Far right Indiana Congressman Jim Banks on Tuesday launched a bid for the seat being vacated by Republican Mike Braun as he runs for the Governor’s office, Politico reports, posing the first challenge to Governor Mitch Daniels who himself was reportedly looking to switch jobs with Braun.

White nationalist QAnon fan Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert had a screaming match in a House ladies’ room earlier this month at some point during the several days it took to elect coward Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, the Daily Beast reports.

Naturally it had to do with the QAdulteress’s completely fake support of McCarthy to serve her own ends while Boebert stuck with Matt Gaetz and the other Freedom Caucasian holdouts opposing the weakling’s titular ascension to the Speaker’s gavel. “Greene questioned Boebert’s loyalty to McCarthy, and after a few words were exchanged, Boebert stormed out,” one source told the Beast.

“You were OK taking millions of dollars from McCarthy but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?” said Greene, according to another source, adding Boebert “ran out like a little schoolgirl.”

The Englewood, Colorado public library last week became the second in the state this month closed by officials due to meth contamination following the closure of the Boulder public library over the same issue, the AP reports. Officials say nobody got high from the contamination, nor are there any long terms health issues caused by exposure, but they had to close down to scrub surfaces and ventilation to de-meth-ify the libraries after some homeless weirdos spilled powered meth.

Indiana is quickly becoming North Florida:  An Indiana man has been arrested and charged with neglecting a dependent after his toddler son, wearing a diaper, was caught on film wandering around the second-floor apartment landing carrying a loaded handgun, NBC News reports.  Shane E. Osborne, the 45-year-old father, was arrested Saturday by Beech Grove Police, who were coincidentally being followed by a camera crew for a police-response reality show for the Reelz network.  The gun, reported a Smith & Wesson 9 mm was loaded with a magazine one round short of full, but there is no evidence the toddler fired the gun.

China’s population dropped by about one million people, a relative drop in the bucket related to the 1.4 billion citizens, but believed to be the first time since the 1950s that the nation has acknowledged a population drop, the Associated Press reports.

The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics reported the population of mainland China dropped by 850,000, to 1.412 billion, after the nation experienced more deaths than births in 2022.  Men account for 51.17% of the mainland population.  The data did not count the populations of self-governing territories including Macau and Hong Kong, nor did it include Taiwan.

The body of the last person listed as missing from Hurricane Ian battering Florida last September has been identified after being found in the wreckage of a sailboat found in Matanzas Pass, the channel of water that separates Fort Myers Beach from the mainland, the New-Press of Fort Myers reports.

The family of 72-year-old James ‘Denny’ Hurst last heard from him hours before Ian reached landfall on September 28th, with Hurst telling them he was going to ride the storm out on his boat.  It’s unclear where Hurst had been docked before the storm and if he intentionally set sail or was pushed away from the dock by the storm.

More than seventy people were killed in Lee County when Ian struck in September.  Hurst was the last one unaccounted for and the last direct casualty of the storm.

An Albuquerque, New Mexico man was arrested Monday in connections a series of shootings targeting four Dem politicians’ homes area and – Surprise! – he’s a failed Republican candidate for the state legislature who sought revenge for his defeat by hiring four men to terrorize the Dems.

Solomon Peña, who lost the race for New Mexico’s 14th State House District in November, was arrested at his home Monday following a lengthy standoff with a SWAT team. At least two of the four shootings at the homes of two state House members and two county commissioners have been definitively linked to Peña through ballistics evidence. The man who was arrested last Monday in connection appears to be one of the goons Peña hired to carry out the attacks. Fortunately no one was injured in any of the shootings, the targets of which strangely did not include Democrat State Representative Miguel Garcia, who defeated Peña by 47 percent in the November election.

Always love spending the day with my kids volunteering at our local food pantry.

The @JCSSFL does incredible work helping those in need in our community.

