The problem with this rant is that the story wasn’t really about physical security like Donald seems to want to make it. Of course Mar-a-Lago is “secure” in that no visitor would ever be allowed in carrying a gun or a bomb. The real issue is that no amount of “strip searches” are going to prevent more Nazis from walking through the door if Trump wants them there, which is why his campaign has now assigned a handler to watch him around the clock to keep him from meeting anyone else who might cause this sort of controversy. To that we say best of luck.

Former Seminole, Florida county tax collector and amateur pimp Joel Greenberg, the guy who shared underage sex trafficked girls (allegedly) with Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, has been sentenced to 11 years in jail–more than a decade after the recommended reduction for cooperation–for crimes ranging from wire fraud to sex trafficking a minor, ABC News reports.

An admitted child sex groomer, Greenberg was facing more than 30 charges in a wide-ranging investigation that included various criminal activities over the last five years, from abuse of his public office to theft, stalking, sex trafficking, cryptocurrency fraud, and fraud relating to a Small Business Administration loan.  Although he originally pleaded guilty in May to six charges in a deal to reduce his sentence, Greenberg’s ongoing cooperation with investigators.

Greenberg will also have a ten-year supervised release when and if he finishes his prison term.  The sentence, while on the high side of mandatory guidelines, was within the recommendations of prosecutors.

UPDATE 12/1/2022 11:57 AM EST: Turns out the guy is some lib comedian who was playing a prank on CNN. We’ll leave it for posterity and note we had no reason to believe it was fake.

A new post-midterms Marquette University Law School survey finds President Biden leading his disgraced predecessor 44 to 34 percent in the 2024 presidential race, widening the 42 to 36 percent lead for the incumbent Dem the same pollster found in September.

What’s funnier is that DeSantis ties with Biden at 42 percent each, an improvement over the 43 to 38 percent found in in September, and DeSantis leads Trump among Republican and Republican-leaning voters 60 to 40 percent in a two-man race for the GOP nomination, leaving us giddy with anticipation of a monumentally destructive war within in the MAGA party headed into the election.

After Fox host Brian Kilmeade reaches deep into his spacious rectum–after all, it’s where his head typically resides–to pull out the number 20,000 to count the number of service members he believes will be separated from the military because they won’t get the coronavirus vaccine, out of the 1.2 million active duty and 800,000 national guard and reserves, Florida Congressman and man who likely has a still at his townhouse in Okeechobee Greg Steube threatens to completely defund the US military due to coronavirus vaccine requirements for service members.

Steube’s an idiot.  Vaccines have been mandated in the military literally since the time of George Washington.  Members of the US military do not enjoy the same rights as civilians; their duty to maintain a battle-ready military means that they get innoculations against things that could know them out of operation… like coronavirus.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s cabinet, which has been reeling from public uproar over the influence of the Unification Church, aka the Moonies, in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by a man aggrieved over the far right pseudo-Christian cult ruining his mother’s life, on Thursday approved a new bill that will ban the practice of telling people to pay up or the souls of their departed loved ones will be trapped in hell, the Japan Times reports.

“The purpose of the legislation is to provide relief and prevent a recurrence of unjust soliciting of donations. “We’ve done our best to make it as effective as possible under the current legal framework,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters Thursday. The legislation doesn’t specifically name the Moonies, or religious organizations in general, which is a nice way of making it look like they’re not strangling the cash flow to those assholes, which is exactly the plan.

Reminder that these sick freaks who extract money from people’s grief also have deep ties to the American right wing, owning the Washington Times and United Press International, hosting former Vice President Mike Pence at an event in Seoul earlier this year (at which fat former President Trump also made a video address), and sent dozens of members of their gun worshipping Pennsylvania-based subsect called “Iron Rod Ministries” into the Capitol on January 6th.

Outgoing “RINO” Georgia Lt Gov Geoff Duncan told CNN on Wednesday night that he once again couldn’t bring himself to vote for dumbass Herschel Walker so he cast a blank ballot in the runoff election – after waiting in line for an hour to do so. Duncan dropped out of running for a second term last year after getting a lot of shit from the MAGA cult for defending the validity of the 2020 election. If the decision came simply because he thought he couldn’t win a primary against a Trump minion (or general against a Dem) then it now seems premature given Gov Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s easy wins. Now hardcore MAGA asshole and fake Trump 2020 elector Burt Jones will take over his post. Pointlessness appears to be a running theme with Duncan.

