We haven’t been staying on top of this long moronic saga of Elon Musk’s back-and-forth over blue checks on Twitter, that he was going to end “legacy” blue checks this weekend and force users to pay for them just like his fanboys that pay for the “subscription” blue checks, mostly because Musk sucks and we were tired of the endless circlejerk around him even before he bought the Birdhouse.

But this is kind of funny: The day was supposed to be Saturday, but as of Sunday morning the New York Times and apparently only the New York Times has lost its blue check. And it’s just their main account, @nytimes. Writers like Maureen Dowd, Peter Baker, Michael C Bender, and Maggie Haberman all still have blue checks too. Their branded sub-accounts such as @NYTpolitics, @NYTcooking, @NYTbooks, etc, all still bluechecked too. Musk “justified” it, tweeting “The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting… Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable. They would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles. Same applies to all publications.” What a dick.

Fat former President Trump’s lawyers are weighing a bid to move the bloated degenerate’s trial on charges stemming from his 2016 hush money payout to pornstar Stormy Daniels from liberal Manhattan to the relatively hardcore MAGA NYC borough of Staten Island, Bloomberg reports.

Experts say an attempt to relocate to a county Trump took 57 percent of the vote in 2020 is likely doomed to fail. “The only reason he would try to move venue to Staten Island is that he thinks – based on voter registration – that that’s a friendlier potential jury pool for him. That’s not going to fly,” said Rogers. Media expert lawyer lady and former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade said it’s far from impossible for Trump to find an impartial jury in Manhattan. “You’d be surprised how many people out there pay little attention to the news and lack strong feelings about politics. I am reasonably certain they can find 12 people to serve on a jury in this case,” said McQuade.

At least 26 people are dead after an outbreak of tornadoes ripped through the South and Midwest on Friday into Saturday, among them nine dead in McNairy County, Tennessee, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, three in Sullivan, Indiana, and four in Illinois, the Associated Press reports.

There’s a lot we should have learned about Donald Trump that, in the hurricane of his ugliness, we just overlooked or forgot.  A lot of that ugliness happened in the aftermath of the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989.  His playbook hasn’t changed:  he relies on hate, as he admitted in a contemporaneous interview.

Dr. Yusef Salaam, wrongly convicted as one of the Central Park Five in an infamous case when he was just 15 years old, spent eight years in prison for a crime he did not commit.  A then-high society real estate developer, Donald Trump called for all five men to be executed; after their exoneration, Trump has not apologized for his statements, instead saying their jail time was just because they had surely done something that merited prison.  (He later modified that to mean they all signed confessions, each of which was later revealed to have been coerced by police.)

Oh, Majorie! Bless your heart. In case you haven't noticed, tiny has a horse fetish. He's not going to fuck you. Actually….. He might. Carry on. Get it, girl! 😂

— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) April 1, 2023

“An Ohio man was arrested this morning and charged with one count of malicious use of explosive materials and one count of possessing a destructive device. According to court documents, on March 25, Aimenn D Penny, 20, of Alliance, used Molotov cocktails against the Community Church of Chesterland, in Chesterland, Ohio, in an attempt to burn the church to the ground,” says a Justice Department press release which didn’t mention that the church was planning to hold a drag show.

Some Wisconsin Republican group, obviously experiencing an emergency for their party as it’s likely that Milwaukee Judge Janet Protasiewicz has an edge over MAGA former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly in Tuesday’s big election, texted this batshittery out while the southern part of the state was under a tornado watch on Friday, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.

There’s a chance they might have violated FCC rules in doing so – it definitely would’ve been illegal to play this one on television. Texting this out is a little more ambiguous. “For the Republican Party of Wisconsin to send this fake emergency alert on behalf of Dan Kelly at a time when many Wisconsinites are under the first Tornado Watch of the season is abhorrent, dangerous, and profoundly irresponsible,” said Wisconsin Dem Party Director Devin Remiker in a statement.

While it surely felt like a lifetime to anxious libs used to endless disappointments in the wait for disgraced former president Trump to finally face the criminal justice system for the first time in a long and deeply corrupt business and political career, it actually only took two months exactly from the day that the New York Times first reported that a grand jury had been impaneled to revive the Stormy Daniels hush money payoff case to the day the Orange God Emperor was indicted for it.

From the day they reported “Prosecutors Signal Criminal Charges for Trump Are Likely” which we at National Zero headlined “Trump indictment imminent in Manhattan“? Three weeks exactly.

Yes, the actual crimes themselves happened more than six years ago and the case – at least as we know it right now, if limited to Stormy Daniels and maybe Karen McDougal (it might not be, more on that later) – might be a narrow one and it’s certainly lower on the list of offenses Trump should face justice for. But for what had been a “zombie” case libs had given up hope on, the turnaround from the first report of the grand jury investigation to the indictment was remarkably quick in contrast to the Georgia and federal investigations – especially the Mar-a-Lago docs case considering it’s been nearly 7 months since the FBI raided that dump and found literal nuclear weapons intel.

A Trump-appointed federal judge on Friday blocked Tennessee’s ban on drag shows as an unconstitutional constraint on free speech without a compelling public interest, WKRN reports.

• Lock who up?
• A billionaire is asking people making $7.25 an hour to pay his legal fees for charges stemming from his six-figure payoff to a porn star to cover up a sexual encounter they had four months after his son’s birth in an effort to save his presidential bid. Because these are the “issues facing working families” they want to campaign on.
• The Biden/Harris Administration response to the Trump indictment–“No comment”–is exactly right.  It’s nice having an administration that acts like they deserve the office, no matter the glee they feel.
• When will Kevin McCarthy and GOP leadership make a trip to the site of a school shooting like Nashville to talk to the teachers, survivors and parents?  Maybe go to a child’s funeral?  Oh, never.  They don’t like to confront things that make them feel bad about themselves.

