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Hamas released thirteen of its estimated 225 Israeli prisoners and four Thai citizens in exchange for at least 33 Palestinians released by Israel during the second day of a four-day ceasefire that will allow food, fuel, medical supplies and other aid to be trucked into the Gaza Strip, the Washington Post reports.  The exchange was delayed after Hamas claimed Israel violated the agreement because it would not allow aid to be delivered to areas it determined to be “military zones.”

According to a number of sources, lame-duck Republican New York Congressman Anthony Devolder George Santos was on fire during a Twitter livestream (called something silly like an “X Space”) for a right-wing blogger Friday night, repeatedly taunting his GOP colleagues in the House to expel him including calling the Republican head of the Ethics Committee that investigated him a “pussy.”

Santos doesn’t want to resign his seat; he wants to be kick out so he can claim victimhood like all Republicans crave.  So to put some cream on top of dare to his colleagues to boot him, he added a Madison Cawthorn-esque flourish to the reason he’s not running for reelection:  it’s not because he’s going to get convicted of felonies.  It’s because they’re having frequent sex with lobbyists.

“Within the ranks of the United States Congress, there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds … I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyists that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on and sell off the American people. … Not show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them. This shit happens every single week. Where are the ethics investigations?”

“Has anybody noticed that Hamas has returned people from other Countries but, so far, has not returned one American Hostage? There is only one reason for that, NO RESPECT FOR OUR COUNTRY OR OUR LEADERSHIP. This is a very sad and dark period of America!” writes fat former President Trump without explaining what he did to pitch in to make a deal happen.

Safe bet that it’s because he was too busy losing his shit over some guy few have heard of, “Bob Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years. He’s more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory, but now he’s going around using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats. I don’t believe anything Bob Vander Plaats says. Anyone who would take $95,000, and then endorse a Candidate who is going nowhere, is not what Elections are all about!”

Hamas says it will delay the next round of hostage releases slated for Saturday because it claims Israel is not in compliance with other parts of the agreement, namely that the promised aid had not reached the northern stretches of the Gaza Strip because the Israeli military had blocked the trucks, the Washington Post reports.

A spokesman for the Red Crescent–the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross–confirmed that a number of its trucks delivering supplies to civilians in the north were barred from entering areas because they were declared “military zones” unilaterally by the Israeli Defense Force.

The Associated Press reports that prior to the latest announcement, Hamas had provided Qatari and Egyptian mediators with a list of 14 hostages it would release Saturday.  An Egyptian spokesperson confirmed Israel’s prison system was preparing no fewer than 42 Palestinian prisoners for release.

Amidst the gutter right wing content shared in a Saturday morning Truth Social posting binge – a flurry more likely the work of the Trump campaign’s social media team rather than the fat former president himself – was a post linked to a Substack piece written by some douchebag – and sponsored by MyPatriotCigars.com – titled “It’s Time To Revamp The RNC.” In it MAGA cock knob Paul Ingrassia proposes all sorts of ideas how to reorganize the Republican National Committee to properly combat the “voter fraud” responsible for the “underwhelming results of the 2022 and 2023 elections (to say nothing of the stolen 2020 election),” backing only candidates “who can prove an extensive history of robust support for the 45th President,” and “cooperating with [QAnon freak who was fired from the Virginia GOP for having sex with a man in their office and posting pics of it on Craigslist] Scott Presler and other voter-outreach grassroots groups to register Republican voters.”

All pretty standard stuff for the MAGA Reich and even if it’s a very safe bet that Trump himself didn’t read it he almost certainly agrees with it when one of his minions summarizes the whole thing for him. Especially the part at the end where Ingrassia very unsubtly warns Ronna Not-Romney.

“Tyranny has arrived on these shores. The Biden regime has made political prisoners of those who peacefully exercised their rights to free speech and assembly. We are going through a great spiritual reckoning as a nation. It is high time that Ronna McDaniel’s RNC, which can be a powerful weapon in this battle, start deploying its resources for good. If not, her fate will be the same as those who similarly betrayed the movement, and she too will be relegated, alongside Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy, and the rest of the Republican establishment – to the dustbin of history,” Ingrassia writes.

This is "Gaza Population Explodes, but They're Definitely the Victims of Genocide" levels of cope

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 25, 2023

For those who might not get what’s going on with this tweet, here’s an explainer: The Associated Press is a non-profit commercial collective, funded by subscriptions from local and national news outlets, to provide coverage of stories not everyone can send a reporter to. Like the above story about endangered sea turtles carried on Breitbart. Founded in 1846, the AP is one of the few concepts originating in the print media age to prove extremely durable in the digital era. Just as, for example, the Denver Post in 1943 was able to deliver their readers updates on fighting between American and German troops in North Africa without the Denver Post having to send a reporter there, AP wire reports enable local and national outlets’ websites to carry stories they wouldn’t otherwise have on their own in 2023. You can see it in a number of articles we’ve published here at National Zero that, even though we correctly attributed them as “the AP reports” their links go to the websites of ABC News, WRAL in North Carolina, NBC News, PBS, 1010 WINS in New York City, Politico, CTV News in Canada, and others rather than their official APnews.com site.

