The scam in which piece of shit Congressman George Santos ripped off $3,000 raised on GoFundMe for surgery for a service dog suffering from cancer who later died – a dog owned by a disabled veteran – is now under FBI investigation according to the veteran, Politico reports.

Agents have interviewed New Jersey man Richard Osthoff, whose pit bull mix Sapphire died in horribly in 2016 after Santos stole the money that would have saved her life, and collected messages exchanged with Santos as he fucked off. “I’m glad to get the ball rolling with the big-wigs. I was worried that what happened to me was too long ago to be prosecuted,” Osthoff told Politico.

Enough is enough libs. Americans are sick and tired of your disgusting, hateful, homophobic rhetoric demeaning proud LGBT people like George Santos and Matt Schlapp. It’s also extremely hypocritical. You act like you’re in favor of gay rights and then in the next breath trade the latest gossip about a sitting member of Congress and turn him into this ugly cartoon stereotype of a histrionic drama queen who makes stuff up just to get attention and steals from charity. The people elected him! He deserves respect as a human being who almost definitely regrets dressing in drag in Brazil 15 years ago. There’s zero chance he still does it because drag is morally wrong. It’s an affront to traditional values and no self-respecting Republican would ever be caught doing it again.

Then there’s Matt Schlapp! Good God you libs are acted even worse toward him. The double standard is just sickening. You say “Every love is beautiful” on your rainbow flags but when it’s a leading conservative like Schlapp you suddenly turn into the Westboro Baptist church. So what if Schlapp finds a man attractive and wants to have sexual relations with him? There’s nothing wrong with that! That you libs demonize Matt Schlapp for expressing his true self is nauseating. How dare you socialist slimebags talk about him the way you have these last few weeks?

The hatred for Santos and Schlapp is shocking but not at all surprising given how you homophobic libs have acted toward other gay Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, and Steve Daines in the past. Expecting you sick fascists to suddenly start acting like decent people is a fool’s errand.

National Zero will resume our regular coverage now that we’ve distilled a lot of MAGA angst into this disingenuous screed for our right wing readers. We hope they enjoyed this obnoxious sandbagging.

Addressing today’s incredibly complicated and unusual economic conditions, the Federal Reserve announced it will raise interest rates by a 0.25 percentage points in an effort to stem inflation while also addressing recession fears, the Washington Post reports.

“Recent indicators point to modest growth in spending and production,” the Federal Reserve statement announcing the increase read. “Job gains have been robust in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation has eased somewhat but remains elevated.”

The US economy is in an unusual state:  in 2022, it experienced two consecutive quarters of shrinkage which would normally signal a recession, but still saw strong consumer data and steady job growth throughout the year, two things that are not common in a recession.  In its comments about the eighth rate hike in a little over a year, the Fed noted that it will likely have to raise interest rates again in the future to fine-tune controls on inflation while not killing consumer demand, a key driver of the American economy.

House Dem leader Hakeem Jeffries on Wednesday named the nine members of his caucus to serve of Jim Jordan’s new bullshit “Weaponization” anti-Deep state subcommittee, with Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett the ranking member backed up by Stephen Lynch, Linda Sánchez, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Gerry Connolly, John Garamendi, Colin Allred, Sylvia Garcia, and Dan Goldman.

Wisconsin Republicans this week filed a complaint this week with the state Judicial Commission over state Supreme Court justice candidate and current Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz over her campaign statements calling the state’s Republican-drawn legislative maps rigged (of course they fucking are) and criticizing last year’s Dobbs abortion ruling, WUWM reports.

The race is officially non-partisan but you don’t need to look past Protasiewicz’s statements or that her potential opponent, Waukesha County Judge Jennifer Dorow, and her husband have applied to open an indoor gun range that serves alcohol to see where the two sides are at. There’s a four-way primary on February 21st, followed by a general election on April 4th, and Dorow and Protasiewicz are considered the favorites to advance to a contest which could tip the court’s current 4-3 conservative majority, hence why the GOP are trying to derail Protasiewicz now.

Problem with the complaint is that there’s no violation on Protasiewicz’s part, according to legal experts in the state, as the only proscription on campaign statements for judicial candidates is against making specific pledges. Merely stating her beliefs falls short of that, but obviously that isn’t going to stop the shitweasels from creating the appearance of impropriety by making the complaint to the Judicial Commission and then just calling the process “rigged” after it gets tossed.