Disgraced attorney and Fox mouthpiece Alan Dershowitz thinks people will wear t-shirts depicting Trump’s face as a sign of opposition like college students wear Marixt icon Che Guevara’s face, but without the irony.

Perhaps because the ones with organizational skills are in jail, indicted or on parole for their roles in the last riot Donald Trump demanded, MAGAts online show few signs of organizing any action around Trump’s expected surrender Tuesday on state charges in Manhattan, NBC News reports.

Commenters on TheDonald mega-MAGA moron site reacted to a post labeled “ACCELERATE,” a reference to the QAnon-aligned conspiracy theorist idea of “accelerationism,” the need to forcefully, violently overthrow the government.  Responses to the post call for the execution for treason for Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, the members of the grand jury, various and sundry prosecutors, and of course, Hillary Clinton.  But there seems to be no organization to travel to Manhattan to cause problems as Trump gets arraigned.

This is one of those rare times when I’m going to ask you to pay attention to the screencard–the stillframe at the beginning of the video–before you play the video.  It’s from an email the Trump campaign circulated Friday.  You’ll understand soon the relevance soon.

“Stormy Daniels is getting rich off Trump’s indictment,” Jesse Watters’ pinch hitter reports with the sneer expected by the Fox audience at this hour.  “In fact, she’s selling merchandise like t-shirts, posters and sex toys.  Use promo code STORMY for 50% off.”

Who’s making money off the scandal, exactly, Jesse-wannabe?

“He’s [Alvin Bragg] a schltate [sic] prosecutor!” one of Donald Trump’s suspended attorneys Rudy Giuliani screeches.  “He’s using a federal crime to bootstrap his accounting crime which is a two year misdemeanor that is barred by the statute of limitations.  If a judge doesn’t throw it out immediately, investigate the judge’s connections to the Democratic Party and figure out how much money he paid for his judgeship.  Y’know, that still happens.  Not all the time, but it still happens.”

Set aside the fact that Rudy’s admitting to knowing judges who paid to get their seats on the bench.  Rudy is on video attempting to intimidate a judge:  Find in our favor or we will make your life hell.  Nah, he’s not a mob lawyer at all.

Freshman Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman was discharged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center where he was being treated for clinical depression, CBS News reports.  Having had a stroke in the midst of the campaign in which he whooped TeeVee doctor and Republican dilettante candidate Mehmet Oz, Fetterman came to Washington and was sworn in to the Senate, but soon checked himself in to the hospital for treatment.

Mental health professionals praised Fetterman’s honesty in discussing his mental health struggle post-election and post-stroke, lauding his openness in dealing with a condition that is frequently hidden and often leads to tragic outcomes.  Fetterman will rejoin the Senate after its recess.

Just prior to that Trump wrote “NEW CRIME STATISTICS ARE OUT IN MANHATTAN, THE PLACE REIGNED OVER BY RADICAL LEFT, SOROS BACKED, DISTRICT ATTORNEY—ALVIN BRAGG. THE NUMBERS ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER….BUT, AT LEAST HE CAN TELL HIS TRUMP HATING WIFE AND FRIENDS THAT HE IS GOING AFTER THE VERY SUCCESSFUL 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. MAGA!” possibly in reaction to ABC News reporting that the fat fuck faces around two dozen charges – including felonies – when his indictment is unsealed on Tuesday.

“Douglass Mackey, also known as ‘Ricky Vaughn,’ was convicted today by a federal jury in Brooklyn of the charge of Conspiracy Against Rights stemming from his scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote. The verdict followed a one-week trial before United States District Judge Ann M. Donnelly. When sentenced, Mackey faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.”

“In 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Presidential Election. As proven at trial, between September 2016 and November 2016, Mackey conspired with other influential Twitter users and with members of private online groups to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages that encouraged supporters of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to ‘vote’ via text message or social media which, in reality, was legally invalid. For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting ‘black turnout,’ the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an ‘African Americans for Hillary’ sign. The ad stated: ‘Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,’ ‘Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,’ and ‘Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.’ The tweet included the typed hashtag ‘#ImWithHer,’ a slogan frequently used by Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted ‘Hillary’ or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.”

A federal jury on Friday found Minnesota Republican operative Anton Lazzaro guilty on charges including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, five counts of sex trafficking of minors, and one count of attempted sex trafficking of a minor, the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery reports.

It continues to be a bad week for Fox.  First, its beloved aspiring autocrat is indicted on criminal charges, and now, a breaking ruling from the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems has won a summary judgment on some of the aspects of the case, according to Adam Klasfeld of Law & Crime.  Fox also lost its effort to exclude some claims.

This is not the end of the case by a longshot, but this step is important:  Judge Eric Davis determined that the fact that Fox hosts lied, that “Fox News Network,” cited as “FNN” in court documents, “published”–or in broadcast terms, aired–the known lies, and that the false information directly concerned Dominion (“… the element of ‘of and concerning’.”) are not issues that need to be determined by the jury; the preponderance of the evidence supports Dominion’s assertion that all those things are true.

Several House Democrats have told their staff members to work from home on Friday as fat former President Trump’s indictment puts them on alert for MAGA terrorist attacks, Axios reports.

“I don’t ever want to see a January 6th again,” said Michigan Dem Congresswoman Debbie Dingell. “I’ve been in the Trump hate tunnel, Donald Trump has gone after me, and quite frankly I don’t have security. I don’t have entourages.” Minnesota Dem Dean Philips said the same, telling Axios “Much of the language from the former President and his devotees is similar to what inspired January 6th. I’m concerned about safety for my colleagues and my staff.” Washington Dem Pramila Jayapal let her staff work from home this week and looking at doing the same next week.