Think Progress

Here Are 20,776,265 Reasons Why The GOP Should Shut Up And Confirm Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee

Republicans have settled on their explanation for why so many of their leaders immediately declared any nominee President Obama sends to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court dead on arrival. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in a statement almost immediately after news of the justice’s death broke. “Therefore,” McConnell added, “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

Inside The Backwards Ideology Driving The Right-Wing Militiamen Who Captured A Federal Building

Two interlocking issues drove what appears to be slightly more than a dozen armed men to seize control of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service building in Oregon on Saturday evening. The first was the incarceration, release and eventual reincarceration of two men convicted of arson by a federal court. The second is a much broader dispute over whether ranchers are free to encroach upon federal lands without interference by the federal government itself.

You Are More Than 7 Times As Likely To Be Killed By A Right-Wing Extremist Than By Muslim Terrorists

Friday afternoon, one week after elected officials all over the country tried to block Syrian refugees from entering their states in an apparent effort to fight terrorism, a white man in Colorado committed what appears to be an act of terrorism in a Planned Parenthood clinic.Though the details of Robert Lewis Dear’s motives for killing three people in the clinic and injuring nine others are still being revealed, Dear reportedly told law enforcement “no more baby parts,” an apparent reference to heavily edited videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress, which numerous politicians have cited to falsely claim that Planned Parenthood sells “aborted baby parts.” Dear’s actions, in other words, appear to be an act of politically motivated terrorism directed against an institution widely reviled by conservatives.