Artist concept of HAWC missile. Courtesy DARPA

With Vladimir Putin airing threatening cartoons depicting Russian missiles targeting a disheveled supper club in south Florida, the US military announced the successful test of one of its latest hypersonic missiles Monday, saying the system reached Mach 5 and traveled 300 miles, hitting an altitude exceeding 60,000 feet, according to Popular Mechanics.

The Hypersonic Airbreathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) is one of three hypersonic missile projects in the works at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), corroborating with the US Air Force Research Lab.  First flown in 2021 and designed to be dropped from a B-52 bomber, HAWC is essentially a proof-of-concept program testing a scramjet-powered missile design for future modification before deployment.

The news of the test comes nearly a month after Putin announced the deployment of one of Russia’s own hypersonic missile, the Zircon, on a navy frigate sailing in the Atlantic.  Previously, Russia has claimed to use the Kinzhal hypersonic missile in Ukraine and said its hypersonic glide vehicle called the Avangard was ready for combat operations in 2019.

Philadelphia Eagles backup offensive lineman Josh Sills may be placed on the indicted reserve as he faces a tough matchup against an Ohio district attorney who on Tuesday sacked Sills with first degree rape and kidnapping charges over a December 2019 incident, NBC Sports reports

“Sills engaged in sexual activity that was not consensual and held a victim against her will. The crime was immediately reported, and the Guernsey County Sheriff’s Office conducted a detailed investigation,” said a statement from the Ohio Attorney General’s office, guaranteed to create no “locker room distraction” from the undrafted backup who played all of five snaps this season.

A relative of lying piece of shit Republican Congressman George Santos told Mother Jones they have no idea why the former drag queen had listed them as having contributed $5,800 to Santos’s campaign and the relative sure as shit didn’t do it. “I’m dumbfounded,” the relative, who requested anonymity, said to a reporter. “It’s all news to me. I don’t have that money to throw around!”

Thank you @elonmusk
I'm back!! Freedom of speech is crucial to our survival as the beacon of freedom for the world. I & a great team have been working hard in my absence from Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter at https://t.co/owTVHlN6Pb

— Sidney Powell 🇺🇸 🗽⚖️🚜🇺🇸 Attorney & Author (@SidneyPowell1) February 1, 2023

Libs got owned big time Wednesday as a Republican-majority committee in the Virginia state Senate blocked a campaign finance reform bill to prohibit candidates from spending campaign funds on shit like vacations, mortgages, and country club dues, the Associated Press reports.

What sounds ridiculous to Americans from probably literally every other state is actually normal in Virginia, as elected officials can spend campaign funds on pretty much anything they want. Efforts to reform and bring the state in line with the rest of the country have been stalled for decades and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future now that this bill was blocked.

FBI agents were seen Wednesday at a home owned by President Biden in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, conducting a search sources tell CBS’s Arden Farhi is in connection to documents from the Obama era. Farhi added in a later update that the search was consensual and the agents were invited without a warrant. “Today, with the President’s full support and cooperation, the DOJ is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Delaware. Under DOJ’s standard procedures, in the interests of operational security and integrity, it sought to do this work without advance public notice, and we agreed to cooperate. The search today is a further step in a thorough and timely DOJ process we will continue to fully support and facilitate. We will have further information at the conclusion of today’s search,” said Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer in statement.

Still probably not going to make Trump fans happy even though this is what they angrily demanded after the FBI raided fat former President Trump’s hooked pad in Florida last August.

UPDATE 2/1/2023 12:51 PM: The FBI completed the search of the Rehoboth Beach house and found no documents with classified markings, according to Biden’s lawyer Bob Bauer.

An Iowa MAGA insurrectionist who already served 30 days in jail for his role in the Capitol riot was arrested again last week after being caught planting his phone to record a woman getting undressed to use a tanning bed at a salon his family owns, the Des Moines Register reports. Daryl Johnson, 52, is charged with misdemeanor invasion of privacy according to a criminal complaint which says Johnson had placed his phone on top of a dividing wall between the tanning rooms at the iSun Tan 24/7 salon in Clear Lake, Iowa. It’s not clear if the woman spotted the phone after tanning or someone else reported him to police for his perverted behavior, but the report notes that the hardcore Trump fan resisted handing his phone over to cops prior to the arrest.