Breitbart’s one of those websites. We have no idea what it actually costs for them to license AP stories – as opposed to simply copying and pasting them like we did in the earliest version of National Zero. That was free… and possibly civilly actionable. As with a lot of high-level enterprise services, the pricing is opaque and appears to be based on traffic, just as the print-centric era AP was based on newspaper circulation. The best data point on that we could find was in a 2009 Harvard Nieman Lab article where the publisher of the 9,000-subscriber Norwalk Reflector in Ohio said they were paying $48,000 a year to carry AP content before they dropped it.

Evil terrorist group – or heroic freedom fighter movement if you ask far left assholes – Hamas on Saturday gave two suspected collaborators the Mike Pence treatment by shooting them and hanging their Muslim-in-name-only (“MINO”) corpses from a telephone pole for selling out to the globalist Israeli Deep State, the Messenger reports on some peaceful, patriotic protesting.

• This Friday of all Fridays doesn’t feel like a Friday.
• There is one reason and one reason alone Donald Trump isn’t pushing for a settlement in New York’s civil case like he did with every other such case he’s been involved within the last 50 years:  he cannot afford to pay the expected fines, so he’s dragging it out.  He does not want it understood that he has no cash.  
• If you went to a Trump rally and asked people if killing turkeys causes winter, I’d put the over/under at 42% who would agree.
• The $90 turkey thing was stupid, but then Fox scurrying around to two different organic grocery stores–in exceptionally wealthy neighborhoods outside New York and Los Angeles–to find 28-pound free-range, non-GMO turkeys with gold beaks and white-meat legs just to find birds for sale over $80 was simply insulting.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CXLVIII”

There’s not a lot fresh that can be written about Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a weirdo, a loner, an idiot kicked out of the Marines for firing indiscriminately into a jungle in the Philippines when he was supposed to be guarding a base, a communist who went through all sorts of bureaucratic bullshit to defect to the Soviet Union only to realize communism sucks and move back home to the US.

Pretty much every news site on Wednesday the internet marked the 60th anniversary of Oswald showing up to work at the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street in Downtown Dallas and probably fired three shots killing President John F Kennedy, something we neglected to cover due to various circumstances, one of which again was that we weren’t really sure what we could’ve written that was particularly original. Especially when the legacy outlets like the New York Times, NBC, CBS, etc had their own archival coverage to draw from to the commemorate the occasion.

It was one of the most significant moments in American history, probably second only to World War II in the 20th century, changing the course of future events in ways few can contemplate. The assassination of John F Kennedy would absolutely still have been the subject of so much coverage for the last six decades whether or not Oswald was himself shot dead two days later.

Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd which started the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, has reportedly been stabbed in prison by a fellow inmate, the Associated Press reports.

The Bureau of Prison reported that a person was stabbed and that “life-saving measures” were taken on the victim, implying that Chauvin was seriously wounded in the attack.  Chauvin is imprisoned in the federal prison in Tuscon, Arizona.

Dear readers, I would normally transcribe a video like this for you because I know many of you either cannot or choose not to subject yourself to the whiny diatribes of conservatives.  But I implore you, please listen to this with the volume up.  A summary:  it starts with a rehashing of Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez using a gas stove after, Charlie Hurt claims, she tried to get them banned–a contrived controversy Fox peddled in January.  Then Hurt goes on one of the smarmiest, whiniest, factless, self-pitying, self-victimizing drones oh-so-enjoyable-for-his-overacting-and-fake-angst that, yes, does include the words, “They hate pies.”  Enjoy, because it is delectable like a fine Limburger.

President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency for the US Virgin Islands after elevated levels of lead, copper and other dangerous contaminants were found in tested samples taken from St. Croix in October, Time reports.  In collaboration with the University of the Virgin Islands, the EPA collected more than 100 water samples; about 37% showed elevated levels of lead and copper, with some showing levels of copper so high it required federal intervention.

While the administration acts to protect the population by bringing in drinking water supplies and FEMA mobilizes other resources, local authorities have told residents in impacted communities not to drink their tap water, but it is safe to use to shower and bathe.  Officials are likely to re-run the testing after experts in civil engineering and public health questioned the collection method used to get the samples, saying that the pattern and spike of some samples indicate the samples were taken through industrial or civil valves that would increase heavy metal contamination in samples, not at consumer faucets.

Thanks to Scott MacFarlane of CBS News, we learn that the J6 Choir, whose rendition of the National Anthem sung with Donald Trump Neil Diamond-ing it through the track like your grandfather at karaoke night was, people tell me, the biggest-selling single of all time, believe me, is going to be short a member as Dominic Box will change his plea during a December 1st court hearing.

