Wall Street analysts had been expecting the cut to capital expenditure spending, but Meta delivered an even sharper-than-expected cut. It now expects to spend between $30-33 billion compared to its previous estimate of $34-37 billion. Meta announced last year that it was pausing a number of its data center redesigns, including ones in Denmark and Texas. The Silicon Valley company also said it was canceling some projects to further meet new budget goals.

Analysts at UBS said in a note that the earnings hinted at even more cuts to come. They said shares were “under-owned” — or, in other words, that it’s a good time to buy. The company itself said it would embark on a $40 billion stock buyback.

That’s all music to Meta investors’ ears. And it also helps Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth crawl back from the depths — if the stock gains stick — after it’s taken a big hit over the past year.

Sary Mansour ran into Tyre Nichols at a Memphis Starbucks less than a week before five police officers fatally beat him.

They had worked together at a Verizon store in the city for a few years beginning in 2014. Initially, they were competitive over who got the most sales, but soon enough they started hanging out at their manager’s home or at team bowling events, where they got to know each other better. They lost touch after Nichols moved to Sacramento for a few years, but their chance meeting at Starbucks gave them a chance to catch up. Nichols told Mansour about his young son, and how he was finding life back in Memphis.

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Nichols was laid back, funny, sensitive and a people person, Mansour tells TIME. “When it came to him talking to women or anybody, he knew how to strike up a conversation. He had a lot of game; he was very charismatic,” he says.

Thousands of mourners gathered Wednesday for Nichols’ funeral in Memphis, where his life was celebrated and remembered by his family. Rev. Al Sharpton, national civil rights attorney Ben Crump and mothers of other victims of police violence including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd also played prominent roles.

Sary MansourSary Mansour (second from left) and Tyre Nichols (far right) are pictured with their coworkers while they worked at a Verizon story in Memphis.

“Tyre was a beautiful person and for this to happen to him is just unimaginable,” said RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother, through tears. “I promise you, the only thing that’s keeping me going is the fact that I really truly believe my son was sent here on an assignment from God and I guess now his assignment is done and he’s been taken home.”

Wells and others who spoke at the funeral, including Vice President Kamala Harris, urged Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a sweeping police reform bill that would establish a national standard for police departments, require increased data collection on police encounters and enforce a federal ban on chokeholds.

“When I think about the courage and strength of this family, I think it demands we speak truth; this violent act was not in pursuit of safety; it was not in the interest of keeping the public safe,” Harris said.

Nichols’ siblings reminisced about their childhood at the funeral. His brother told a story of how Tyre got his name—a name that was originally supposed to be his brother’s. (It was after the character Tyree in the 1980s American Western film Silverado.) Nichols’ sister shared a poem. The first line read: “I’m just trying to go home; is that too much to ask; I didn’t break any laws along this path.” Another sister recalled how Nichols was among the easiest of her siblings to look after because all he wanted was to watch cartoons and eat a bowl of cereal.

Desiree Rios—The New York Times/ReduxThe body of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who was fatally beaten by Memphis police officers, is rolled into the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tenn. on Feb. 1, 2023.

Mansour didn’t attend the funeral, but has spent the last several days remembering their time together. He remembers watching Nichols wrestle with anxiety as well as his father’s terminal illness. “Even after he went through these issues with his parents, he still found a way to stay OK,” he says.

Nichols—an avid skateboarder—would often bring his skateboard with him to work and would even do flips in the mall where the Verizon shop was located, Mansour recalls.

One of Mansour’s favorite memories is of Nichols hiding inside a giant pop-up 3-D model to scare his coworkers. “I see it move and I’m just like there’s no way. And the next thing I know, he screamed my name and jumped out,” he says.

Nichols was a huge fan of the San Francisco 49ers football team and was very family oriented, Mansour says.

Mansour was out with friends when he watched official video of the incident released by the city to the public last week. He describes the incident as “sickening.”“Looking at the police, it seems there is something more personal,” he said. “It’s more saddening than shocking.”

Florida is debating whether to require all high school athletes to disclose their menstrual history.

Parents and experts generally agree that it’s important for student athletes to be in good health. But many critics say a new draft physical evaluation form by the Florida High School Athletics Association (FHSAA), which makes the menstruation questions mandatory, is part of the state’s attempt to roll back transgender rights.

