The Maricopa County, Arizona Board of Supervisors meeting to certify the results of the 2022 election appears to be going just swell on Monday, with the MAGA asshole above claiming the two-minute limit to remarks by members of the public is unconstitutional, as is early voting. “This Maricopa County Board of Supervisors hearing is even worse than we imagined. The sabotage by the County was criminal,” wrote small-faced right wing dipshit Charlie Kirk on Twitter. Loser Kari Lake’s feed is a similarly endless parade of clips of her fans saying all sorts of outlandish shit.

The widow of a recently deceased Russian army colonel last week wrote an open letter to dictator Vladimir Putin, asking a number of questions about her husband’s “suicide” such as why he shot himself in the chest five times instead of just once in the head, Ukrayinska Pravda reports.

“He enters his [superior’s] office, and not his own, as all the media write, sits in his chair and fires five bullets using a service weapon, but does not aim at his head, does not aim to end it all as soon as possible,” wrote Yulia Boyko detailing the November 16th death of Russian Colonel Vadim Boyko at the recruitment processing center he helped operate. Colonel Boyko had found himself in hot water as his superiors blamed him for some fuckup and told him he owed 100 million rubles for “loss and damage of state property and will be brought to criminal liability with confiscation of property.”

Deadbeat dad Herschel Walker is already in a big hole in the Georgia runoff against Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock after two days of early voting in largely blue counties according to an analysis of the racial makeup of turnout so far by election data egghead John Couvillon.

“This reminds me of football teams who let the other side run up a 28-0 lead at half time, thinking they can come back from such a deficit,” Couvillon wrote Monday of a 46% Black to 38% white turnout ratio out of 182,000 total over the weekend, explaining that for Walker to have a shot, white voters would need to outvote Black voters by 62% to 22% on every one of the next five days of early voting. Then Walker would also need some help from those who voted Libertarian in the first round.

Now would be a good time to remember that Georgia Republicans fought all the way to the state Supreme Court to prohibit voting over the weekend and lost. So rather than simply backing off and directing all counties statewide to allow early voting to keep things even, they just handed two days of early voting to 25 mostly blue counties. On Saturday alone the blue counties outvoted the reds 62,153 to 6,338 – nearly a 10:1 advantage in banked votes. The numbers really help drive home how fucking stupid a mistake Republicans made and keep making on early voting.

Ghoulish Trump minion Kellyanne Conway on Monday met with investigators from the House January 6th Committee, NBC News political correspondent Ryan Nobles reports.

The interview is noteworthy as Conway was never the subject of a public subpoena. Nobles adds that neither the Committee nor Conway would say if her appearance was voluntary.

Disgraced former President Trump repeatedly rejected pleas from his minions to publicly disavow notorious anti-semite Nick Fuentes after they spoke over dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort over fears of alienating the anti-semites in his fanbase, sources tell the Guardian.

“Following a series of consultations with global experts, WHO will begin using a new preferred term ‘mpox’ as a synonym for monkeypox. Both names will be used simultaneously for one year while ‘monkeypox’ is phased out. When the outbreak of monkeypox expanded earlier this year, racist and stigmatizing language online, in other settings and in some communities was observed and reported to WHO. In several meetings, public and private, a number of individuals and countries raised concerns and asked WHO to propose a way forward to change the name,” says the WHO.

This is so friggin lame. Not as lame as the time they skipped “Xi” in the Greek alphabet when naming the Omicron variant of COVID. But watch as the right wing go apeshit (oops) over this “woke” decision making by the top global health authority. We’re not saying they don’t mean well or that the name isn’t problematic. It is. However, it’s the kind of thing that will generate “controversy” which will drive MAGAmericans to take public health directives less seriously than they already do. The word “monkeypox” is already tattooed on people’s brains and “phasing it out” won’t mean shit. How about just focus on eradicating it instead of eradicating the current name?

Lots of really hot red stuff is coming out of this big mountain with a hole on top on the island in the state with the fruit with the spikes on the outside, Reuters reports. The hot red stuff not a problem for people with houses nearby yet but government science guys say it might be bad. The big mountain make lots of noises and shaking when spewing the hot red stuff.

More than 2.3 million people are now under a boil water order after a power outage at a Houston water purification plant caused water pressure to fall below recommended operational levels, KTRK ABC-13 in Houston reports.