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— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) January 17, 2023

A former “high ranking” mercenary with Russia’s Wagner group who was arrested by Norwegian authorities near the border with Russia last week is now seeking asylum, the AP reports. The man, Andrey Medvedev, is reportedly willing to tell Russian human rights groups everything he knows about the Wagner group and its owner, oligarch Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Fat former President Trump on Monday told some right wing douchebag host on “Real America’s Voice” that he’s not afraid to take on Florida Gov Ron DeSantis for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. “I got him elected, pure and simple. And there was no reason to go wild about endorsing him… So, now I hear he might want to run against me. So, we’ll handle that the way I handle things,” said the Orange God Emperor in an atypically honest and candid statement. Trump is indeed handling DeSantis in his way of handling things – through fraud and subterfuge.

An Atlanta judge on Thursday ordered an unidentified juror being considered to sit for rapper Young Thug’s upcoming trial to write a 30-page essay on the importance of jury service after she skipped out on a selection appearance to go on vacation in the Dominican Republic, Fox News reports.

Juror Number 64 was arrested after landing at the airport and immediately hauled before Judge Ural Glanville to explain why she blew off the court date. Glanville then gave her the homework assignment in lieu of a 20 day jail sentence and $1,000 fine for disrespecting a sacred duty to the common law justice system. “You have to do APA style. You’re going to have to use at least 10 primary sources, 10 secondary sources,” Glanville said, adding “We’re going to run it through a plagiarism check – you gotta write it yourself. And you have to come back and talk to me about it.”

House Oversight Chairman Congressman James Comer kind of went off-script on Monday, telling Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum that “every President has accidentally taken documents that were deemed classified.” When MacCallum asked if that was really true of Bush and Obama, Comer doubled down, saying “Our research shows that every president has accidentally taken documents.”

This was always going to be an extremely hard needle to thread, but the House GOP are already showing themselves not up to the task of showing how what Biden did was any worse than Trump, especially if this jackass is making it sound like a common mistake. This so-called “political gift to Republicans” isn’t going to mean shit if and when Jack Smith agrees that it is a common mistake and then charges Trump with obstruction of justice for willfully and overtly refusing to correct it.

Evil MAGA Republican Arizona 2022 gubernatorial loser Kari Lake is considering a 2024 run for the Senate seat occupied by useless “independent” Kyrsten Sinema, CNN’s Kate Sullivan reports, which is weird because we were to understand that Lake is the “rightful” governor of Arizona.

Anyway it’s great news for Senate Dems because, as we’ve written before, Dem Congressman Ruben Gallego would be in a good position against Lake, with or without Sinema running again in a three-way (obviously better for Gallego without Sinema, of course). And it’s not like Lake is going to be any less batshit the second time she runs for statewide office, how else is she supposed to appeal to Republican primary voters? She should totally run for Senate.

Various national and international media outlets are reporting that there’s yet another massive winter rainstorm headed for California and that the White House doesn’t keep visitor logs for Presidents’ private homes and that 68 passengers and crew were killed in a plane crash in Nepal on Monday. Meanwhile the Davos international money something meeting with Soros and that World Economic Forum guy is happening in Switzerland which is like catnip to the “New World Order” conspiracy freaks who were already having a good time with some poor kid who used to be an American Idol contestant dying from heart failure because they can blame that on the COVID vaccine.

Other media outlets reported that a family of six have been gunned down in California, which is horrible and a different one reported that another family in Connecticut is okay with having a black bear live under their porch which is kind of cute and quirky. Also the death toll in the Russian strike on an apartment building in Ukraine has climbed to 40. Biden said a bunch of stuff in his Martin Luther King Day speech. You could definitely say there’s a lot going on in the news.

Staff with the “Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels” wildlife advocacy group are sounding the alarm over a suspected outbreak of “squirrelpox” which amazingly only affects squirrels, Sky News reports.

Unlike chickenpox, monkeypox, cowpox, bird flu, swine flu, tomato flu, and all sorts of other pathogenic ailments named for flora and faunae, only squirrels – specifically red squirrels – can be infected by squirrelpox. There is no current danger to humans from squirrelpox. In fact grey squirrels can’t even get sick from it, though they are apparently carrying it around and infecting the red ones. Of course should this change and the squirrelpox find its way to the United States, we’ll be ready with predictable jokes about Appalachian hillbillies getting it from eating squirrel meat.

