Category: Uncategorized

Efforts by voters challenging Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s eligibility for office–based on his vocal and ongoing support for the January 6th domestic terrorists–got a boost today when the North Carolina State Board of Elections ruled the group’s lawsuit can proceed despite Cawthorn’s court filing to dismiss, WTVD ABC-11 Raleigh-Durham reports.

The lawsuit contends that according to North Carolina law, Cawthorn is ineligible to be elected to office because he is in violation of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which prohibits people from running for Congress “who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”

North Carolina law allows voters to challenge the eligibility of a nominee or office holder based on “reasonable suspicion or belief.”  The statute demands that the candidate “show by a preponderance of the evidence” of qualifications to run.  Cawthorn claims that the Board’s powers illegally impede his First Amendment rights.

At least two explosions rocked downtown Abu Dhabi Wednesday morning (local time), with social media accounts saying they were possibly caused by a Houthi rocket attack and authorities saying gas cylinders exploded in an apartment.  The Washington Post reports that the explosion caused concern because the United Arab Emirates is hosting the FIFA Club World Cup.

The College Board, an extremely generic sounding organization we should just call the “SAT and AP Class Commission” because that’s what they actually do, just fired Republican Indiana state House Speaker Todd Huston from his $460,738/year day job as Senior Vice President for State and District Partnerships (meaningless bullshit title) over his “Critical Race Theory”-adjacent bill outlawing content which “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, responsibility, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or political affiliation,” Popular.info’s Judd Legum reports.

The College Board only moved to cut him loose when Legum published a post Monday exposing the gulf between Huston’s public job and what his now-former employer is supposed to do for kids entering higher education, so a serious round of applause for Judd Legum.

Democratic Ohio Congresswoman Joyce Beatty relates harassment she experienced at the hands of 84-year-old Kentucky Republican Congressman Hal Rogers:

Today, while heading to the House floor for votes, I respectfully asked my colleague @RepHalRogers to put on a mask while boarding the train. He then poked my back, demanding I get on the train. When I asked him not to touch me, he responded, “kiss my ass.” … This is the kind of disrespect we have been fighting for years, and indicative of the larger issue we have with GOP Members flaunting health and safety mandates designed to keep us and our staff safe. … @RepHalRogers, when you are ready to grow up and apologize for your behavior, you know where to find me.

Manu Raju of CNN reports that Rogers did say he was sorry for what he said to Beatty, saying, “My words were not acceptable.”

The Orange Allah giveth unto his loyal servant in the same boilerplate endorsement that he doles out to all of his zealots, no point pasting it here. Noem hit some rough patches with the extremists and things got messy in her extramarital affair with psychopath Trump minion Corey Lewandowski, but in the end the Holy One made the call and showered her with his golden words of support.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has taken a rare swipe at the Party to which he owes his entire political career by saying that the Republican National Committee went too far in censuring Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney and Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, the New York Times reports.

“We saw it happen,” McConnell said.  “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

McConnell joins a growing number of Republicans who seem increasing uneasy about the growing violence and anti-American sentiment within the GOP, particularly when it comes to supporting the terrorists who attempted to overthrow the Constitution.  And McConnell stated the unity of the Republican Party was a risk because of continued infighting.

“The United States Capitol Police is sworn to protect Members of Congress. If a Member’s office is left open and unsecured, without anyone inside the office, USCP officers are directed to document that and secure the office to ensure nobody can wander in and steal or do anything else nefarious. The weekend before Thanksgiving, one of our vigilant officers spotted the Congressman’s door was wide open. That Monday, USCP personnel personally followed up with the Congressman’s staff and determined no investigation or further action of any kind was needed. No case investigation was ever initiated or conducted into the Representative or his staff,” says U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger in a statement on Tuesday after the Federalist reported an Inspector General probe had been opened into the Capitol police department intel procedures, an article which framed far right Rep Troy Nehls’s freakout over a cop taking pics of his office as connected to the probe.

We actually can’t find any reliable, non-right wing propaganda source reporting on the existence of an investigation by the US Capitol Police Inspector General. National Zero apologizes for reporting the Federalist’s earlier assertion uncritically on Tuesday. Even if we framed it as “so fucking what?” there is still a difference between the a probe that takes 18 to 24 months to come up with nothing actually substantive by which time it will be long forgotten and no probe at all. Jerkoffs like Troy Nehls feed off of suspicion and the mere existence of an investigation and its on us to help make sure he starves. A correction has been added to the Tuesday morning National Zero article.

The Florida state Senate on Tuesday advanced a bill prohibiting teachers from explaining to kids younger than ten what homosexuality is Axios reports. The bill also allows parents to sue teachers for not telling parents about any “critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or wellbeing,” which a Dem pointed out could be something as stupid as a kid receiving a vegetarian lunch they didn’t ask for. This will go well.

