Formery fat former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday declared defeat in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race, Axios’s Josh Kraushaar reports. Pompeo had written some stupid book and formed a political action committee in anticipation of a possible run but instead snatched defeat when it was at a very safe remove from the jaws of victory.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday answer a Justice Department emergency appeal and stayed lower court rulings overturning the FDA’s approval of abortion drug mifepristone.

The rest of his speech was the usual bullshit, maybe it was slightly interesting how he said school shooters should be executed within months after the crime. Also unrealistic.

The Turtle Man was seen limping into the Capitol on Friday, not looking very spry at all ahead of his expected return to work on Monday, video captured by NBC News shows.

Far right extremist Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s mother Leola Williams is still living in the house bought and renovated by Clarence’s Hitler-loving pal, Harlan Crow, according to Slate who say they visited the home just a few weeks ago while interviewing Williams. And yeah, the first four words of the headline could be a story in itself considering Clarence is 74. No idea how old Leola is.

Within heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s politically suicidal new six-week abortion ban is an even more insidious and horrifying requirement: To qualify for the rape, incest, or human trafficking exception a victim must be able to show documented proof of the assault such as a restraining order, police report, medical record, or other evidence. And even then that’s only permissible up to 15 weeks of pregnancy. After that, no abortion.

CNN’s Don Lemon dismisses Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light controversy as ‘crazy’ and ‘ridiculous’ https://t.co/6YHgDif51M

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 14, 2023

We’ll also note that none other than Donald Trump Jr is now urging his fans to just let it go, saying he’s “not for destroying an American, an iconic company for something like this.”

The Justice Department on Friday asked the Supreme Court to immediately block that asshole Texas MAGA judge’s ruling overturning the FDA’s approval of abortion drug mifepristone.

National Zero is still going strong on our pledge to compose only original articles (with certain very limited exceptions) by relating reporting from elsewhere in our own voice. However this Washington Post report on the state of the 2024 Republican Senate primary races does too great a job setting the scene that we have to leave it intact. To do otherwise would be butchery:

“This week, Republican officials in Arizona secretly gathered potential candidates for the state’s 2024 Senate race to deliver an urgent message: Play nice. At a meeting in a Scottsdale conference room, state party Chair Jeff DeWit urged the candidates to avoid destructive personal attacks on one another in a bid to avoid a rerun of 2022, when nearly every Republican running for statewide office lost following toxic primaries, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations. ‘One lesson that everybody there claims to have learned is that bitter primaries are bad and should be avoided,’ one person said.”

“But one likely candidate wasn’t there to hear the message, despite an invitation: Kari Lake, the former TV anchor and Trump ally who lost her gubernatorial bid last year after torching her GOP rivals and focusing heavily on false claims of fraud in the 2020 election,” the Post writes before going into the rest of the national landscape, specifically in Pennsylvania where 2022 gubernatorial loser QAnon freak Doug Mastriano is “praying” on whether he should declare* for the Senate.

Former Trump White House “ethics” lawyer Stefan Passantino, who was caught trying to tamper with his then-client former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the House January 6th Select Committee, has filed a $67 million lawsuit against the committee for reputational damage incurred by the credible allegations of the tampering attempt, MSNBC reports.

Trump and his minions had been paying Passantino to “represent” Hutchinson, when really he was trying to coax her into leaving out the most politically damaging parts of her testimony. It was only after she hired a different lawyer did Hutchinson testify at a surprise hearing to share some pretty damning legally and embarrassing politically details about the disgraced former president’s actions on January 6th. In a later interview made public by the committee, Hutchinson described Passantino’s attempts to steer her away from the steering wheel grab and ketchup incidents.

Passantino subsequently parted ways with his law firm and is the subject of a Bar association ethics complaint over the tampering, so we get the “reputational damage” part. What we don’t get is how this spineless piece of shit thinks such damage was somehow unjustified.

“Consumer Research” an innocuously-named right wing astroturf group, is planning to set up a system to send “Woke Alert” text messages to shoppers to alert them to brands which they should boycott for offending MAGAmerica’s increasingly delicate cultural sensitivities, Axios reports.

“We are launching Woke Alerts to help consumers make better-informed decisions about where to spend their money,” says Consumers’ Research executive director Will Hild. “We believe companies should focus on their customers and not woke politicians and progressive activists.”

Pudding Fingers pic.twitter.com/PRCVAZlkw9

— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) April 14, 2023

It was all an abstraction until the “MAGA Inc PAC” hired an actor who looks vaguely like Ron DeSantis to sit there and eat cups of pudding with his fingers. Now we’re in a whole new world.

Former Trump Administration Acting Director of National Intelligence Dick Grenell testified Thursday to the grand jury investigating the fat Orange God Emperor’s theft of classified documents following his humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, CNN reports.

Grenell’s testimony reportedly concerned his efforts to help cherry-pick and declassify records that would’ve helped prove the twice-impeached loser was “innocent” of any collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign, a line of inquiry special counsel Jack Smith is pursuing as a possible motive for the theft of documents – and that Trump insanely wanted to hold other unrelated documents hostage at Mar-a-Lago to trade for ones relevant to Russia and the 2016 election.

