I can see the scalp of literally every man in this picture!
Here’s all the shit we couldn’t cover today:
- Julia Ioffe paints a frankly shocking portrait of a totally unmoored State Department in her latest piece for The Atlantic. “The cafeteria is so crowded all day” because “no one’s doing anything,” one official told her; another said her job “feels like coming to the hospital to take care of a terminally ill family member.” “I don’t think this administration thinks the State Department needs to exist,” Ioffe was told. “They think Jared [Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law] can do everything.” [The Atlantic]
- A little over a month after our first black president left office, an orange man reportedly referred, repeatedly, to the presidents of historically black colleges and universities as “you people.” One college president told BuzzFeed that “I was waiting on him to say something worse.” [BuzzFeed]
- The Trump administration reportedly misdirected the media to write reports anticipating a more moderate tone on immigration and promises for compromise in Trump’s speech last night, which did not materialize. “It does make you wonder; so we’re not supposed to believe what the senior-most official at the lunch says,” CNN host John King mused. “Maybe we shouldn’t believe what they say.” YA THINK?!?!? [Mediaite]
- Republican North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer was pretty tweaked by the idea of Democratic women wearing white to last night’s joint session. “It is a syndrome. There is no question, there is a disease associated with the notion that a bunch of women would wear bad-looking white pantsuits in solidarity with Hillary Clinton to celebrate her loss. You cannot get that weird,” he said. You heard it from Kevin first, folks, the woman disease is back! [Politico]
- The Trump administration is reportedly eyeing massive cuts to the EPA, although they may not get through Congress. The proposal includes reducing EPA staff by one-fifth and cutting programs aimed at cleanups, environmental justice, climate change, and native Alaskan villages. [Washington Post]
- Iowa State Sen. Mark Chelgren, author of the very insane bill that would limit the number of Democrats public universities could hire, lied about his own educational history. Of course he did! He claimed on a government site that he got a business degree from “Forbco University,” which, as it turns out, was actually just “a management course he took when he worked for Sizzler, kind of like Hamburger University at McDonald’s.” [NBC News]
- Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke was confirmed as Interior Secretary. [Associated Press]
- 22-year-old Dreamer Daniela Vargas was arrested by immigration authorities after she spoke to the media about the detention of her family. [Huffington Post]
- 32 “Blue Lives Matter” bills, which propose that police officers be included in hate crime protections, have been introduced in 14 states since January. [The Huffington Post]
- A gun was fired through the window of an Indiana synagogue on Sunday evening, part of a rash of violent threats and vandalism against Jewish communities across the U.S. [Haaretz]
Here are some tweets that the president was allowed to publish:
This has been Barf Bag.