Unbelievably, Texans still believe in regulated levels of purity for drinking water, and the Houston plant fell below the required level at 10:30 a.m. local time.  Now, residents are instructed to continue to boil for 2-3 minutes water that will be consumed or used to brush teeth.  Also, ice and water from lines in refrigerators should not be used.

Although the issue was corrected shortly after it was discovered, some areas of the city are still experiencing low water pressure.  The city expects the boil water order to be lifted Tuesday.

A report issued by the Maricopa County Election Department assures officials that no voter was denied the opportunity to cast a ballot on Election Day even though a problem with an on-site printer made the traditional voting process impossible, the Washington Post reports.

The county is set to certify the election results on Monday, and the department issued the report to address concerns voiced by Republicans that Election Day procedural problems disenfranchised–some people say, intentionally–conservative voters who were encouraged by candidates and state Party leaders to vote on Election Day because every other method–like early voting and ballot drop boxes–were rigged by Democrats, liberals, Venezuelans, and others.  No evidence of such rigging has been presented.

The report mentions that voters had the option of casting their ballots using “Door 3,” a slot in the stand on which the vote scanning machine was located.  Ballots that could not be scanned–because of the problems with the printers–could be placed in Door 3 to be scanned later by an Election Department staffer.  Conservative muckrakers had spread the unfounded conspiracy theory that ballots for Republicans placed in Door 3 would not be counted and would be destroyed.  There is no evidence of such an issue.

A funny thing happened on the way to Montgomery County Airport in Maryland for a pilot and passenger in a Mooney M20J single engine plane on Sunday, local fire department spokesman Pete Piringer reports, adding that both are apparently uninjured but still trapped within the plane as of 7:47 PM EST. Power has been shut off for tens of thousands as firefighters mount a rescue.

This is not the completely random fire department spokesman Piringer’s first appearance in a National Zero story. Nor is it the funniest. That would be the one about the asshole who accidentally burned down his house while trying to smoke out a snake infestation from last December.

The Iranian delegation to the World Cup has called for FIFA to eject the US team from the World Cup tournament in Qatar after the US Soccer Federation removed the Iranian national symbol from the country’s flag on the US team’s website to show support for protesters in Iran, CNN reports.

“By posting a distorted image of the flag of the Islamic Republic of #Iran on its official account, the #US football team breached the @FIFAcom charter, for which a 10-game suspension is the appropriate penalty,” Iran state-aligned Tasnim news agency wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “Team #USA should be kicked out of the #WorldCup2022.”

The Iranian national symbol, a stylized representation of the word “Allah” in Arabic, sits in the center white stripe of the Iranian flag, with a red stripe below it and a green stripe on top.  The representation on the US soccer site showed the flag without the Arabic text, which was added in 1980 after the Muslim fundamentalist revolution.  The US Soccer Federation said the protest was planned and that the emblem would be repositioned in the flag after an unspecified set period of time; the website showed the correct Iranian flag as off 6 p.m. ET Sunday.

Protests against the ChiCom government’s draconian Zero-COVID policy erupted in major cities across China over the weekend, a rare display of defiance against Chinese dictator Xi’s regime over the brutal lockdowns that have inflicted untold suffering on regular folk and offered MAGAmericans a chance to draw deeply exaggerated and outright false parallels to the “repression” they faced from “Faucism” over the first year and a half of the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The unrest kicked up a notch after lockdown restrictions in the eastern city of Urumqi caused delays in a fire department’s response to a blaze at an apartment building in which at least 10 people perished because they were physically locked inside the building, a horrific tragedy that no doubt more than a few MAGAmericans think is on the same level as having to wear a mask when they ordered lunch at McDonald’s. “Xi Jinping, step down!” one man shouted at a protest in Shanghai, literally risking his life to do so, a man sure to be considered a spiritual brother by an obese Michigan militia member who shouted the same to Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 for a few hours before driving home to play Call of Duty. Chinese censors scrambled to remove references to the protests from social media in a move not at all reminiscent of Facebook and YouTube’s algorithms deleting videos claiming COVID-19 vaccines make people’s skin turn magnetic.

After spending millions of dollars over the last decade airing their propaganda ads in select markets during the Super Bowl, scam Hollywood space cult the Church of Scientology has now officially confirmed that the commercials did end up netting at one new adherent to their, uh, faith, anti-Scientology blogger Tony Ortega reports on an article he found in the Church’s magazine.

