Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski on Friday told Alaska Daily News reporter Zach Hughes she’ll be ranking Dem Congresswoman Mary Peltola first on the ballot when she votes next month, which we guess counts even more than simply an “endorsement” of the heavily-favored incumbent against moron former Governor Sarah Palin and Republican also-ran Nick Begich.

It kind of raises the question of why Murkowski hasn’t jumped ship and joined the Dems or at least become an independent caucusing with the Dems like Maine Senator Angus King or Bernie Sanders. MAGA Republicans hate her guts for voting to convict the Orange Warlord in his second impeachment trial and backed that freak Kelly Tshitkablahblah to defeat her.

Former ChiCom president Hu Jintao was removed from the room by security at the Commie Party’s congress on Saturday, Al-Jazeera reports, remarking that the 79 year-old ex-president seemed reluctant to leave his seat next to current ChiCom dictator Xi Jingping “in a dramatic moment that disrupted the highly choreographed event.” ChiCom internet censors quickly scrubbed any mentions of Jintao from search results, but its unclear if this means specific to him being dragged out of the congress or all mentions of him altogether. “A seated Xi was filmed holding papers down on the desk as Hu tried to grab them,” Al-Jazeera wrote and we copied verbatim as to not fuck up something probably pretty significant. Well, adios Hu Jintao. Hope it’s at least quick and painless.

The Republican National Committee on Friday filed a lawsuit against Google for applying its Gmail spam filter correctly to the insane bullshit they send to would-be donors, Axios reports. Back in June, Google caved and made some changes to allow more Republican spam emails to come through, but apparently that wasn’t enough to satisfy the party, whose complaint alleges that Google “has relegated millions of RNC emails en masse to potential donors’ and supporters’ spam folders during pivotal points in election fundraising and community building.”

“The timing of Google’s most egregious filtering is particularly damning. For most of each month, nearly all of the RNC’s emails make it into users’ inboxes. At approximately the same time at the end of each month, Google sends to spam nearly all of the RNC’s emails. Critically, and suspiciously, this end of the month period is historically when the RNC’s fundraising is most successful.”

• To his faithful, Steve Bannon is not a repeat criminal even though he’s been convicted of multiple offenses.  To them, he is a martyr.  How one gets viewed as a martyr by a bunch of people he duped out of millions of dollars demonstrates how gullible his followers are. 
• Donald Trump’s historic subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack reads like a laundry list of crimes and a rogue’s gallery of criminals.  Its ten bullet points are all accusations of criminal activity, and all ten bullets hit their target.
• The fact that Trump kept clemency packets after his presidency shows how fragile he is. Typically, those packets appeal to a President’s humanity, his greatness, his benevolence.  Trump saw those as fan letters to him, not understanding every President gets the same appeals because people are desperate.
• A pair of blue jeans from the 1800s, found in an abandoned mine, sold at auction for $87,000.  Size 38 W x 32 L, showing obesity isn’t a new thing in the US.

The Sierra Club announced that the fossil fuel companies planning a 75-mile pipeline from southern Virginia to central North Carolina have abandoned their plans because no one will sell them land on which to build, Reuters reports.

In a statement, the Sierra Club said the so-called Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate extension is “unlikely to ever be built” after the environmental group raised objections to the approval process the project when through during the Trump administration.  Like other environmental groups, the Sierra Club challenged the rigor with which the Trump administration reviewed environmental impact projections and other factors that would have otherwise blocked or at least delayed the project.

“The project and its regulatory review process have also been subject to intense scrutiny owing to insufficient environmental justice review procedures and the lack of overall need for this boondoggle of a project,” the Sierra Club said in the statement. “Abandoning their efforts is a clear victory for communities working tirelessly to protect their health and homes from corporate polluters — and a major setback for the Mountain Valley Pipeline.”

We’ve had some lively – to say the least – discussions here on National Zero about Lindsey Graham’s not-so-secret orientation in the past but we would like to think that we’ve never described his obvious homosexuality itself as a defect or malformation but rather it’s his closeted status and self-hatred being a big driver of his malevolence (though the “homosexual chihuahua” line was probably kind of pushing it). This is way worse and we kind of expected better from a brilliant mind like Barb McQuade. And yeah, she deleted it, but we’re not going to give her a pass.

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday paused the Biden Administration’s student loan forgiveness program at the request of MAGA states’ attorneys general pending review.

