7 Things: More Twitter election interference, DeSantis leads Trump, and more …

7. Brittney Griner is free but a U.S. Marine stays locked up

• Phoenix Mercury basketball player and convicted drug user Brittney Griner has been returned to U.S. custody after months in a Russian prison. The Biden administration traded a Russian arms dealer for Griner.
• A U.S. Marine Paul Whalen was apparently part of the discussion, but only a one-for-one trade was executed. But from a basketball standpoint, we won this trade.

6. Alabama COVID-19 cases on the rise

• As expected, COVID-19 cases are up following the Thanksgiving holiday. The 300+ cases are the highest the state has seen since Oct. 1 and double the patients for hospitals than before the holiday.
• But in comparison to last winter, the numbers are way way way down, there were 3,000 a day hospitalizations last winter and there were 700 in the hospital in July. Alabama hospitals have seen as many as 300 flu patients in a day so far this flu season, and when taken as a whole, there are somewhere between 500 and 600 people in state hospitals with respiratory viruses

5. Fox News highlights UAB professor

• Fox News’s popular primetime host Laura Ingraham has declared that UAB’s Dr. Morissa Ladinsky is “on the warpath against traditional Americans” after her comments about how a young person’s suicide was a positive for the transgender movement.

• She’s laid out how Ladinsky was speaking at the Academy of Pediatrics conference and “she spoke glowingly about trans ideology, and more disturbingly, about the ‘bold’ suicide of a trans girl.”

4. House-approved defense bill has Alabama benefits

• The U.S. House of Representatives voted 350-80 to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This legislation will cost $487 billion and cover the funding for the Pentagon. U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Saks) is the lead Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and believes there are many good things for the state of Alabama in the bill.

• The vaccine mandate is almost dead and U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Hoover), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, is thrilled about that, “This legislation repeals the unnecessary COVID vaccine mandate on our military which will help mitigate the slump in our recruitment and retention levels.”

3. My marriage is now legit

• Gay marriage has been protected by a Supreme Court ruling for years and interracial marriage has been legal since 1967, but Democrats felt they needed to pass a law enshrining the recognition of both.
• Some Republicans crossed the aisle to pass this bill but there have been some issues raised about religious liberty, this will probably show up in the courts soon.

2. DeSantis leads Trump

• In what appears to be a trend, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is cracking into former President Donald Trump’s status as a frontrunner for the GOP nomination for president of the United States.
• A Yahoo poll taken before the Georgia runoff shows DeSantis up on Trump 47-42, which comes after previous polls showed Trump up double-digits. When you narrow the poll to 2016 primary voters, DeSantis’ lead jumps to 11 points.

1. Twitter lied to Americans, the media, and Congress

• The newest batch of Twitter files released by CEO Elon Musk shows that the company has long been engaged in the act of shadowbanning (secretly throttling the spread of information) based on its political impact. Musk says he will tell users if they were impacted.
• This was denied by Twitter and the media for years and this was election interference. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey went before Congress and told them that the practice was not happening, he lied, and that is a crime. As usual, the collective yawn by the mainstream media betrays the freedoms they claim to stand for and protect.