Nikki Haley Appears to Believe She Can Win Taylor Swift’s Endorsement

Nikki Haley appears to be woefully misinformed about her chances at getting Taylor Swift’s endorsement.

“I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know what the obsession is, Taylor Swift is allowed to have a boyfriend, Taylor Swift is a good artist, I’ve taken my daughter to Taylor Swift concerts before,” Haley told CNN Thursday. “To have a conspiracy theory of all of this is bizarre. No one knows who she will endorse.”

Sure, technically anything is possible as we’re all hurtling on a rock through space, but the chances of Swift endorsing Haley are so infinitesimally small it’s laughable.

The historically apolitical pop superstar had effectively held a vow of silence on politics until 2018, when she endorsed Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, in the Senate race against Republican candidate Marsha Blackburn.

And in 2020, the “Cruel Summer” singer endorsed Joe Biden for president—the first time she ever tapped into presidential politics.

“The change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented, that women deserve the right to choose what happens to their bodies, and that the LGBTQIA+ community deserves to be acknowledged and included,” Swift told V Magazine at the time.

That doesn’t exactly sound like Haley, who has in recent months come under fire for claiming that America was never a racist nation, who won’t rule out an abortion ban, and who has claimed that Florida’s anti-LGBTQ “Don’t Say Gay” law didn’t go “far enough.”

Right-wing conspiracy theorists have latched onto Swift as their latest obsession, believing that the musician and her two-time Super Bowl champion boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, are a part of a Pentagon psyop to help President Joe Biden get reelected to the White House.

“The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce). All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA. Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield. It’s all been an op since day one,” posted pro-Trump Rumble broadcaster Mike Crispi on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

It’s an idea that defies all logic, especially as some of its most vocal proponents, who are known white supremacist and neo-Nazi affiliates like OANN host Jack Posobiec, seemingly reverse course on their racist ideologies in favor of targeting the blonde-haired, blue-eyed country music star and her football-playing boyfriend.

Nikki Haley is right about one thing: The conspiracy theories are bizarre. But so is her thinking she actually has a chance at getting Swifties to back her.

A Republican representative believes that Palestinian babies are not innocent civilians but “terrorists” who should be killed.

Florida Representative Brian Mast made the horrifying comment when confronted by Code Pink protesters outside his office on Wednesday.

In a video, Mast can be seen calmly telling the demonstrators, “It would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters.”

When asked if he has seen the images of Palestinian babies killed in Israeli attacks, Mast says, “These are not innocent Palestinian civilians.”

“The babies?” the activists asks in astonishment.

Mast then says that the “half a million people starving to death” should have elected a pro-Israel government.

When one protester points out that much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed, Mast says, “And there’s more infrastructure that needs to be destroyed.”

“Did you not hear me? There’s more that needs to be destroyed,” he says again for emphasis.

More than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed since October in Israel’s constant bombardment of Gaza. The majority of the victims have been women and children.

Mast’s horrific comments—and the chilling way in which he delivered them—should come as no surprise. In November, just a few weeks after the war began, Mast compared Palestinian civilians to Nazis and implied that they are all guilty for Hamas’s atrocities.

“I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of ‘innocent Palestinian civilians,’ as is frequently said,” he said on the House floor.

“I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.”

Republicans just earned their first intraparty “no” vote on their sham impeachment effort against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas: Colorado Representative Ken Buck.

“The people that I’m talking to on the outside, the constitutional experts, former members agree that this just isn’t an impeachable offense,” Buck told reporters Thursday outside the House chamber.

“It’s maladministration. He’s terrible,” the Republican representative added, referring to Mayorkas. “The border is a disaster, but that’s not impeachable.”

Buck’s announcement raises doubts as to whether the House will even be able to push forward an impeachment vote, as Republicans grapple with a razor-thin two-seat majority in the lower chamber. While the effort may still have a shot with the help of some Democrats in swing districts, a solid “no” vote from inside the party certainly doesn’t help.

In an interview with MSNBC, Buck argued that a policy disagreement isn’t a valid basis to oust the Cabinet member, specifying that Mayorkas’s decisions on the border don’t constitute a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

“This is a policy difference,” Buck said. “If we start going down this path of impeachment with a Cabinet official, we are opening a door, as Republicans, that we don’t want to open. The next president who is a Republican will face the same scrutiny from Democrats. It’s wrong, and we should not set this precedent.”

Buck had been undecided on the vote prior to speaking with Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green and committee staff, reported NBC News. House Republican leadership did not make an effort to speak with him, he told the outlet.