Charged last December, Box has had a series of run-ins with the law in his native (checks notes) Florida including an August DUI arrest.  He then skipped a hearing in federal court later in the month to determine if his bail should be revoked; his lawyer explained that he could not attend that hearing because he had been in jail in Jacksonville after deputies found him passed out in his car in the parking lot of a barbeque restaurant.  So maybe just taking a plea on the federal charge of trying to undermine the government was just the way of taking something off his plate.

A review of internal documents by the New York Times shows that the company previously known as Twitter–purchased by Elon Musk just over a year ago when he killed one of the most recognizable brands on the internet–could lose as much as $75 million in advertising revenue in the final quarter 2023, largely due to major advertisers abandoning the platform because of its catering to hate groups and Musk’s endorsements of white nationalist and neo-Nazi posts.

Twitter (intentionally dead-named) reported $1.57 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, before Musk took over the company in a $44 billion purchase.  The documents reviewed by the Times shows ad contract placements by companies like Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola and Microsoft being suspended, with an initial estimate showing a loss of $11 million, but a follow-up report developed after Musk’s November 15th report endorsing a neo-Nazi view, more than 100 brands puts holds on their advertising agreements.  In reaction to that, internal documents show Twitter executives calculating the losses causes by Musk would reach $75 million in the fourth quarter, traditionally one of the heavy revenue generating periods for the company.

Ah, finally, a good, old-fashioned corrupt Republican story.  Not a sexual assault, insurrection, or clown-show story, but one that’s based at the core of Republican beliefs:  greed.  And I have former Republican California Assemblyman William Brough to thank for that.

You see, Brough just had a $47,000 fine assessed by an independent state public integrity board for misusing campaign funds more than doubled for failure to pay, as the Los Angeles Times reports.  Having left politics in 2020, Brough’s $17,000 use of campaign funds to buy himself a custom cigar humidor, family vacations and the latest in Orange County fashions will cost him six-figures… all while his campaign finance leader repeatedly warned him to stop his excessive spending:  “I need all of your receipts ASAP—you’ve gone mad with the [credit] card use, and I have one silly receipt for every ten expenses,” his campaign treasurer emailed him in 2018.

Tucked at the end of an otherwise predictable statement celebrating the first release of hostages in the Israel-Hamas war, President Joe Biden drops a bit of a bombshell:  as he admits is unproven at the moment, but he believes Hamas attacked Israel now because the Biden Administration has been working with Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations explicitly to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The public acknowledgment that the United States is having such conversations with Saudi Arabia is far more than previous administrations have publicly commented on discussions regarding the foreign policy of two traditional Middle Eastern rivals, and it’s more than having two Arab existing partners of Israel normalize relations with the country.

The world’s largest iceberg, measuring roughly 1,500 square miles and weighing one trillion metric tons, has broken free from the site where it had been grounded for more than three decades and is now rapidly headed toward the Southern Ocean thanks to high winds and strong ocean currents, Reuters reports.

Created in 1986 after splitting from West Antarctica’s Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, the berg, which scientists believe regained buoyancy after significant melting, seems to be headed toward a current of ocean water known as “iceberg alley” where it will move north.

Known as A23, the iceberg could possibly re-ground itself near South Georgia Island, which would block access to the island for the myriad aquatic life like penguins, seals and seabirds that migrate to the island to forage and mate.

One of the women who accused then-Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment and other charges in 2021–leading to Cuomo resigning from office and ultimately getting charged with a misdemeanor–has filed a lawsuit against him under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, a law signed by Cuomo’s successor in May 2022.  The lawsuit seeks damages against both Cuomo personally and the State of New York as her employer.

According to the New York Daily News, Brittany Commisso’s three-page complaint says Cuomo’s inappropriate behavior ran from inappropriate remarks about her appearance to fondling her breasts.  “All of (this) was objectively unreasonable and abusive and reasonably perceived by plaintiff as being abusive,” the court filing charged. “She was required to suffer to maintain employment and avoid adverse changes in the condition and terms of employment, which in fact she later suffered in retaliation for rejecting and reporting the same.”  (Normally, National Zero would not report on the name of a sexual assault accuser, but Commisso not only used her name in the complaint, but she was also identified and interviewed by CBS News when the story broke in 2021.)

Minnesota Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips, who announced a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against incumbent President Joe Biden, the prohibitive favorite, announced that he will not seek re-election to his Congressional seat.  His seat, the Minnesota 3rd, is rated D+8 by Cook Political.

“The fact is, I intend to be running for president well beyond that,” Phillips said in an interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, adding that he thinks “it would be irresponsible to continue to string both my constituents along and the other candidates who both have entered the race and who might be interested in entering the race.”