WaPo has an expose of the Gateway Pundit site, which is about time. GP is the source of a lot of the toxicity and misinformation that keeps MAGA alive. Why hasn’t Hoft been buried under lawsuits already?

Speaking of liars, Trump is now pushing a conspiracy theory that Liz Cheney destroyed evidence.

“Why did American Disaster Liz Cheney … ILLEGALLY DELETE & DESTROY most of the evidence, and related items, from the January 6th Committee of Political Thugs and Misfits. THIS ACT OF EXTREME SABOTAGE MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR MY LAWYERS TO PROPERLY PREPARE FOR, AND PRESENT, A PROPER DEFENSE OF THEIR CLIENT, ME. All of the information on Crazy Nancy Pelosi turning down 10,000 soldiers that I offered to to [sic] guard the Capitol Building, and beyond, is gone.”

Um, and of course this isn’t true.

Now, Trump has seized on House GOP claims that some records are missing from the archives of the House select committee that investigated Jan. 6, including Trump’s actions. The Democratic chair who headed the committee denies anything was lost; instead, he says some sensitive materials were withheld from the House archive to protect witnesses.

But here’s the kicker: The special counsel who is prosecuting Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — although not for the Capitol insurrection itself — says the withheld materials have already been provided to Trump as part of discovery in the case.

At TPM, see The New Argument That Might Save Trump’s March Trial Date. Interesting.

Washington Monthly reports on a piece of legislation signed by Trump, the VA MISSION Act, that privated a lot of veterans’ health benefits.

… the legislation set up a parallel private sector network—the Veterans Community Care Program or VCCP—which pays private sector providers to treat more than a third of the nine million veterans enrolled in the VHA.

The Veterans Community Care Program promised to give veterans speedier access to high-quality care if they couldn’t get a timely appointment at the VHA or had to drive too long to get to one. Instead, as many studies have documented, VCCP care is of lower quality than that provided by the VHA. It also takes longer, on average, to get an appointment with a VCCP provider than it does with one at the VHA, and perhaps most importantly, the cost of this private sector program is soaring. Between 2014 and 2024, expenses for veterans’ care in the community quadrupled from $8 billion to $31 billion, accounting for a third of the budget for veterans’ medical services.

So a lot of tax dollars go into a lot of pockets, but this isn’t doing veterans much good. Sounds like a Trump plan.

I’ve been writing at Patheos about attempts to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy. Oklahoma is planning to fund a virtual Catholic charter school. This would be, in effect, a religious public school, and it would have been clearly unconstituitional until recently. But what’s interesting is that Leonard Leo and a network of right-wing religious and legal nonprofits appear to be positioning this school as a test case for the Supreme Court. The legal crew that was behind the Dobbs case that ended Roe v. Wade is deeply involved. So are a lot of characters with connections to Supreme Court justices Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch. See Christian Public Schools In The U.S. ?

SCOTUS has already eliminated the old prohibitions about using tax dollars to pay for sectarian religious instructions in Carson v. Makin, 2022, They might very well greenlight the Oklahoma charter school. This would theoretically open the door for other religions to open schools and get taxpayer funding. But there is language in the Carson decision about  ‘history and tradition’ that might be elaborated upon to argue that the tax privilege only applies to Christianity.