Pfizer announced that the retail price of a Covid-19 vaccine dose will be set between $110 to $130 after the government pandemic programs in place to pay for the manufacture, distribution and administration of the shots run out, the Associated Press reports.

Relatively few people would have to pay full retail price thanks to insurance coverage or government subsidy.  Like seasonal flu shots–which have a retail cost between $50 and $95–insurance plans must cover required vaccines at no out-of-pocket expense to the patient.  The company said it will set up an assistance program for people who cannot afford full-priced shots as it does with other medications.

The federal government is paying between $20 to $30 per dose of the current batches of vaccines from the manufacturers because it ordered lots of tens of millions at a time.

Researchers in Egypt have uncovered a copy of the oldest known chart of visible stars, an endeavor undertaken by a 2nd Century BCE scientist known as the “father of scientific astronomy,” which was erased by ancient scribes so the parchment could be reused, LiveScience reports.

Hipparchus, an ancient Greek scientist, was the first known person to try to catalog the vastness of space as visible from a Greek island, making notes about the position and features of the lights in the sky that previous observers had bestowed with mystical powers.

Researchers examined a manuscript known as the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a 6th Century AD Christian Palestinian Aramaic of the Old and New Testaments.  The manuscript is what’s known as a  palimpsest:  a text written on a “recycled” piece of parchment that had its original writing scraped away.  Shining various wavelengths of light on the parchment, researchers were able to uncover the original text, a copy of Hipparchus’s star chart.

Confirmed bachelor Senator Lindsey Graham on Friday petitioned the Supreme Court to step in and overturn the Thursday federal appeals court ruling ordering him to testify to in the Fulton County, Georgia district attorney’s investigation into Graham’s calls to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger following fat former President Trump’s humiliating loss in 2020, CNN reports.

Emails obtained by Axios reveal that in late December 2020 Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann warned other minions they were pushing the Orange God Emperor into signing false statements about voter fraud to a court as part of a lawsuit against Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The emails add more weight to a federal judge’s finding this week that the fat bastard did knowingly lie to a court about fake voter fraud numbers.

“I will review [the lawsuit] now. I didn’t send John edits, I explained that I was concerned about the President signing a verification about facts that may not be sustainable upon detailed scrutiny. I think that we should limit specific factual ‘number’ allegations to those that are necessary i.e., those allegations that demonstrate that the decision is outcome determinative,” Herschmann wrote to evil MAGA lawyer Cleta Mitchell on New Year’s Eve in 2020, telling her she had to get her shit together and show actual fraud had occurred. Two days later Mitchell would sit in on Donald’s famous “Find 11,780 votes” call to Raffensperger, which he had recorded and promptly made public.

While House Minority Leader–anxious to lose the “minority” tag because Republicans don’t like minorities of any type–Kevin McCarthy has been making the rounds on conservative chat shows claiming that if he should become Speaker after the midterms, no additional aid to the embattled nation of Ukraine will be approved by the House, Senate Minority Leader–who is likely to remain a minority after the midterms–Mitch McConnell said Senate Republicans will ensure the continued supply of American arms to the Ukrainians, Politico reports.

“It is in America’s core national security interest to make it clear that revisionist states such as Russia or China cannot simply gobble up smaller neighbors. The Biden Administration and our allies need to do more to supply the tools Ukraine needs to thwart Russian aggression. It is obvious this must include additional air defenses, long-range fires, and humanitarian and economic support to help this war-torn country endure the coming winter,” McConnell said in a statement while simultaneously whining that the Biden Administration isn’t providing military equipment to Ukraine fast enough.

Speaking at Delaware State University on Friday, President Joe Biden said 22 million Americans have applied so far under his student debt relief program, CBS News’s Steve Portnoy reports.

Earlier on Friday CNBC reported the relief could start going out as soon as Sunday, barring any last minute successful injunction by a right wing judge. It’s an unlikely prospect at best as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday tossed a petition from a MAGA Wisconsin group.

“If Republicans fear that Libertarians are going to be spoilers, Republicans need to run more liberty-minded candidates,” said Libertarian Party national Chair Angela McArdle to NBC News in a report on how the GOP’s sweating the pesky right-leaning third party’s candidates on the ticket in tight races. “[Georgia Libertarian Senate candidate] Chase Oliver and [Arizona Libertarian Senate candidate] Marc Victor both performed well in their respective debates. They’ve earned any votes they receive, and Republicans are not entitled to anyone’s vote.”