“Fabio Ferreira… had always sought answers to the bigger questions in life [He was just like you, blah blah blah, he didn’t know the evil ghosts of dead aliens cause psychological problems blah blah blah] That began to change in February 2016. Fabio was at home watching the Super Bowl and saw an IAS-sponsored Scientology ad. He wanted to know more so he logged on to Scientology.org. An article on the cause of aberration got his attention,” Scientology’s propagandists wrote in their magazine article on the obvious smashing success of the campaign aimed at mainstream audiences.

Ortega notes that in airing their annual Super Bowl ads, they don’t actually buy the national spots (which cost $7 million in 2022), rather the few spaces reserved for local affiliates in select media markets like New York and Los Angeles, which are much cheaper.

A good way not to accidentally dine with a vile racist and anti-Semite you don't know is not to dine with a vile racist and anti-Semite you do know.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 27, 2022

Belarusian state media on Saturday reported that Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei died suddenly at some point this week of something, according to Reuters. Makei, 64, had held the post since 2012 and, until an abrupt heel turn following a 2020 uprising over dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s rigged reelection, had advocated for closer ties to the West and criticized Russian influence over Belarus. Makei had been set to meet with Kremlin counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Monday as Moscow’s war effort against neighboring Ukraine continues to deteriorate.

In a development anyone could have predicted, the new “Voter Fraud” units in Virginia, Georgia, and Florida, created to address MAGA voter “concerns” after Trump lost the 2020 election, have no significant investigations ongoing in the wake of the midterms, the AP reports.

“I am not aware of any significant detection of fraud on Election Day, but that’s not surprising. The whole concept of voter impersonation fraud is such a horribly exaggerated problem. It doesn’t change the outcome of the election, it’s a felony, you risk getting put in jail and you have a high possibility of getting caught. It’s a rare phenomena,” said Campaign Legal Center VP Paul Smith. “It’s a myth that’s created so they can justify making it harder for people to vote,” he added.

Speaking to two people apparently named Christine Dolan and L Todd Wood, Herschel Walker of Texas, the GOP finalist for Senator from Georgia, forgets that he played professional football until 1997, when he played for the Dallas Cowboys, near where he lives.

“I don’t wanna go to Washington and hang out twenty years and hang out [in] country clubs.  That’s not Herschel Walker.  I don’t do that.  I’m da guy that get the job done, and that’s [the reason?] I decide to run.  It doesn’t matter about the attacks.  What’s happen right now is bigger than Herschel Walker.  And y’know ya people ah that talk about me playing football, when I– you know how long ago I play football? …. had pads on me… [The hostess, presumably ‘Christine,’ interjects, ‘Back in the ’80s!’]  Way back in the 80s!  Right now, I cou… cou… companies….”

A 16-year-old boy wearing a swastika pinned to his vest opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun and a revolver at a public school he had attended and a neighboring private school, killing three and injuring thirteen, The Guardian reports.

Although they’re so common in the United States they rarely make the national news anymore, school shootings–particularly those where there are fatalities–are extremely rare in other countries.  So far in 2022, there have been more than 250 school shootings in the US; second on the list is Mexico, with eight.  Brazil has has two school shootings this year.

As is common with underage shooters in the United States, the shooter found the weapons at his home:  the semiautomatic handgun was originally issued to the military police; the boy’s father is a member of the military police.  The revolver was registered to his father.

To increase the amount of oil products available for consumers, the Biden Administration is lifting a sanction against Venezuela to export some of its oil to the United States through Chevron, the only US company capable of conducting oil exploration in Venezuela, the Washington Post reports.

A joint operation between American interests and the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, Chevron had been barred from operating in Venezuela, instead operating in other counties and avoiding the large oil reserves under Venezuela.  The new policy allows Chevron to harvest Venezuelan oil reserves but only if those products are sent to the United States and if proceeds from sales do not go back to the Venezuelan government-owned partner.

The move is also seen as a reward for the administration of autocratic Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose government is sitting down with opposition leaders in Mexico City to address various conditions in the country that have led to a humanitarian crisis in the country.  During the negotiations, the two sides agreed to a UN executor to handle of hundreds of millions of dollars frozen by foreign governments due to Maduro’s corruption, allowing the money to be used for humanitarian efforts.