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QAnon Congresswoman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) caused quite an uproar when she revealed her plan to file articles of impeachment against newly-elected President Joe Biden just one day after his inauguration. Many of Biden's Democratic supporters have pushed back against Greene's efforts, but they are not the only ones who disapprove.
According to The Hill, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has also made it clear he does not agree with Greene's stance or her effort to move forward with articles of impeachment against Biden.
<p>On Friday, Jan. 23, McCarthy conducted an interview with Greta Van Susteren where he weighed in with his opinion on the newly-elected lawmaker's plan. While he admitted that he does not agree with her, he also noted that she does have a right to move forward with her agenda. </p><p>"I called her. I disagree with that. That's exactly what the Democrats did with President Trump, and why we disagreed with when they wanted to come after him for purely political reasons," McCarthy said. "I think Republicans are better than that. That this is one of the arguments we used against the Democrats, and I don't think we should use it either."</p><p>"She has a right to, as an elected member of Congress to submit those," he added, "I just don't think the timing and the case is right at this time, in this moment."</p><p>McCarthy's remarks come just days after Greene released a statement arguing that Biden is "unfit to hold the office of the presidency." Less than one day after Biden was elected Greene also charged that Biden displayed a pattern of abusing his powers when he served as Vice President from 2008 to 2016.</p><p>"President <a href="https://thehill.com/people/joe-biden" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Joe Biden</a> is unfit to hold the office of the presidency. His pattern of abuse of power as President Obama's Vice President is lengthy and disturbing," Greene said in a statement on Thursday, Jan 21. "President Biden has demonstrated that he will do whatever it takes to bail out his son, Hunter, and line his family's pockets with cash from corrupt foreign energy companies."</p><p><br/></p>
<div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e8fc94dd56068a82cde94ee68092afc6" id="c7b9a"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1352359178355011586"><div style="margin:1em 0">I just filed Articles of Impeachment on President @JoeBiden. https://t.co/mcwEEkKiHL</div> — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene)<a href="https://twitter.com/RepMTG/statuses/1352359178355011586">1611262528.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p><br/></p> Although Green claimed to have filed the articles of impeachment, she was later trolled on Twitter after <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-2650057836/" target="_self">admitting that she had not done so because she "thought it would be a lot easier than it is,"</a> according to a Republican inside source in the lawmaker's district.
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Lindsey Graham slammed by ex-Republican staffer: He wants to keep the GOP 'a racist party'
January 23, 2021
On MSNBC Saturday, former House GOP staffer and Breitbart writer Kurt Bardella accused Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) of endorsing ongoing resistance by the Republican Party against multiracial democracy and demographic change, following his comments that people who oppose Trump within the party will be "erased."
"After all that's happened the past couple of weeks, what influence do you think Trump will actually have moving forward?" asked anchor Alex Witt.
<p>"Well, what I've just heard Lindsey Graham say — and it's embarrassing, frankly, what has become of Lindsey Graham, but putting that aside, he said — let's talk about outcomes," said Bardella. "400,000 dead Americans, that's a good outcome? A white nationalist mob trying to violently overthrow the United States government, hang the vice president, hold hostage lawmakers and execute the Speaker of the House, that's the outcome Lindsey Graham's talking about here?"</p><p>"The fact is Donald Trump is a symptom, he's not the cause of the rot that ensued inside the Republican Party for a very long time," said Bardella. "They have to decide whether they will be a party that continues to parrot white nationalist parties or not. And that decision will come through in a vote to impeach Donald Trump or not. It sounds like people like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley want to continue down this line to keep this a racist party. That's their prerogative. That's fine. But we've already seen in the midterm elections, the American people rejected the racist party of the American politics, election cycle after election cycle, and they're putting themselves on the permanent path of staying in the minority and out of the White House."</p><p>"By 2045, this country will be a minority-majority country," added Bardella. "And as long as the Republican Party continues to alienate themselves from people of color, from women, from Hispanics, from Asian-Americans, from anybody but white people, they will find themselves on the wrong side of power with only themselves to blame."</p><p>
Watch below:
</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JwhAdu15gd4" width="640"></iframe>
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A mutant strain of the novel coronavirus discovered in South Africa appears to be able to ward off antibodies from individuals who had previously recovered from COVID-19 — meaning if the new strain becomes widespread, we may see more people getting infected multiple times.
<p>A group of South African scientists made this discovery in a <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.18.427166v1.full.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">paper</a> published earlier this week by South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases. In it, researchers describe how they studied blood samples from a small group of people who had developed COVID-19 but ultimately recovered. When the human body recovers from a disease, it produces a protein known as an antibody to identify and ultimately protect itself in the future from the bacteria or virus which caused it to become ill. (These illness-causing microorganisms are known as pathogens.) This means that people who were sick with COVID-19 should in theory have antibodies that recognize the pathogen which causes it and neutralize it in the event that they are reinfected.</p><p>Instead, according to the authors of the paper, half of the blood samples of the patients they tested did not have the antibodies necessary to protect them from the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/01/10/multiple-coronavirus-strains-are-now-circulating-heres-what-that-means/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">501Y.V2 strain</a> of the novel coronavirus, which was identified in South Africa last month. While it was a small study and more research will need to be done, the initial results are not auspicious.</p><p>Not only could this interfere with the human population's ability to develop natural immunity, it could also hamper the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Both companies are distributing <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/12/05/mrna-history-vaccines-coronavirus-moderna-immunology-lipid-nanoparticles/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">mRNA vaccines</a>, which are different from traditional vaccines that train the immune system to develop antibodies against pathogens by injecting weakened or dead versions of the disease-causing agents into the body. mRNA vaccines, by contrast, inject a synthetic single-stranded molecule of RNA that infects our own cells and makes them produce the protein that grows on the "spike" on the exterior of the coronavirus. The presence of this protein in the body is then recognized as an intruder, and the immune system learns to identify the coronavirus as an enemy and protect against it.</p><p>In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, both of them train the body to recognize a protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus known as Spike. Spike is the protein that helps the virus enter human cells and resembles little pins that stick out from the sphere of the virus itself, like the spines that poke out all around a sea urchin. Unfortunately, the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/01/10/multiple-coronavirus-strains-are-now-circulating-heres-what-that-means/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">South African mutation</a> alters that very protein, meaning that it could affect the vaccine's efficacy.</p><p>The South African strain is not the only one raising concern. There is a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-20/south-african-study-into-new-virus-strain-raises-vaccine-fears" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">new strain in Brazil</a> that the scientists argue "also has changes at key positions" in ways that could impair antibodies' effectiveness against the disease. Then there is a strain in the United Kingdom known as B117 that, though not deadlier than previous strains, is more transmissible.</p><p>"I think transmissible is definitely the word to go with because that highlights what we do know and what we don't know," Dr. Dylan Morris, a postdoctoral research scholar at UCLA, told Salon earlier this month about the British strain. "Even if the disease severity isn't increased or even if it decreases by a small amount, 'more transmissible' is still a very scary thing at this point in the pandemic, because that could result in faster spread and faster exponential growth."</p>
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