They argue that that school districts should not have the right to access and store such personal information as a condition of competing in high school sports. The menstrual history questions have been part of Florida’s athletics pre-participation form for more than 20 years, but they have previously been optional. Now, many argue that it’s time to remove them altogether.

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Here’s what to know.

What are the questions Florida will ask female student-athletes about their menstrual history?

The updated draft of the physical evaluation form, published online on the FHSAA website asks athletes the following questions:

• Have you had a menstrual period?

If yes, athletes must answer the following:

• How old were you when you had your first menstrual period?
• When was your most recent menstrual period?
• How many periods have you had in the past 12 months?

Other than these, the form mainly asks about the athlete’s cardiac health, medications and history of injury.

What would happen if Florida makes these questions mandatory to answer?

As of now, student athletes in Florida can opt out of answering these questions, but if students choose not to respond under circumstances where it’s mandatory to, they risk failing the medical examination that all athletes must successfully pass to participate in a sport.

Critics have noted that this policy would be a major challenge for transgender athletes who may have to out themselves with their responses to the questions. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis approved a bill last year—which is currently under legal fire—that bans transgender female students from playing on women and girls’ sports teams.

In Palm Beach County, the school administration began re-examining the questions last year after parents expressed backlash that the questionnaire would be available to complete online and that the responses would be stored digitally via a third-party-software. The software company, Aktivate, is vulnerable to court subpoenas, which many parents worry could be a problem in post-Roe Florida, where abortion is severely restricted now and such medical records need stronger protection than ever.

The FHSAA Board of Directors is set to decide whether the menstrual history questions should remain optional or become mandatory at the upcoming board meeting this month from February 26 – 27 in Gainesville.

Do other states ask their female student-athletes about their menstrual history?

Texas school districts also ask female-athletes very similar questions about their menstrual history. In several school districts—including in Austin, Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth—the questions are mandatory to complete, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Many other states require student athletes to undergo a physical examination from a healthcare provider, but they generally only ask the provider to share a signature affirming that the athlete is in good health, rather than turn personal health history over to the school.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided not to revoke actor Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar nomination in the Best Actress category, following an investigation into whether aggressive campaigning from her Hollywood peers helped her secure the nod. Riseborough’s nomination prompted extra scrutiny from the Academy after public backlash following its announcement, with critics raising questions about whether the grassroots campaign violated any rules and if the nomination should have instead gone to a Black woman, such as Viola Davis (for The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (for Till). The ongoing controversy marks the latest instance of the Academy being called out for its lack of diversity when considering who gets an Oscar.

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To Leslie and why Riseborough’s nomination is being criticized

This is Riseborough’s first Oscar nomination for her role in To Leslie, an independent film about a woman who, estranged from most of her friends and family years after she spent all the money she won from a lottery jackpot on drugs and alcohol, tries to rebuild her life. Though critically acclaimed, Riseborough’s Oscar nomination came as a surprise because most of the public hadn’t heard of the low-budget film—since its release last March, it has grossed just $27,000 at the box office. To Leslie was also missing from the usual For Your Consideration campaign cycle, which this year included films like Elvis and Everything Everywhere All At Once that went on to secure nominations.

Instead, buzz for Riseborough in To Leslie came almost entirely by word-of-mouth, with incredibly influential figures in Hollywood praising her performance on social media ahead of the Oscar nominations, which were announced on Jan. 24. Notably, Titanic actor Frances Fisher posted nine times on her Instagram page advocating for her fellow Academy members to include Riseborough in their Best Actress nominations and rankings.

“IMO I’m nominating Andrea in first position because I think all the other ladies are a lock,” she wrote in a caption, suggesting that the other actresses she explicitly named, like Davis and Deadwyler were already likely to be nominated in the category (they weren’t).

Joining Fisher’s show of support were a slew of A-listers, many of whom were past winners in the category, like Gwenyth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Jane Fonda. Celebrities hosted screenings of the film and filled Twitter and Instagram feeds with adulation for Riseborough.

“Andrea should win every award there is and all the ones that haven’t been invented yet,” wrote Paltrow on Instagram.

