Republican Texas state Senator Drew Springer this filed a bill to impose fines equal to the cost of an investigation on any person files three or more complaints with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality about the same issue in one calendar year that result in no enforcement or action by the agency in order to tamp down on “vexatious” complaints, the Dallas Observer reports.

Nice to see Texas Republicans taking the same approach to environmental regulation as they are with voting: Making the process intimidating to the average Joe so they don’t bother participating.

MAGA Florida state Senator Jay Collins on Wednesday tried to claim it was an “error” when he filed an amendment excepting the Confederate stars and bars to a bill prohibiting any other than the American, state, or municipal flags from flying on government buildings, the Daily Beast reports.

Hard to see how including “The flag of the Confederate States” on a list of proposed exemptions was an “error,” but Collins tried his best to disown it tweeting “Any insinuation that Jay is a confederate sympathizer is disgusting.” The entire bill has apparently collapsed as a result of the “error,” with supporters withdrawing amid fears it might be wholly unconstitutional.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! While many today celebrate this Irish holiday, many do not realize the history behind it. This holiday's original intent was to remember the life of St. Patrick who is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland. pic.twitter.com/DZmmqn5EWa

— Senator Doug Mastriano (@SenMastriano) March 17, 2023

As an outlet where discussions of pudding are usually reserved for Fridays after 10 p.m. Eastern time, we found it difficult to write a headline to express our extreme disgust at Republican Florida Governor and man so dull he makes polenta seem spicy Ron DeSantis.  “For what this time?” you justifiably ask given his assault on…well… teachers, decency, women, minorities, science, fashion, LGBTQ people and non-Christians to list just a few of his targets.  But pudding?

According to the Daily Beast, DeSantis has a team who make his appearance less grotesque due to the presumptive presidential candidate’s horrible interpersonal manners.  Everyone recognizes that DeSantis is socially inept, but apparently the thing that disgusts people the most are Ron’s habit of grossly eating food.

One legendary episode happened in 2019 as he made the mandatory pilgrimage to kiss Trump’s feet in Washington, DC:  on the flight north, DeSantis enjoyed a serving of chocolate pudding by eating it using three of his fingers.  … ’cause you can take the man out of Florida…

A group of 11 financial institutions promised to deposit a total of $30 billion in First Republic Bank, an effort meant to signal the strength of the financial market and the sector’s confidence it will weather the current storm, NBC News reports.

The Platinum Donors, who contributed $5 billion, include Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.  Gold Donors, at $2.5 billion, are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.  Truist, PNC, U.S. Bancorp, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon are the Silver tier at around $1 billion each. The money will stay with First Republic for at least 120 days.  First Republic still has $70 billion in liquid assets of its own, but investors started dumping the stock, which went from $115 last week to close around $34 Thursday.

First Republic is an unusual bank, with a specialty dealing with high-net-worth individuals.  A run on the bank by depositors seeking cash could cripple the institution, and it would further shake up a tenuous industry, so having fellow financial institutions reinforce federal insurance makes sense on a number of levels.  Stabilizing First Republic means stabilizing First Republic’s stock price, which will have calming effects on stocks within the same category, with will prevent panicked depositors which thereby stops a run on their reserves.

Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian convicted felon who attempted to find scandalous information about the Biden family to help Donald Trump win reelection, took to Twitter Thursday to apparently claim Trump operatives obtained the data used as the center of the “Hunter Biden laptop” scandal from Ukrainian FOP (Friend of Putin) Dmitri Firtash, indicating that the files being passed around by Rudy et al were not, in fact, from a blind computer repair shop owner at a strip mall in Wilmington, Delaware.

On October 6, 2019, I attended a meeting with the President of the United States’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, attorneys for Dmitri Firtash and Fox paid commentators [Victoria Toensing] and Joe diGenova, Fox paid commentator [disgraced former The Hill reporter John Solomon]AT FOX NEWS HQ in WDC). [sic] The subject was effectuating a swap of Hunter Biden’s Data from Firtash for Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and Joe diGenova obtaining an order from Attorney General Barr lifting the US extradition order against Firtash. #LevRemembers

Not to be passed over here is the connection of John Solomon and Fox News to this story, which they each claimed to be covering as independent “journalists,” claims that have been undermined in the meantime.

