North Carolina, after passing it’s radical gerrymandering plan and repressive voting regulations designed to make it harder to vote, has now been rated by the Electoral Integrity Project as comparable to Cuba, Sierra Leone, and Indonesia.  It’s legal framework and registration restrictions position the state comparable to Venezuela and Iran.  Looking at all the relevant measures, North Carolina can no longer be considered a real democracy.  Welcome to the new “normal”.

UPDATE: Mika Brzezinski reported this morning that Cheeto Jesus “clarified” his nuclear tweet in an off-air conversation with him.  And it’s not good:

“Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass. And outlast them all.”

Just what we need – a nuclear arms race. This guy is not only an idiot.  He’s a dangerous idiot who can’t keep his Twitter or his mouth shut. Thanks, America, for plunging us back into the Fifties.  What’s next?  Teaching our kids to duck and cover like we did during the Cold War?

It just gets worse.  Cheeto Jesus’ handlers are not handling him, and it appears not even trying.  Yesterday, he changed 40 years of nuclear policy, ordered a new fighter jet, and taunted celebrities who he claims are wanting tickets to the, uh, err…urp, inauguration, all 140 characters at a time. He is now complaining that his son, Cheeto Jesus III, can’t sell access to raise money for his “charities” after getting caught planning just that a couple of days ago.  CJ doesn’t even make a show of reducing his conflicts of interest, because he’s not.
Stop.  Please just stop.

A Jewish family in Lancaster Pennsylvania has fled their home after Breitbart falsely accused them for the cancellation of a performance of a Christmas Carol at the local school.  School officials stated that the play was cancelled for scheduling reasons as it took 20 hours to rehearse during school hours.  Coincidently, the Jewish family had asked for their child to be excused from participating in the play several months ago.  After the cancellation, the family was blamed and the child was being harassed at school.  When Breitbart, in true form, published a story fabricating the reason was the Jewish family, you can imagine the result, so the family fled their home town.  Welcome to the world of Cheeto Jesus and his “news” arm, Breitbart.

Joe Biden’s Note to Self on CBS This Morning today.

He should have run.

Now that Newt Gingrich has declared that Donald Trump is going to be above the law …

“The Constitution gives the president of the United States an extraordinarily wide grant of authority to use the power of the pardon. I’m not saying he should. I’m not saying he will. It also allows a president in a national security moment to say to somebody, go do X even if it’s technically against the law and here’s your pardon because I am ordering you as commander-in-chief to go do this.”

… he’s decided that Trump was just being “cute” when he said “drain the swamp.”

Said Gingrich: “I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore… Maybe he feels that as president, as the next president of the United States, that he should be marginally more dignified than talking about alligators in swamps.”

Dignified?  Hell, Newt, “drain the swamp” is the most dignified thing Trump has ever said.

So, in Newt’s screwy mind, Trump can order somebody to go rob a bank, pardon them, and then use that money for more sludge for the swamp. Ain’t America grand!

Newt, who once called himself “too intellectual” to be president, has got this all figured out. Now if he could just find a job … Newt resigned Congress in disgrace in January of 1999 and hasn’t held a real job since then.  Too intellectual to work for a living.