Oscar nominations are selected and voted on by about 9,500 voting members of the Academy. Members submit recommendations for nominees in their respective branch (for example, acting or directing) and then rank their preferred nominations via preferential voting. The votes are then sorted, starting from first-place rankings, to determine the final nominees for said category. Once all nominations are final, members of Academy vote across all categories for each award’s winner.

Grassroots efforts don’t break nomination rules, but lobbying and “any tactic that singles out ‘the competition’ by name or title,” is forbidden, according to the Academy’s regulations. The aggressive and successful campaigning from Riseborough’s peers raised questions about whether any rules were broken in the process.

Riseborough’s To Leslie co-star Marc Maron criticized the Academy’s decision to investigate what he said was a win for lesser-known films. “Millions of dollars [are] put into months of advertising campaigns, publicity, screenings by large corporate entertainment entities, and Andrea was championed by her peers through a grassroots campaign, which was pushed through by a few actors,” he said on his podcast, WTF With Marc Maron.

Did Riseborough’s nomination ‘push’ out Black actors?

This year’s Best Actress category has no Black nominees, despite the buzz and studio-backed campaigning for Davis and Deadwyler’s performances. Controversy over the Academy’s longtime lack of diversity came to a head in 2015 after the Academy chose all white actors for all 20 acting nominations, prompting the viral #OscarsSoWhite hashtag.

Davis and Deadwyler not making the nominations list did not come as a surprise Frederick W. Gooding, Jr., an associate professor of John V. Roach Honors College at Texas Christian University and author of Black Oscars: From Mammy to Minny, What the Academy Awards Tell Us about African Americans. “Overall the Academy’s patterns are always consistent,” he tells TIME in reference to Black actors’ year-after-year snubs in the acting categories. It’s been over 20 years since the first and only time a Black actor has won in the Best Actress category: Halle Berry for her performance in 2001’s Monster’s Ball.

Considering Riseborough’s film didn’t come close to Davis and Deadwyler films’ box office numbers, Gooding says that her close connections with those within the academy likely played a significant role in her nomination. “Hollywood operates in an environment based on if you know somebody that will have the social capital to help. For many people of color, and African Americans in particular, they may not have the advantage of these social resources or informal networks that happen to be white dominated.”

Stephen Tapert, an instructor at the New York Film Academy and author of Best Actress: The History of Oscar-Winning Women notes that Michelle Yeoh making Oscar history this year as the first Asian woman to be nominated in the category, marked some progress. “I didn’t look at this year’s list of nominees as a step back, but you do have to wonder why this particular category of Best Actress is the one that seems to not get as much diversity,” he says. Since the Oscars began in 1929, there have only been 20 women of color nominated throughout the approximately 475 nominations of the Best Actress category.

What has the Academy said?

On Jan. 27, the Academy released a statement that they’d review this year’s nomination campaigns, but did not explicitly mention To Leslie, nor Riseborough. The investigation could have resulted in Riseborough’s nomination being revoked.

On Feb. 1, it was determined all nominations would stay the same. “The academy has determined the activity in question does not rise to the level that the film’s nomination should be rescinded,” Bill Kramer, the academy’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “However, we did discover social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern. These tactics are being addressed with the responsible parties directly.” In a statement to TIME on the matter, a representative for Kramer said, “I am not sure there is much else to say publicly from our side at the moment.”

Rules can potentially change in regards to social media tactics moving forward. “Given this review, it is apparent that components of the regulations must be clarified to help create a better framework for respectful, inclusive, and unbiased campaigning. These changes will be made after this awards cycle and will be shared with our membership,” the statement said.

On the diversity front, the Academy has issued inclusion standards for their best picture category under their Aperture 2025 initiative that are expected to take effect in 2024. The guidelines require meeting two out of four diversity on and off-cam standards to be eligible for the top award of best picture.

Goodin says he is not confident these efforts will be the solution to the multi-layered problem of the Academy’s diversity issues, noting how despite the celebration of fantasy films like Avatar and the Lord of Rings franchise, 80% of all Black Oscar nominations are for roles that deal with themes of racism and poverty.

“It feels like an illusion of inclusion,” he says. “What is it gonna take for me to see images that look like myself or my daughter saving the world? I want to fly too.”