Tucker Carlson famously reads his scripts directly from a teleprompter, so the fact that the following screw up made it on the air means (1) some writer needed to misread the date of Janet Yellen’s quote as 2007; (2) some video archivist finding the clip filed under the proper year, 2017; (3) a script supervisor or producer approving the video and script; and (4) Tucker Carlson himself reading the script and thinking it all fits together.

But then you go on air, and your on-air producer sees the “2017” bug in the corner and whispers in your ear, “We totally fucked up.  This piece makes no sense.  She said that in 2017, not before Bush’s Great Recession in 2007 like you just said.”  And a normal host would be embarrassed.  But thankfully, we’re talking about Tucker Carlson, who can feel no shame.

Tracking with the Orange God Emperor’s Thursday afternoon Truth Social post ripping on the Manhattan DA’s senior counsel as if he was planted there by Garland and then a statement from his campaign later in the day claiming “the Department of Justice stocked the DA’s office with top people from DC to help ‘Get Trump’ at a local level,” the New York Times reports the Trump teams’s plan for handling the all-but-certain pending indictment for Donald in New York is a “Deep State” plot engineered by Biden and Garland, calling it a “a key aspect of the campaign’s response.”

Which shows they really don’t have a lot else to work with, and given that calling Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg a racist however many fucking times has obviously not deterred him, it’s hard to see how Biden and Garland are going to be dragged into this in a way swing voters will actually buy.

The same can’t be said of Republicans rivals like Tiny D, Mike Pence, and Nimrata “Nikki” Haley, as the Times reports the Trump team plans to squeeze them to go on the record on whether they’re for or against Donald being prosecuted. That’s actually a smart move as it’s hard to see which one would be the “right” answer for them. Says a quite lot that being indicted will help Trump a lot more in the Republican primary than it will in the general against the incumbent president.

“Venus has a geologically young surface, but it is unknown whether it has ongoing active volcanism. From 1990 to 1992, the Magellan spacecraft imaged the planet’s surface using synthetic aperture radar. We examine volcanic areas on Venus that were imaged two or three times by Magellan and identify a ~2.2 km2 volcanic vent that changed shape in the eight months between two radar images. Additional volcanic flows downhill from the vent are visible in the second epoch images, though we cannot rule out that they were present but invisible in the first epoch due to differences in imaging geometry. We interpret these results as ongoing volcanic activity on Venus,” says the abstract of a new report by Jet Propulsion Laboratory eggheads Robert Herrick and Scott Hensley.

Cokehead Larry Kudlow didn’t even have the right figure earlier this afternoon – hours after it was debunked by multiple sources – as it was $73 million, not $75 million the chodes at the Claremont Institute falsely claimed Silicon Valley Bank had contributed to Black Lives Matter.

A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals – two of them appointed by Trump – on Thursday unanimously ruled heels-wearing Florida Gov Ron DeSantis’s “Stop-WOKE” act restricting how race can be taught in schools is unconstitutional, blocking its enforcement, Politico reports.

“The Court did not rule on the merits of our appeal,” said DeSantis spokesworm Bryan Griffin in a statement and goddamn we could swear we’ve heard that one before from right wingers reacting to a loss in court. “The appeal is ongoing, and we remain confident that the law is constitutional.”

President Joe Biden and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg derailed two more freight trains this week, one filled with corn syrup in Mohave County, Arizona on Wednesday and another filled with some other stuff that isn’t chemically hazardous either in Glendale, Kentucky on Thursday.

Both derailments occurred in heavily pro-Trump counties, but the lack of a toxic spill calls into question exactly what Biden and Buttigieg’s plans are here. Are they so incompetent that they screwed up at genocide and forgot to make sure the trains they derailed were carrying hazardous chemicals that would wipe out the conservative rural white populations of these areas? Probably.

National Zero will resume our regular news coverage now that we’ve sandbagged our right wing readers with having to explain a plot hole in their narrative. We hope they can figure this one out.

More than two dozen Trump minions and Mar-a-Lago staff members have been subpoenaed to testify to a federal grand jury – and at least one of them testified on Thursday – that’s investigating the disgraced former president’s handling of classified documents, sources tell CNN.

Trump communications aide Margo Martin, who worked in the White House during his administration but then moved with him to Florida, testified before the grand jury on Thursday. “They’re casting an extremely wide net – anyone and everyone who might have seen something,” a source said.