Happy Robert E Lee’s birthday to Alabama! Well officially on the state 2023 calendar it’s listed as “Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert E Lee’s Birthday,” but why the fuck are we going to acknowledge that in the headline if they’re going to make the most important American civil rights leader, a man who was literally killed for his efforts to build a more equitable society, share a day commemorating him with that of a dead traitor who fought to maintain a deeply barbaric and inequitable society?

The calendar also includes “Confederate Memorial Day” on May 4th, “[Confederate President] Jefferson Davis’ Birthday” on June 5th, and “Mrs Rosa L Parks Day” on December 1st, which isn’t an actual state holiday but a day “to commemorate her accomplishments. Each resident of this state is requested to observe the day with appropriate activities,” whatever that means. Sure doesn’t sound like state employees get the day off, unlike on the Confederate holidays.

Also President’s Day on February 20th is not President’s Day in Alabama, but “George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s Birthday,” apparently as they don’t want to honor Abraham Lincoln because he freed the slaves and all that. It’s stupid because even though the national President’s Day is an observed holiday to honor both Washington and Lincoln’s February birth dates, it doesn’t expressly mean that Lincoln need be honored too. And Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13th, 1743.

In an email flagged by Spectrum News 13 Orlando anchor Greg Angel on Monday, disgraced former President Trump’s political action committee largely misrepresented themselves as from Napoleonic Florida Gov Ron DeSantis’s non-existent campaign to solicit donations and ask if DeSantis should run. Only in the fine print at the bottom does it specify that the email originated from Trump’s PAC.

Though we at National Zero subscribe to Trump’s obnoxious and ceaseless appeals for money through stupid sweepstakes contests, pointless “polls,” and other sundry bullshit, we did not receive this particular message (extra special thanks to Angel for tweeting the screenshots) leading us to speculate it was targeted only at Floridian subscribers to the Orange God Emperor’s missives.

Of course the email helps siphon money away from DeSantis, but probably even more important to Donald’s campaign data operation is donors’ identities. A Trump 2020 voter who receives this email and responds “Yes” to the question in the subject line by contributing to what they think is DeSantis’s presidential campaign (or even just clicking on the button) is going to find themselves bombarded with emails trashing the Florida governor and trying to get them back into the Trump column if and when DeSantis officially enters the 2024 GOP primary. It’s a pretty sophisticated scam by Trump’s standards. It also fairly blatantly telegraphs Trump’s fear of DeSantis, and it’s hard to imagine whatever gain will outweigh exposing an apparently weak position.

Andrew Intrater, the American citizen cousin of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, both of whom previously have been investigated over illegal donations to Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee, also donated tens of thousands to the campaign of and committees linked to lying shitbag Congressman George Santos, according to FEC filings viewed by the Washington Post.

Intrater was also a client of a Florida-based Ponzi scheme Santos worked for, apparently having dumped hundreds of thousands into the scam. Intrater’s name repeatedly came up in reporting on the Mueller investigation during the early Trump years. Vekselberg sat next to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at a 2017 inaugural ball, but hasn’t been back to the US in recent years owing to Treasury Department sanctions and a September 2022 FBI raid on his properties in NYC. US and Spanish authorities also seized Vekselberg’s $90 million yacht off the island of Majorca in April.

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With God all things are possible! If you or someone you know needs help send them to https://t.co/BZzN0h41OZ….It's free and online! pic.twitter.com/CYxIJrybIz

— Mike Lindell (@realMikeLindell) January 16, 2023

Third-place Ohio 2022 Republican Senate primary finisher Matt Dolan, a “RINO” despised by the MAGA scumbags for his disloyalty to disgraced former President Trump, will run again to try to take on incumbent Dem Senator Sherrod Brown, according to a voicemail obtained by NBC News.

Dolan, a member of the family who own the Cleveland Guardians (changing the name from the Indians certainly doesn’t help with his white nationalist street cred), largely self-funded his 2022 campaign and will presumably do so again in 2024. We would like to say he’s probably going to lose to some Trump-endorsed white nationalist conspiracy freak who will then lose to Sherrod Brown in the general, but we only feel confident in the first half of that prediction seeing as how Ohio just elected a worm like JD Vance over competent and popular former Dem Congressman Tim Ryan.