North Carolina Trump fan Matthew Beddingfield was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday, more than 10 months after the Huffington Post concluded that he was at the Capitol with his father during the January 6th, 2021 insurrection and had assaulted police officers – all while awaiting trial on attempted murder charges from a 2019 incident where Beddingfield shot another teenager in the head during a gunfight in a Walmart parking lot, NBC News reports. Beddingfield pleaded guilty last year to a lesser charge over the shooting and was sentenced to probation which… well if it’s revoked it’s probably the least of his problems at this point if he’s facing decades in federal prison.

Term-limited Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan will not challenge Maryland Dem Senator Chris Van Hollen in the November midterm elections, the AP reports. Hogan had been courted by Moscow Mitch to run as he’s looking for moderate-ish recruits with a record of winning statewide elections, just as Mitch did New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. And just as New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu did, Hogan told Mitch no and fuck no.

On Monday during an interview with famous fat guy Chris Christie, right wing radio host Hugh Hewitt veered a little too close to candor when he said: “I never talk about January 6th, because I like my audience. I don’t want them to turn me off. And they’re bored. They do not like it.”

“If AT&T/DirecTV cancels OAN, I hope that everyone will boycott and cancel DirecTV. It is a very popular channel, far more popular than most would understand, and they are being treated horribly by the Radical Left lunatics running the networks. Instead of being allowed to grow, their voice is being shuttered. Don’t let it happen, cancel DirecTV. If you feel infringed by what this Communist movement is doing, cancel DirecTV!” says the fat Former Guy.

A woman walking on the Royal Park Bridge, connecting West Palm Beach to Palm Beach, Florida, died after the span open and the portion she was walking on lifted 50 feet into the air, CNN reports.

Pushing her bicycle, the woman was walking on the pedestrian portion of the bridge, about 10 feet from the mid-point of the span, when the bridge started opening.  According to witnesses, she held on to a railing as the section rose into the air.  As a pedestrian on the other side of the span tried to reach her, her grip slipped and she plunged around 60 feet to the concrete platform below.

Investigators do not know why the bridge rose with pedestrians still on it.  “There are warning signs and there are safety procedures in place for the bridge tenders to follow, with multiple steps and multiple layers of checking to make sure that there are no cars or people on the bridge when it goes up,” West Palm Beach Police spokesman Mike Jachles said.

Now maybe we’re making a broad assumption based on limited experience. It’s not like we spend all day, every day trolling Breitbart. If we did, maybe we’d see evidence of leftist trolls doxxing and harassing the regulars there. But probably not. We’re sure it’s happened, we just don’t think it’s something that has occurred at anywhere near the frequency with which right wing trolls harass and stalk normal, more well-adjusted folk on mainstream sites.

We’re not generally averse to sweeping generalizations about Republican voters and Trump fans for expedience or guilt by association, but now would be the right time to acknowledge that for however obtuse and fucking demented they are politically, a non-zero number of MAGA regulars in the Disqus-verse are actually kind of nice guys who would be likable if the discussion topic were different. Maybe 20 to 30 percent of them, when observed under the right conditions, show themselves to be capable of reason and circumspection. They can share a laugh at an apolitical joke on an apolitical topic, talk about movies, hobbies, whatever.

There are enough of them to justify that caveat. The rest are complete assholes, 100%, but even most of them don’t take things all that personally, much happier to propagate their bullshit than they are pursuing personal vendettas against the libs. But yet the hardcore pieces of shit, the ones who put time and effort and resources into doxxing a rival that seem so comfortable on the right. The answer to the question is self-evident: That the politics of hatred and malice attract those mentally predisposed to it. But the relentlessness with which some of these walking herpes sores wage their wars on others feels almost like it transcends simple Red vs Blue, like they forgot what it was all about in the first place. Their terroristic crusade against this or that person and it could be over video games or sports fandom and the impotent rage would still be there all the same. Almost like they’d be comfortable anywhere, but MAGA politics is the most accessible gateway to them.

Capitol police opened an investigation on me without any legal right to do so.

The swamp has over stepped and we have the receipts! https://t.co/dczYIkmGua

— Troy Nehls (@SheriffTNehls) February 8, 2022

Long story short for those who don’t want to suffer through the Federalist’s histrionic bullshit: An unnamed Capitol Police officer spotted a whiteboard in Texas MAGA Congressman Troy Nehls’s office with the words “body armor” written on it. Per the Federalist, Nehls claims he was working on legislation to ban the sale of Chinese manufactured body armor in the US, which seems plausible and reasonable enough, but since insurrectionist Republicans have a history of wearing bulletproof vests to work, the officer thought it merited further investigation. Also present was a crudely drawn map of a Capitol office building which Nehls claims was directions to an ice machine.