Sanofi, one of the three major producers of insulin in the US market, with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, announced Thursday they’ll be capping the price of insulin at $35 month for both insured and uninsured patients, following the other two giants in making the move, NBC News reports.

Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is seeking to compel Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to testify in front of a grand jury about a call with the disgraced former president on June 24, 2022 while investigators were building evidence that the fat bastard was trying to obstruct justice and hide stolen classified documents sought by a subpoena, ABC News reports. The call would have been on the same day that the feds issued a subpoena for surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago after they had learned Donald had ordered his staff to hide boxes of files.

Back in December Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg announced that Colangelo had joined his staff as Senior Counsel after serving two years in the Justice Department where he “helped to oversee the Antitrust, Civil, Civil Rights, Environment and Natural Resources, and Tax Divisions, including review of significant hate crime matters,” which, maybe aside from the last one (and the Tax Division), doesn’t sound like anything relevant to Trump. So we guess probably the Gateway Pundit or some other dogshit site found that this random dude, for whom there’s no evidence is involved in the current push to prosecute Trump, just happened to take the job in Bragg’s office and that immediately becomes evidence that Merrick Garland is secretly pulling the strings here.

It makes sense when you ignore the fact that Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump for federal crimes that could put him away for the rest of his life rather than a novel state-level prosecution for covering up that he had sex with a pornstar for 90 seconds in 2006.

Prefacing this as some National Zero readers occasionally seem to think we actually take Rasmussen polls seriously: We don’t and probably never will. When we “cover” them it’s with amusement at their findings like the time in 2020 when they found 51 percent of Black voters surveyed approved of Trump or Mike Lindell leading among GOP voters for the RNC chair race back in January.

When we cover them it’s because we think their questions, their findings, or both are laughable enough to share with you. If for whatever reason we’re actually taking them seriously in an article then we will let you know. Otherwise just assume it’s a joke like this survey via the Washington Examiner where they found 67 percent of Republican voters – and 51 percent of voters overall – believe GOP politicians “secretly” conspired with Democrats to take down Trump in 2020. The exact wording of the question wasn’t available because it’s behind a paywall at Rasmussen’s site, and no fucking way are we paying them for content, but we doubt the Examiner is going too far off from it.

Without getting into the weeds about how valid the finding is, it’s the kind of question that people would hear and interpret differently. Like a lot of National Zero readers would probably buy a story that said “A few days before January 6th Mitch McConnell privately assured Joe Biden the Senate GOP was going to certify the result” that to the fanboys would absolutely consider ro be “conspiring” – and then they add in a whole bunch of other shit about “RINOs” rigging the election. So in typical Rasmussen-MAGA fashion, the innocuous gets lumped in with the sinister to show how a “majority of Americans and super-majority of GOP voters don’t trust the result.”

Very recently arrested Chinese exile scam artist and Steve Bannon sugar daddy Guo Wengui is pushing for GETTR, the lame right wing Twitter clone he backs, into a market for women looking for sperm from male donors who haven’t been vaccinated for COVID-19, Rolling Stone reports.

“It’s just so embarrassing, man,” a source inside the company told Rolling Stone about the plan, with another calling it “the most ludicrous fucking thing to come out of pro-Trump social media in a long time, and that is saying something.” A person familiar with GETTR’s operations said the batshit plan was borne of desperation. “Gettr isn’t a serious place anymore, particularly after Jason [Miller] and other staffers recently left. It isn’t shocking that these ideas are being thrown around. People who are still there want Gettr to make money, but it’s just insane brainstorming to figure out how.”

Did you watch that libs?!? Ron DeSantis can be funny! You and your fascist leftist media keep calling him things like a joyless little gremlin who never looks like he’s having fun doing this while Real Americans can laugh at this hilarious joke about COVID being a “woke virus!” Even you libs can admit that was pretty funny how he pointed out that incongruity between BLM protests and pro-Freedom anti-lockdown protests in 2020 and then added a clever punchline to it. All of his supporters in the crowd laughed at it, so maybe you need your funny bone checked if you can’t chuckle too, libs.

National Zero will resume our regular coverage now that we’ve devoted space to showcasing for our MAGA readers the lighter side of Florida Gov Ron DeSantis. We hope they enjoyed this report.