{"id":18961,"date":"2026-02-13T04:22:03","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T04:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/billy-long-calls-iceland-52nd-state-joke-totally-inappropriate-2\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T04:22:03","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T04:22:03","slug":"billy-long-calls-iceland-52nd-state-joke-totally-inappropriate-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/billy-long-calls-iceland-52nd-state-joke-totally-inappropriate-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Billy Long calls Iceland \u201852nd state\u2019 joke \u2018totally inappropriate\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Former Rep. Billy Long apologized to lawmakers for a private joke he made to former House colleagues saying Iceland would be the &ldquo;52nd state&rdquo; with him as its governor. Appearing Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, President Donald Trump&rsquo;s pick to serve as ambassador to the Arctic nation moved to clean up a diplomatic mess of his own making&#8230;<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/live-updates\/2026\/02\/12\/congress\/billy-long-on-greenland-00778409\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former Rep. Billy Long apologized to lawmakers for a private joke he made to former House colleagues saying Iceland would be the &ldquo;52nd state&rdquo; with him as its governor. Appearing Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, President Donald Trump&rsquo;s pick to serve as ambassador to the Arctic nation moved to clean up a diplomatic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}