The Biden White House’s political operation are dropping their initial wariness of calling out extremist Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene by name, seeing benefit in drawing more public attention toward the QAnon-fueled batshittery going on in the House GOP, Politico reports.

“Those dangerous conspiracy theories took hold. These people got big followings. There was not enough leadership from the Republicans in charge when it came to this. And so early this year, he made a decision that was in line with why he chose to run in the first place: he had to specifically condemn this and show how false and dangerous it is,” a Biden ally told Politico. “We could not sit by and fail to challenge that, because their party was negligent. He talked with historians and advisers about it. Pretending these threats didn’t exist would only help them grow.”

The Trump 2024 Campaign, stuck with a mentally ill moron for a candidate, have decided to keep a chaperone on the Orange Warlord around the clock to prevent meetings like the one with anti-semitic dipshits Kanye West and Nick Fuentes from happening again, Rolling Stone reports.

“Additional processes are being considered to ensure individuals who are scheduled to meet the president are fully vetted,” sources said, as if a 76 year old man running for president of the United States is a child who cannot be trusted to make his own decisions on who he associates with.

Woman looking at the woman she’s going to replace Tulsi Gabbard finds “it interesting to me is that before Musk bought Twitter, I don’t recall hearing anything from the Biden Administration or the Washington establishment or the EU complaining about how dangerous Twitter is or how it poses a threat to our democracy, which really just shows they don’t, they don’t care about free speech. They don’t care about democracy.  The reason why they’re so concerned, they’re so afraid and upset right now is that they no longer can control Twitter.  They can no longer use this platform as their propaganda arm to, to silence voices they don’t like and to push out the narratives that they want to push out.”

Just one question:  Who the fuck is the “they” in this story?

More than one million households in the United States are headed by same-sex couples, a first in American history, with reported open same-sex households increasing by 120% since 2008, Census Bureau data shows, NBC News reports.

Census data show more than 1.2 million self-declared LGBTQ-led households in 2021, up from 540,000 during the last data sweep in 2008 American Community Survey.  About 60% of these households are led by married couples.

One aspect that likely drove the number of LGBTQ couples openly declaring their status is the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the United States.  Corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas stated in his concurring opinion to the Dobbs case overturning Roe that he wanted to review Obergefell and other cases that recognized the privacy rights of individuals including Griswold which legalized birth control and Lawrence, which legalized non-procreational sex.

“So clearly, political forces hijack professional sports as a way to brainwash those young men who watch professional sports,” braindead automaton and heir to cold cash from a frozen food empire Tucker Carlson claims, speaking to Theo Fleury, a former National Hockey League player. “That’s the entire point of it.  Strategic.  But why does nobody push back, like ‘No, you’re not allowed to do this in professional hockey.  It’s about hockey.  Back off.’  Why does nobody say that?”

Oh, Tuckums.  Such a sad boy.  During a segment discussing how the NHL has the most conservative audience, Tucker of course misses a few cogent points, namely that the players themselves are the “young men” and women (whom Carlson predictably ignores) to whom the issues they support are important.  Oh, and the NHL has the most conservative audience predictably because the league and sport are overwhelmingly white:  only 3% of NHL players are non-white.

Indiana’s Attorney General wants the state medical board to sanction the doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio who had to flee to Indiana to get the procedure because of her home state’s draconian laws regarding women’s healthcare, NPR reports.

Republican Todd Rokita wants the state medical board to penalize Dr. Caitlin Bernard for not reporting the child’s rape to Indiana authorities and for relating the child’s plight to the media thereby, Rokito claims unironically, to have violated the patient’s right to privacy.  Neither charge holds water.

Bernard’s attorney has said the doctor checked with authorities in the child’s home jurisdiction in Ohio to ensure that the attack was reported.  In Indiana, one only has to ensure that a child abuse case was reported to authorities to comply with the law; there is no specific requirement to report it to Indiana authorities if it was reported elsewhere.