The FBI searched another Biden-related property on Wednesday, but found no classified documents of any kind. This is no surprise. According to multiple major news outlets, President Joe Biden wanted the search to happen, and helped facilitate it. Now Biden is getting headlines about how no classified documents were found there, which exonerates him in the court of public opinion. Which of course is the entire point. There’s no scandal here. There’s not even a story here. And Biden is taking steps to help put the whole thing quickly to bed.

Yet even as this major victory for Biden played out on Wednesday, far too many folks on our side missed the point entirely. Instead of helping spread and amplify the powerful messaging that Biden is in the process of being fully exonerated, a lot of folks spent the day complaining about how “unfair” it is that the Feds are searching more Biden properties than Trump properties. That narrative surely allowed these folks to feel righteous outrage. But it did nothing at all in terms of helping Biden.

Again, the story when it comes to Biden is that he wants his properties quickly searched, because he’s done nothing wrong, and he wants the Feds to announce that conclusion as quickly and neatly as possible. This has no correlation whatsoever to a completely different kind of storyline playing out with Donald Trump.

If Trump could get himself off the hook simply by asking the Feds to search his other properties, he’d have done it a long time ago. But he can’t himself off the hook by cooperating, because he’s already been caught stashing things like classified nuclear state secrets at Mar-a-Lago. He also told the Feds he had no remaining documents at Mar-a-Lago, only to then be caught rifling through those documents. Trump is already nailed on multiple charges, and at this point there’s nothing he can do to undo that. So of course he’s refusing to cooperate with the Feds. This is how these kinds of things always work.

Let’s be real here. The DOJ had no problem sending the FBI with a search warrant into Trump’s primary residence. So the notion that the DOJ is somehow pulling its punches when it comes to Trump’s other properties is laughable. The reality is that if the Feds had reason to believe there were classified documents at Trump’s other properties, they’d have expanded the warrant and gone in a long time ago. So this likely means the Feds have already concluded that there are not additional documents at Trump’s other properties, and therefore they don’t see any point in forcibly searching those properties, which would merely hand Trump a friendly news cycle about nothing being found there.

Keep in mind that according to multiple major news outlets and court-released documents, the DOJ cultivated sources inside Mar-a-Lago in order to help determine if there were classified documents inside and where specifically they were stashed. So it’s nearly a given that the DOJ also cultivated sources inside Trump’s other properties for the same reason. And the DOJ’s decision not to forcibly search those properties is a pretty good indicator that there aren’t documents there. And why would there be? Since leaving office, Trump has used Mar-a-Lago as his base of operations. Any classified documents he stole were surely routed and stashed there.

The part everyone seems to be missing is that if Trump stole these classified nuclear secrets and such for the purpose of selling them for cash or giving them to his longtime foreign benefactors, then the documents that weren’t recovered at Mar-a-Lago are instead in the hands of these bad actors. In the time since the Feds searched Mar-a-Lago, their criminal probe has almost certainly shifted focus toward tracking down any folks who received documents from Trump. And obviously, out of necessity, the DOJ isn’t going to let any such efforts make the news headlines while they’re still ongoing.

This is part of the problem that we find ourselves in. The federal government has likely spent the past few months carrying out covert and complicated international efforts to track down the classified documents that Trump managed to sell or give away before anyone knew that he’d stolen them – and even as this complex effort plays out behind the scenes, know-nothing know-it-all conspiracy theorists on Twitter are going viral by insisting the entire case could be cracked if the DOJ would simply dig up Ivana’s casket at Bedminster.

This all serves to underscore that two distinct worlds exist when it comes to these kinds of complex criminal probes. There’s what’s actually going on, in the real world, in accordance with how things actually work, most of which is complicated and nuanced and plays out behind the scenes. Then there’s the completely imaginary world where clowns on the internet compete with each other to see who can get the most retweets by floating the dumbest and most simplistic “clever” idea for how the case could be magically cracked. These two worlds, the real one and the imaginary one, tend to have zero overlap.