Because the GOP are freaking out after the USCP started compiling information on the staff and friends of MAGA members of Congress suspected of being a threat, Nehls and his fellow victims filed a complaint with the USCP Chief and got the department’s inspector general to open a probe into the department’s intel division. But libs don’t Back the Blue.

UPDATE 3:59 PM EST 2/8/2021: This whole story is almost certainly bullshit. First off the headline makes it sound like they’re connected when they were not, that failure is irrespective of the Federalist’s poor sourcing. Second, no source besides the Federalist has reported on an active Inspector General investigation into the department’s intel practices. We apologize for the errors that result from skimming insufferable right wing propaganda and reporting it as more or less true, even if we made it sound like another pointless circlejerk, with or without a real IG probe. We left the story intact with no changes since its original publication to show our non-diligence in relief.

The FBI is probing a meeting between Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio that sources say was held in the parking garage of the Phoenix Park hotel on January 5th, 2021, the day before the Capitol riot, Reuters reports. Tarrio, who had been arrested the prior day on vandalism charges after he had torched a Black Lives Matter banner outside of a DC church during a melee in the streets of the capital in December 2020, did not participate the Capitol riot as he had been ordered to leave the city immediately following his arrest.

Also present were Bianca Gracia, leader of Latinos for Trump, and Kellye SoRelle, a lawyer for the Oath Keepers (and now their acting president following Rhodes’s arrest on seditious conspiracy charges last month) who on January 18th, 2021 filed a completely insane civil complaint against Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (among many others) asking a federal judge to dissolve the entire 117th Congress and void the 2020 election. Latinos for Trump were the plaintiffs.

With the ever-present threat of a 9.0 megathrust earthquake occurring offshore leading to an apocalyptic tsunami an absolute certainty for coastal communities in the Pacific Northwest within the next 150 years or so, officials in Washington State have proposed a network of 58 fortified evacuation towers for locals to escape to during the deluge as the best solution to the catastrophe, the New York Times reports. The towers, modeled after Japanese shelters which saved countless lives in the tsunami that followed the massive 2011 Tohoku earthquake, would cost $3 million each.

This, short of condemning the homes of tens of thousands of Washingtonians and forcing them to relocate inland, is the most viable solution to the 100% certain destruction of their towns. The shelters are large enough to accommodate about 380 people each, or 22,000 in total, but would still be insufficient to hold all those in the path of a wave should it strike during the summer with beachgoers present in the coastal towns. Experts estimate that those in the flood zone would have 10 to 20 minutes max to escape the incoming tsunami – immediately after the strongest recorded earthquake ever to hit the continental United States. Again, this is 100% guaranteed to happen.

Far right Arizona state Senator and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem has introduced a resolution to decertify the 2020 election in Arizona on Monday, 14 months to the day after the election was called for President Joe Biden, and weeks after a similar resolution introduced by a similarly impotent Republican dead-ender failed in the Wisconsin legislature. A clip from the text:

“Whereas, a declaration of the results of statewide electoral contests in the 2020 general election is in dispute with probable cause to believe that multiple discrepancies exist, both criminal and noncriminal in nature, and that so many questionable ballots were commingled with legitimate ballots across the State of Arizona that significant voter disenfranchisement has occurred, making the election irredeemably compromised; and Whereas, the Constitution of the United States provides for enumerated powers of the federal government; moreover, the Tenth Amendment specifies such enumerated powers as negative rights of the federal government, while protecting vast unenumerated powers for the state governments, stating, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,'” and so on and so forth. Read more here.

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho QAnon fan Matthew Barszcz, 26, was indicted on charges of possession of child pornography last week by a federal grand jury, the Coeur d’Alene/Post Falls Press reports. Barszcz faces up to 20 years in federal prison if convicted on what had originally been a state-level charge when investigators traced activity on BitTorrent to his IP address in July 2020 and executed a search warrant which turned up a device containing the files in February 2021.

Barszcz’s excuse to police was that, as a QAnon adherent protecting America from Satanic Democrat pedophiles, he had downloaded the images of child sexual abuse to report them to law enforcement, without addressing the plot hole that he had downloaded all of them between June and October 2020 and waited until he was arrested four months later to claim that was his goal.

Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Monday that the state will lift its mandate that all people wear masks indoors and as of February 15th, only unvaccinated people will have to stay masked in public settings, CNN reports.

With declining infection rates as the omicron variant fades, and with the state exceeding 80% vaccinated, Newsom hopes to return the state to a closer feeling of normalcy.

Although the state is lifting its mask mandate, some counties experiencing particularly high rates may extend theirs, a move the Newsom administration would not likely challenge.