Johnson, along with his son, Daniel Johnson, pleaded guilty last year to felony civil disorder in a case a DC judge called “more egregious than most of the January 6 cases I’ve sentenced to date,” while tossing Johnson into the clink for a month last June. Daniel Johnson got four months in the same sentencing. The two helped hold a set of doors open for other rioters to enter the Capitol as the battle raged. “Mark my words Yesterday will be the beginning of the revolution,” Daryl wrote on social media the next day, adding there could be “hangings on the front lawn of the capital.”

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it yet again: More and more of these people keep turning out to be just complete pieces of shit personally, separate and apart from their politics. We’re still waiting for a MAGA reader to bring to our attention a Capitol rioter who was a genuinely, objectively decent human being who devoted their life to charity work or whatever else might win others over. All we see are these sort of stories of sickening, very much deplorable behavior in their personal lives.

Republicans in Arizona and nationally are already almost resigned to MAGA freak 2022 losers Blake Masters and Kari Lake running for what should be a solid pickup opportunity as the Senate seat currently occupied by flaky “independent” Kyrsten Sinema is up in 2024, Politico reports.

“Just look at what happened in the last two elections. You in no way have to guess what happens when MAGA candidates ignore bread-and-butter issues that Arizonans care about. Kari Lake is not governor. Blake Masters is not senator. Republicans have to get back to basics,” said Arizona GOP strategist Barrett Marson, correctly worried that GOP primary voters are going to fuck this up again.

“Any candidate in ’24 that has, as their principal campaign theme, a stolen election, is probably going to have the same issues that some of the ’22 candidates had,” said Senate GOP second in command John Thune. “I just don’t think that’s where the American public is. It’s a swing state – we need to have a good Republican nominee, obviously. You know, whoever gets in, I hope they focus on the future, not the past,” Thune added, as if the shit about “stolen elections” is going to suddenly go away in 2024, especially in the likely event of Trump being at the top of their ticket.

Fat former President Trump’s campaign staff are building an oppo file on Napoleonic Florida Gov Ron DeSantis consisting of statements and video of Ron encouraging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 early in 2021 to show he’s full of shit on the issue, the New York Times reports.

The files, to be deployed when DeSantis attacks Trump’s “vulnerability” on vaccines, include video of Ron hailing delivery of Florida’s first doses, “b-roll” of him pushing an old lady in a wheelchair into a vaccination site, and so on and so forth. In a way it’s quintessentially Trump: Rather than make it a “good” thing, he has to turn it into “Hey this guy was just as bad as me.”

Connecticut may exonerate people accused of witchcraft https://t.co/nVOqWi65td

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 1, 2023

The missing “highly radioactive capsule” has been found in Western Australia, 9News reports. If you don’t know what we’re talking about then don’t worry about it. We didn’t cover it because other news got in the way. It wasn’t that interesting, despite what the headline might have implied.

Imagine my shock getting the email that baseball was canceled, and by one of those judgy, fascist tech companies Elon Musk warned us about!  That’s right, libs:  YouTube, and therefore its parent company Google and therefore its parent company Alphabet, have canceled baseball just like DirecTV has canceled all conservative broadcasting in the world by dropping its carriage agreement with Newsmax.  Get outraged because you’ll never be able to see baseball–and maybe any sport–ever again if Google decides you can’t!  (… except for the networks YouTube TV’s email lists as carrying Major League Baseball games.)

Asked by the Fox crypt keeper his reaction to Republican former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley sort-of officially entering the 2024 GOP presidential nomination race, Republican Ohio Senator and Nick Offerman wannabe JD Vance responds that he’s drinking the overpriced Trump Kool-Aid®:  “Well, Laura, you know I’ve endorsed, uh, President Trump.  I think he’s the likely nominee in 2024, well, I certainly think he’s the best nominee because he delivered on his promises and I think we ought to give him a chance to during, during a second term to deliver on more of those promises.  I’m not here to beat up on any of the other candidates but I think Trump’s gonna win and, and I think he’ll be the best nominee for the Party.”