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Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson is suggesting selling the 53 trucks and other vehicles towed and impounded by cops this weekend to pay for the policing costs incurred by the right wing anti-vax protest that paralyzed the Canadian capital city for weeks, CTV News reports.

“I’ve asked our city manager, for instance, how can we take possession of all of those trucks that have been towed away? How can we confiscate those and sell those trucks to help pay for some of our costs? I don’t think the taxpayers of Ottawa should be paying for this multi-million dollar bill that we’re going to be saddled with because of the irresponsibility and the illegal activities of a bunch of truckers and others who showed little regard for our community and its people,” said Watson in an interview with CTV News at Six. Ottawa is tens of millions in the hole in police overtime pay after the occupation, though some funds are on the way from the federal government to cover the costs.

More than 1,000 dead rats and other rodents were discovered at an Arkansas distribution center for Family Dollar Stores, prompting a voluntary recall and the Food and Drug Administration to issue a warning to dispose of the products, CBS News reports.

The recall is for various products purchased since the first of the year in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.  The products recalled include dietary supplements, beauty products, pet food, over-the-counter drugs and medical equipment.

In an inspection of the West Memphis, Arkansas warehouse, officials found live rodents, dead rodents, “rodent feces and urine, evidence of gnawing, nesting and rodent odors throughout the facility, dead birds and bird droppings, and products stored in conditions that did not protect against contamination.”  The FDA ordered the company to fumigate the location.

Former Guy has been talking to people about picking either Senator Marco Rubio or Tim Scott as his replacement for Mike Pence as running mate in a 2024 comeback campaign, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reports. Worth noting is that neither Rubio or Scott voted against certifying the 2020 election – Scott announced the day before he was voting to certify, Rubio did not say anything beforehand but did not object either before or after the Capitol riot. That’s an important question of loyalty to the Orange Tyrant that would be bound to come up during a campaign – and result in the fanboys shrieking that Trump picked a “RINO” as a running mate.

The Trump-founded, Devin Nunes-managed, artificial intelligence moderated, free speech Twitter clone TRUTH Social makes its hotly anticipated debut in the iOS app store Monday, Reuters reports, citing a screenshot they obtained of an internal beta user’s post asking a TRUTH’s chief product officer “Billy B” when the launch is happening. “We’re currently set for release in the Apple App store for Monday Feb. 21,” the executive responded from his verified user account, per Reuters.

Keep in mind that a launch in the app store does not definitely mean the platform will be open to all users on Monday, so don’t be surprised if you download it and get a prompt telling you to enter in some sort of preview code you don’t have yet. It’s also possible from this news – and this would suck – that like Kevin Sorbo’s lame “Freespace” social media app, that there is no browser-based version of Truth Social, making it more of a hassle for National Zero to properly cover and mock the right wing dumbassery that will be no doubt ubiquitous on Truth.

Three people set to blow the whistle on the leading Democrat candidate to be the next President have dropped dead over the last three months – two of them suicides and one heart attack, the Daily Beast reports. Lee Jae-myung, mayor of large Seoul metro area city Seongnam and the frontrunner in the 2022 South Korea Presidential race who has long been suspected of ties to organized crime, is facing an inquiry over allegations he’s been profiting millions of dollars off of a major real estate scam at the Seongnam Development Corporation. Two of SDC’s top executives “committed suicide” in December while the third man had material knowledge of the shady source of legal fees paid to defend Lee in another unrelated case died of a heart attack in January.

That case was over whether Lee had committed perjury when asked about whether he had his own brother tossed in the loony bin years ago, making it clear Lee doesn’t fuck around. May God have mercy on the Seouls of anyone else who thinks they’re going to stop Korean Killary from getting into whatever their equivalent of the Oval Office is. We wanted to try to work “Gangnam Style” into the end of this article too, however we’re not sure if everyone would definitely get the reference.

Anyone know where Hillary was this weekend? https://t.co/ewlCbfxRE6

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 19, 2022

Isn’t it kind of weird how he doesn’t seem so afraid of her though? Wouldn’t one think that if Hillary Clinton can get to some asshole in a jail cell on another continent that she could just as easily get to a United States Senator anywhere he is, be it Washington, Texas, or Cancun? Shouldn’t this kind of shit talk put Ted on the “Arkancide” hit list too? Can he even trust his own security guards? What if they’re secretly on the Clinton Foundation’s payroll? Ted should sleep with one eye open.

On Sunday, Politico surveyed the landscape of the Republican gubernatorial primary and the state of the party overall in Wisconsin as 2020 election dead-ender Timothy Ramthun’s campaign threatens to upend what had already been a fraught situation for the party seeking to unseat Dem Governor Tony Evers and keep utterly detestable asshole Senator Ron Johnson in Congress for the third term he had promised not to run for. “We’re going to spend millions of dollars tearing ourselves apart,” Dodge County GOP Chairman Jack Yuds told Politico, adding that Evers “is going to be sitting on millions of dollars” to use in November. “I don’t like it. We’ve got to focus the group.”