Republicans plan to bring the impeachment articles to the House floor next week. Should the effort prove successful, it will force a trial in the Senate.

The effort to impeach Mayorkas gained new traction on Sunday when the House Homeland Security Committee released two articles of impeachment, the first of which described the Biden administration’s border policies as a crime and the second accused Mayorkas of lying to Congress and obstructing an official investigation.

Tensions have been boiling over between the two parties since Texas defied a Supreme Court ruling that determined that state’s use of concertina wire along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border went beyond its authority. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to stall on a legitimate border security deal in a thankless attempt to bolster Donald Trump’s reelection campaign—a move that a growing number of conservative lawmakers appear to disagree with, including Senator Kevin Cramer and Representative Dan Crenshaw.

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled Thursday that 10 Republican state senators have disqualified themselves from the upcoming election, after staging a record-long walkout last year to block bills on abortion access, transgender health care, and gun restrictions.

The 10 senators staged a six-week boycott last year, the longest in Oregon’s history, stalling hundreds of bills and paralyzing the legislature. Oregon’s secretary of state determined in August that the senators had violated a voter-approved constitutional amendment disqualifying lawmakers from the ballot if they have more than 10 unexcused absences.

The boycotters sued Secretary LaVonne Griffin-Valade, arguing they should be allowed to run in November. But the state’s high court upheld Griffin-Valade’s decision on Thursday.

Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved the change to the state constitution in 2022, after Republicans had staged similar boycotts the three previous years. The amendment states that if a lawmaker has missed more than 10 sessions, that lawmaker is not allowed to run “for the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed.”

Democrats control the Oregon statehouse, but legislature rules require two-thirds of lawmakers to be present in order to pass legislation. The amendment’s goal is to prevent lawmakers from staging walkouts that gum up legislative works.

The 10 senators who walked out last year were primarily boycotting two measures: one that would have expanded access to abortion and gender-affirming care and another that would have cracked down on so-called ghost guns, or undetectable firearms. The legislative session resumed only after Republicans managed to extract concessions from Democrats on both these bills.

The boycotters argued in the state Supreme Court that they should be allowed to run for reelection in 2024 since their terms aren’t technically “completed” until 2025. They would then be ineligible in the 2028 election cycle.

But the justices pointed out that even if the amendment itself is ambiguous, the information provided ahead of the ballot initiative was not.

“Those other materials expressly and uniformly informed voters that the amendment would apply to a legislator’s immediate next terms of office, indicating that the voters so understood and intended that meaning,” the justices wrote in their ruling.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has plans to force a vote on another censure resolution against Representative Ilhan Omar on Thursday—except this time, Greene is attempting to punish the first Somali American legislator in Congress for words she never said.

Omar, who is also one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, has spent the better part of the week under fire by her colleagues across the aisle over a speech she delivered at the Minneapolis Hyatt Hotel on Saturday, celebrating an election in a region of Somalia. During the speech, she spoke in Somali about a dispute between Somalia and the breakaway republic Somaliland—but Republican interpretations of Omar’s language have been far from accurate.

Several Republicans have called for an ethics investigation, accusing Omar of being a “foreign agent,” while others, like wannabe House Speaker Tom Emmer, are demanding she “resign in disgrace,” condemning Omar for her “Somalia-first comments.”

According to the translation Republicans keep using, and the one cited by Greene’s resolution, Omar allegedly said that “the U.S. Government will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do,” and that she would “protect the interests of Somalia from inside the U.S. system.”

Greene and other Republicans also keep alleging that Omar said we are “Somalians first, Muslims second.”

But third-party translations of Omar’s speech, published in full by The Minnesota Reformer, reveal that Omar never actually said any of that. The Reformer commissioned two translations, and neither showed Omar saying, “Somalians first, Muslims second.”

“So when I heard that people who call themselves Somalis signed an agreement with Ethiopia, many people reached out to me and said I needed to talk to the U.S. government. They asked, what would the U.S. government do?” Omar said, according to the outlet.

“My answer was that the U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do. That is the confidence we need to have as Somalis. We live in this country. This is the country where we pay taxes. This is the country that has elected a woman from your community. For as long as I am in Congress, no one will take over the seas belonging to the nation of Somalia and the United States will not support others who seek to steal from us,” she continued.

“So feel comfortable, Somali Minnesotans, that the woman you sent to Congress is aware of this issue and feels the same way you do,” she added.

In an email to the local paper, Omar noted that the attacks were “disingenuous attempts to malign my character and question my loyalty to my home, America.”