The National Weather Service has issued a travel alert for the Sierra Nevada region of Northern California, ahead of a storm threatening snowfall of up to five feet at higher altitudes, CBS Bay Area reports on the kind of situation where people ate each other to survive back in 1846.

It’s not like a wagon train of migrants from the midwest, traveling mostly on foot alongside oxen-pulled carts is going to get snowed in for months and have to resort to cannibalism to make it through to spring again. We’re just saying similar weather conditions are in the forecast. In fact the canyon in which they were stranded for months is now called Donner Pass after the leader of the ill-fated group, George Donner. He was one of the 40 dead whose bodies were at least partially eaten by the survivors of the Donner Party disaster and… You know what? Forget the whole cannibalism thing and focus on the snowstorm. It’ll be a rough one. Stay safe if you’re in the area. Pack plenty of snacks if you have to drive. Normal stuff like granola bars, beef jerky, freeze dried fruit, etc.

The second Mesa County, Colorado clerk who helped Mike Lindell-linked election conspiracy scandalmonger Tina Peters access the county’s election machines pleaded guilty to one felony and one misdemeanor count, the Colorado Sun reports.

Sandra Brown, previously the county’s election manager, pleaded guilty to one felony count of attempting to influence a public servant and one misdemeanor count of official misconduct in a plea agreement that will likely spare her from going to prison.  In exchange for the deal, Brown will testify against Peters, the county clerk who is charged with seven felony and three misdemeanor counts of election tampering and misconduct in office for allowing unauthorized people to access voting machines and data.

Torn foam magnate Mike Lindell reportedly perused data from Mesa County in at least one of his on-line symposia promoting the Big Lie.  When Lindell’s phone was confiscated at a Minnesota Arby’s drive-through, he said he believed it had to do with the Peters case.

Rapey Scientologist Danny Masterson, who played “Hyde” on classic sitcom That 70’s Show, on Wednesday walked out of court a free man, for now at least, on charges he sexually assaulted three women, all of whom were members of the evil Hollywood cult at the time, after the jury deadlocked.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo declared a mistrial and set a new trial date for March. Let us all pray to Lord Xenu that His will is honored by the next jury.

Wednesday marks one year since National Zero ditched our original model of copying and pasting text from articles on other news websites for our content. Aside from specific items like press releases, official statements, court documents, and other circumstances, the last 365 days of articles have been 100% original (except for that one day in May when my keyboard shit out).

Oh and then there’s the “articles” that are tweets, videos, screenshots, Truth Social posts, et cetera-only. Those obviously aren’t original content. But all that aside, minus the quotes we lift from the articles we source, we can say with pride that the text content of National Zero has been almost entirely originally composed for the past year. Almost no exceptions. Very, very few of them.

Now we’re not going to badmouth PoliticalWire.com at all here given how much we owe Taegan Goddard for pioneering this format. He probably wasn’t first, but we have yet to see anyone better at delivering a rapid fire, quick update experience better than he has. And he’s freaking fast too. Rarely do the shitheels at The Hill get to aggregating a big story before he does.

A Fulton County, Georgia judge on Wednesday ruled that state Republican Party chairman David Shafer has to get his own lawyer separate from the rest of the fake Trump 2020 electors amid the grand jury investigation targeting them for their failed attempt to defraud voters, the AP reports.

Shafer and 10 of the 16 fake electors are being represented by Kimberly Debrow and Holly Pierson, two lawyers paid by the state party as they face potential indictment. The move to separate the counsels by the Fulton DA’s office could possibly indicate prosecutors are looking to have the lower-level MAGA scumbags flip and testify against Shafer for his crimes.

Dems on the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday finally obtained disgraced former President Trump’s tax returns from the IRS, ending a nearly four year battle, CNN reports. It’s not clear what if anything the public will learn about the contents of the returns given that there’s just over a month left until Republicans take over the committee and probably burn the documents.

The December 1st deadline to apply for this spring’s Senate Page Program is coming up quick! Alaskans, if you are a high school junior between 16-17 years old with at least a 3.0 GPA – or you know someone who might be interested – visit my website below. https://t.co/K7xJ8GmoA2

— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) November 30, 2022

What the hell is this 3.0 minimum GPA? Congress is filled with complete morons and probably plenty more who cheated their way to get good grades. Such flagrant elitist snobbery.