MAGA activists are terrorizing the party from within. “GOP leaders are making a grave mistake if they continue to refuse to listen to their constituents, who either ARE DETERMINED not to vote in upcoming elections (if the situation remains unchanged in terms of fixing the problems that occurred in the 2020 election) or who will not vote for any of the current Republican leadership who refuse to address the people’s concerns about election integrity,” said a recent Facebook post by an actual official county GOP account. Some are even warning the party not to issue official endorsements of candidates because “in some ways, it could be the kiss of death because the candidate who wins that [endorsement] could become the establishment candidate or the insider, and that’s what the base is against,” said a state Republican Party strategist.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flies first class from Texashttps://t.co/AZdKXDT65u

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 20, 2022

Truth Social, the social media app that looks a lot like a ripoff of Twitter, will drop in the Apple App Store Monday, according to information reporters from Reuters reviewed.

Previews of the app show that it has verified users (designated by a red check mark), a character limit and upvote buttons.  Truth Social has declared that it will be a haven for free speech, but early versions of the terms of service show that saying anything bad about anyone in the Trump family (or presumably, their allies) would merit a ban.

Beta versions of the application were circulating among testers over the last two weeks.  When one beta tester asked on a message board when the app would be going live, an executive responded, “We’re currently set for release in the Apple App store for Monday Feb. 21.”

Noted conspiracy theorist and club foot enthusiast Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA), in an apparent rehearsal for her Open Mic Night slot at Yuk Yuks by the Alpharetta airport, announces that her sole job in Congress is to obstruct legislation and make everyone’s lives hell.

Fox correspondent Sara Carter has admitted there was no basis for a widespread report that a woman had been trampled to death by a police horse during the law enforcement effort to clear out the Canadian truck drivers, the Daily Beast reports.

The report was picked up by Senator Ted Cruz (Q-Quintana Roo) and conservative, um, “media personalities” Diamond and Silk, who broadcast the fake report over their social media accounts.  Right wing and conspiracy website even ascribed a name to the woman:  Roberta Paulsen.  Ms. Paulsen had been taken to a hospital and died, but of an apparent heart attack, not a horse hoof stomp.

By Saturday, Carter had backed off the report, tweeting that her sources were wrong, and not that she was wrong for reporting something she hadn’t verified.  Carter’s Twitter feed is riddled with posts that contain qualifying statements like “We’re waiting for confirmation that….”  Spreading unconfirmed information makes one a gossip, not a reporter.

Lawyer about whom everyone is asking “can she still practice law?” Sidney Powell solicits money for a new investigation into a claim that Capitol Police invited January 6th domestic terrorist into the Capitol and then fired tear gas behind them to force them into the building which, she claims, was the conspiracy all along to arrest Trump supporters because of course they didn’t go in voluntarily.

Ottawa Police have cleared the anti-vax clustertruck assholes from the area in front of the Canadian Parliament building after weeks of occupation, the CBC reports. Though pockets of resistance remain, the recapture of the city’s center marks a major loss for the North American right wing. Cops say 47 were arrested on Saturday, adding to the more than 100 cuffed on Friday. At least 38 vehicles were towed, hopefully to an impound yard somewhere in the Yukon Territory.

Two teams of computer scientists running stylometric algorithms believe they’ve identified the author of the very first few QAnon posts as a 45-year-old South African software developer and tech journalist Paul Furber – before 8chan administrator Ron Watkins took over the persona, the New York Times reports. QAnon researchers had long suspected Furber of being the original author as he had shared the first “Q drop” posts on 8chan and acted as if he’d stumbled across them, but the analysis comparing the linguistic styles present in his publicly attributed tweets and articles with the Q posts and found some very strong similarities between the two. Furber spoke with the Times and tried to play it off by saying Q’s writing style had influenced him. The teams also determined a rough point at which Watkins took over authoring the Q posts from Furber as some time in early 2018 by comparing the posts to Watkins’s publicly attributed writings.

Top Ukrainian military officials come under direct artillery fire from Russian-backed rebels while touring the frontlines Saturday, the Associated Press reports. No information on casualties was provided. Separatist leaders had ordered a full mobilization of their military forces earlier Saturday amid ever-escalating violence that Ukrainian and Western officials feared would provide Russia a self-permission structure to begin the long-anticipated assault.

A French “modeling agent” described by the Daily Mail as Jeffrey Epstein’s “pimp” was found dead of “suicide” in a jail in Paris on Saturday. Jean-Luc Brunel, 76, was arrested on charges of statutory rape by French cops in December 2020 as he attempted to board a flight to Senegal after Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre had named him in her lawsuit against British royal Price Andrew – which reached a settlement just days ago. French law allows for prosecution of crimes committed overseas and investigators had found sufficient evidence to nail Brunel after interviewing Giuffre remotely. It is unknown if there is any CCTV footage of Brunel’s hanging death or if he had a cellmate but by far the most salient question is what did Hillary know and when did she know it?

“…who wears anything for eight hours in a row?…”

• For the first time, the Trumps are learning what life’s like for the rest of us who have to follow the laws and can’t buy our way out of charges.
• The parents who are crying about CRT being taught in their schools were the kids too fragile to watch ABC Afterschool Specials as children.
• Whatever the fuck is going to happen in Ukraine will be a circus.  On the off chance Putin doesn’t invade this weekend, he’ll leave sufficient forces along the border to keep everyone on edge indefinitely.  He’s working to destabilize the West, and he’s got all the time in the world.  
• One thing about Biden:  He’s repaired much of the damage Trump did with our NATO allies.  The entire alliance stands united against Russian aggression.  Kudos there.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LVII”