Joe Biden

Hours after the far-right House Freedom Caucus demanded that Speaker Kevin McCarthy call off debt ceiling talks with President Joe Biden, GOP negotiators did just that on Friday as the two sides remained at an impasse over federal spending—which Republicans want to slash deeply—and other issues.

"It's time to press pause because it's just not productive," Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), McCarthy's handpicked lead negotiator, told reporters Friday without saying when or whether talks would resume.

The Biden White House is responding to news a far-right wing Republican Congressman has hired a staffer who has ties to a neo-Nazi.

U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has been accused of associating with white nationalists and whose own siblings reportedly have said he is a white supremacist, hired Wade Searle as his digital director. Searle, Talking Points Memo reported this week, has ties to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is the antisemitic Christian nationalist and white supremacist who founded the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), has a cult-like following of supporters called "groypers," and infamously dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago late last year.

Former President Donald Trump on Friday piled pressure on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to default on the national debt and wreck the American economy unless Democrats cave and give Republicans "everything they want."

In an all-caps Truth Social post, the former president laid out a stark choice for Republicans as they try to negotiate a way to raise the national debt ceiling.

Nations around the world are looking on with a mixture of alarm and bafflement as the United States hurtles toward an economy-wrecking default, with the Republican Party refusing to raise the country's globally unique debt limit without massive, harmful spending cuts.

The possibility of a U.S. default—a failure to pay the government's obligations—has already rattled global markets and prompted grave warnings from major institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, which said last week that a default would have "severe repercussions" for a world economy already facing the prospect of a central bank-induced recession.

MSNBC’s Emmy-award winning anchor and host Chris Hayes dissected then disintegrated Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and the Republican Party in general, for their authoritarian lunge and overall hypocrisy.

For nearly eight minutes Thursday evening, Hayes explained to viewers how DeSantis peddles fake claims about freedom, while enacting some the most hypocritically “authoritarian” and “dystopian” laws in the country.

When Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, that was by no means the end of their legal woes.

The right-wing cable news outlet is still facing a $2.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic (a Dominion competitor) and a lawsuit by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, who alleges that it tried to bully her into giving misleading testimony in the Dominion case. And to make matters worse for Fox News, former Homeland Security official Nina Jankowicz is suing them for defamation.

A Washington D.C. police officer was arrested and accused of lying about leaking information to the leader of the right-wing Proud Boys militant group.

An indictment alleged that Shane Lamond, a lieutenant with the Metropolitan Police Department, warned Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio before the Jan. 6 insurrection that an arrest warrant had been issued for him related to the destruction of a Black Lives Matter banner, reported the Associated Press.

United States Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) called into bankrupt right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars on Thursday and lavished him with praise for the specious information that he feeds to his audience.

"Alex, you have been, uh, a true leader. You, you are an original. You've always been telling the truth to the American people and making sure that they're informed on everything," Greene said.

Government reform experts are raising red flags that Congress has done little in the way of creating "guardrails" that would rein in the chaos Donald Trump visited upon the country during his four years in office that culminated in his attempt to overturn his election loss which led to an attack on the Capitol by his supporters.

According to a report from Politico's Michael Schaffer, a book called After Trump that written just before the 2020 presidential election by former White House counsel Bob Bauer and former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith suggested a menu of reforms that would set create new rules when it comes to a wide range of issues from presidential pardons, filling executive branch vacancies, and the use of emergency powers.