Leaked audio obtained by the Tennessean of a private Monday meeting of the state House Republican caucus reveals GOP leadership screaming at the handful of members who voted to spare white Democrat state Representative Gloria Johnson from expulsion over a rowdy anti-gun protest but not the two Black Dems, Justins Jones and Pearson, both of whom were reinstated this week.

“Dear God, we were called – you brought racism into it because you didn’t stay with us. I don’t want to hear why there wasn’t preponderance of the evidence as an attorney – I need to know why you flipped your vote at the last minute,” Knoxville Republican Jason Zachary yells at lawmakers Jody Barrett and Bryan Terry. Barrett then defends his vote, saying he “[knows] what [Johnson] did. I know that she did break the rules. I know that she deserved to be expelled, but we’ve got to do it right, and that wasn’t right. I went back to my desk. I sat there and had my internal debate on what to do. The bell rings, I am concerned that I am going to vote yes on a resolution I know is wrong.”

Responding to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s indicating that he would pardon MAGA vigilante Daniel Perry in the 2020 shooting death of Black Lives Matter protestor Garrett Foster, the judge in Perry’s trial on Thursday unsealed a ton of deeply racist and hateful Facebook posts by Perry that had been kept from the jury during the trial, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

“Black Lives Matter is racist to white people…It is official I am racist because I do not agree with people acting like monkeys,” and “now it is my turn to get banned (from Facebook) by comparing the black lives matter movement to a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit,” and “My parents own a 4 bedroom house and the BLM movement believes that my parents should give their house to a poor black family and pretty much live in a one bedroom house that they should buy with money they don’t have,” are among the hateful shit that Perry wrote just before the shooting.

Russia seems to be in desperate straits.  After its invasion of Ukraine didn’t succeed in two weeks, then two months, and now into its second year, its equipment reserves has deteriorated greatly.  Military observers have pointed out this photo, posted earlier this week by on a Russian soldier’s media account, as an example.  The photo depicts a Russian standing in front of a T-55 medium battle tank, a design first released in the late 1950s.

As Ukrainian forces start receiving modern battle tanks like the Abrams from the US or the Leopard II from Germany, Russian forces are deploying tanks that were used in the Israeli-Arab Six Day War in 1967.  Reportedly, some of the tanks are being brought out of storage due to a lack of resolve to commit more T-90s to the invasion; Ukrainian forces have reported captured at least two T-90s.

An aide to Fabian Basabe, a 45-year-old Republican legislator, accused the lawmaker of slapping him at a GOP fundraiser in front of dozens of other people, an allegation being investigated by the GOP state house speaker, CBS News reports.

The 25-year-old aide says Basabe “had been drinking and was mistaken about something that led him to slap me in the face in front of other people in the room. He then told me to stand in the corner. I was so embarrassed that I did as he asked.”  When asked about the incident, Basabe responded, “What?! I don’t remember anything like that.”

Florida’s Republican Speaker of the House has hired an outside attorney to investigate the incident because he’s too busy hunting trans people.

The product of childish rage of a far-right transphobe, the over-price, under-tasty Ultra Right Beer appears to be in violation of the law already.  Founded by butthurt straight white “christian” male and conservative activist Seth Weathers, “Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer” promises an un-woke experience for just $19.99 for a six-pack of cans purchased on the website.  Weathers promises the beer, which has yet to be produced so he could brew pisswater to fulfill the orders.

But there’s already a problem.  According to the product’s website, the beer will be brewed and canned in northern Illinois.  Illinois bans the sale of beer directly from the brewery unless the brewery has a special retail license.  Plus, selling the beer across state lines via the web also has significant legal problems.  PLUS, in Illinois (as in most other states) container graphic designs and labels must be approved by state regulators.  Weathers would be smarter to simply fill the cans with water and selling them as novelties instead of breaking a slew of laws, which he apparently doesn’t think apply to him and other conservatives.  Seriously, tho, if you’re pissed because a company is marketing its products to a specific demographic, you really hate the free market.

Using the vast network of irrigation canals across the US, a startup energy company has raised $18 million to expand its network of turbines that can each generate enough electricity to power a small town or a college campus, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and utilizing an existing untapped resource, the Associated Press reports.

The turbines generate energy at the locks located along the 1,600 miles of canals that stretch across the US, particularly in mid-western and western states, that divert water from sources to water the nation’s agricultural infrastructure.  Canal locks change water levels by filling a chamber until it reaches the desired height; opening one lock gate allows the water to equalize with the new depth.  The turbines generate as much as 10 megawatts of electricity by capturing the power of the flowing water as the locks open and close.

The technology can also be used in isolated, rural areas where smaller generators can be installed to power agricultural operations.  Because it does not require extensive infrastructure to operate, the turbines would benefit agricultural communities in a similar way windmills are utilized.