So it’s not surprising that so many folks on our side, who have long ago been sucked into the imaginary MSNBC-and-Twitter version of the DOJ’s Trump probe, are so far removed from how anything works that they can’t even wrap their heads around why President Biden scored a huge victory today by inviting the Feds in to search one of his properties. Nor can they seem to grasp why there’s simply no correlation between Biden inviting the Feds in to search his property so he can be quickly cleared, and the Feds having to take a much different approach to the criminal case that’s going to end up putting Trump on trial and in prison for the rest of his life.

Whining about unfairness is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a winning strategy in politics. Ever. It just paints your own side as a bunch of inept losers who don’t know how to win, which turns off persuadable voters in the middle. Nor is there any reason to ever try to draw any correlation between the legal process of being innocent helping to get yourself quickly cleared, and the completely opposite legal process of being guilty and trying to avoid making it easier for the Feds to put you away.

Those on our side who are whining about the “unfairness” of the Feds searching more Biden properties than Trump properties are missing the mark in so many ways, it’s difficult to even count them all. It comes off as nothing more than yet another arbitrary excuse to declare defeat and whine about it, in order to feel as much outrage as possible. The trouble with outrage addicts is that, whether they consciously want to lose so they can feel even more outrage – and that desire to lose governs every move they make and every word they speak.

It’s plainly obvious that the winning messaging on Wednesday was that Biden invited the Feds to search his property and they found nothing. That’s such a winning message, it’s worth its weight in gold. Biden and his allies certainly seized upon that winning messaging. But far too many folks on our side blew the opportunity to do the same, in favor of whining about how unfair it is for the sake of getting to feel outrage, and spinning laughable conspiracy theories about a casket for the sake of getting to feel smart. These are, bluntly, the losers we have to work around whenever we decide to put in the work to fight and win any given political battle. At some point we’re going to have to address just how badly these defeatist outrage addicts are hanging around our ankle like a ball and chain.

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Jim Jordan is a fool, a fool of the worst kind. He’s apparently the only one who doesn’t know it, even as people and the DOJ continue to point it out to him. Guess that makes him a dumb fool. He decided to take his case for his ridiculous “weaponization” subcommittee to the airwaves by visiting Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” Surely, Jordan knew this wasn’t a conservative friendly, conspiracy-laden news show that would quietly entertain his foolishness, and it didn’t disappoint.

Steve Benen of MSNBC likened Jordan to Earl Landgrebe of Indiana, a close ally of Richard Nixon. When asked about Nixon’s predicament, Landgrebe responded: “Don’t confuse me with the facts. I’ve got a closed mind.” So does Jim Jordan, who can’t be bothered with facts. He sees things through his narrow, twisted lens, and nothing else matters. While with Chuck Todd, Jordan gave as part of the reasoning for his weaponization subcommittee that the FBI “raided the home of a former president 91 days before an election.” Three things are wrong with this statement: it wasn’t a “raid,” the papers were at a country club, and Trump wasn’t running for anything. Idiot.

Jordan incredibly tried to compare Trump’s theft of classified materials to the current issue involving President Joe Biden, and Chuck Todd rightfully pushed back: “Biden didn’t defy a subpoena. More importantly, the only time the public found out about it is because Donald Trump told the public about it.” Digging the screws further into Jordan, Todd said that Jordan was trying to paint a picture of these events happening within a short time, when attempts to retrieve the stolen documents from Trump stretched out over the course of a year and a half.

Grinning like the fool he is, Jordan continued to try to make it seem as though Joe Biden is getting some sort of preferential treatment because his attorneys did the right thing and turned over what they found. Jordan can twist this all he likes, but he will never make a case that President Biden has “weaponized” the DOJ and FBI against Donald Trump. Indeed, Biden could care less about Donald Trump. Biden handily defeated Trump in 2020, and his focus immediately turned to trying to help the United States out of the many holes Trump left in the country.

Even the DOJ knows Jordan is a fool. According to the Hill, the agency let him know that it will not be providing the documents he requested. He has asked for all records, including correspondence between the DOJ and Biden’s attorneys. Guess he’s never heard of attorney-client privilege. The DOJ has told Jordan again that it will not be releasing documents relating to any investigations that are not already public. The only thing Jim Jordan is succeeding in doing is showing the world that he is a big fool, not that many people need help seeing that. Keep it up, Jordan; carry on wasting taxpayer dollars and time to paint the foolish portrait you have painted of yourself that will result in absolutely nothing.

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