“I think it’s going to be significant,” Arizona GOP pollster Chuck Coughlin, said of the frustration. “After all the ballots are counted, [candidates] are going to say, ‘That guy had 5% of the vote or 4% of the vote, and if I add that 4%, I win,’ because that’s how close these races are going to be. When all the shouting and hollering is done people are going to look around and go: ‘God, we’ve got to keep that guy out of the race in the future, We’ve got to do something to stop that from happening.'”

Spoiler alert [pun intended]: There’s nothing they can do to stop that from happening. Instead they’ll probably just put more effort into backing Green Party and legal weed candidates wherever possible. And that’s the difference: Of course you’ll never hear a Democrat complain about a Libertarian sucking away a few would-be GOP votes at the margins but if there’s an example of Dems putting the same level of effort into helping right-leaning third party spoilers as Republicans have for left-leaning ones over the last few years we would love to see it.

The largest ever decline in the federal deficit – thanks to President Biden’s leadership. pic.twitter.com/jeP6Jozziz

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 21, 2022

Republicans are in a conundrum when it comes to reality.  They claim to be the Party of Fiscal Responsibility–just as they hilariously claim the mantle of the Party of Personal Responsibility while they brush off their individual crimes and misdeeds like stealing documents or fathering children–but every GOP president over the last half-century has left office with deficits significantly higher than when they entered office, versus every Democratic president over that same time who has left office with deficits at the same levels or lower.  (President Bill Clinton actually left office with a budget surplus, which George W. Bush turned into a record-setting at the time $1.4 trillion annual deficit.)

Tax revenues increased significantly during FY2022 which ended October 1st, while pandemic-related federal spending was cut significantly, leading to the deficit falling from $2.77 trillion in FY2021 to $1.3 trillion at the end of the last fiscal year, Politico reports.  The $1.4 trillion cut was targeted by Biden as he entered office:  He made the campaign promise to lower the deficit to under $1 trillion at a time when the expected deficit in Donald Trump’s last year in office was expected to be lower, at $2.4 trillion.

The House January 6th Select Committee have formally delivered their subpoena to disgraced former President Trump requesting he testify under oath about his failed attempt to overturn his humiliating loss in the 2020 election to Joe Biden, CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane reports. In the letter to Donald the committee set a November 4th deadline for the documents they are seeking, and November 14th for him to testify to the committee and/or its investigators.

“We have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multi-part effort to overturn the 2020 Presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power,” the committee wrote in its letter, pulling no punches and seeking extensive records of the fat former despot’s communications with an array of groups and individuals including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, the Kraken, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and other scumbags.

Former Georgia Senator Kelly “Left Eye” Loeffler has been meeting with Republican voters to try to persuade them to not do to Herschel Walker what they did to her back in the January 2021 Senate runoff and stay home because they think the election is rigged, the AP reports. A post-mortem found that 33,000 Trump 2020 voters in Georgia – mainly concentrated in the regions of the state when Donald held rallies for Loeffler and fellow ex-Senator David “Chickenshit” Perdue in December 2020 and January 2021 – did not show up again to vote for Loeffler and Perdue.

“This effort is about amplifying Georgia’s voices and taking our state back and saying that we will not be silenced,” said Loeffler. “We know that when people feel like their vote counts, they’re more likely to vote.” This report’s a little strange, because we were to understand that Dems were fucked in the midterms no matter what. Why would Kelly Loeffler be wasting her time hanging out with middle class people trying to get them to tell others to vote if the GOP already has this in the bag? Is there maybe something she and her Republican activist buddies know that we don’t?

Moreover why aren’t any of the doomers incorporating early and projected turnout into their forecasts of horrific defeat for Democrats? We already have the data, especially in Georgia where Secretary of State’s office COO Gabe Sterling says more than 500,000 early votes have come in as of Thursday, smashing the 2018 record for a midterm. While it’s not a guarantee high turnout is great for Dems – we saw it in Virginia in 2021 only for the Republican to prevail in the governor’s race – it’s definitely better for them than low turnout, which always advantages Republicans.

A federal prosecutor told Chief  Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell that the Department of Justice was still “very early on” in bringing charges against people who participated in the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, and that as many as 2,000 criminal cases are possible.

NBC News reports that during the sentencing hearing for insurrectionist Matthew Bledsoe of Tennessee–who received a 48-month prison sentence, less than the 70 months recommended by prosecutors, Howell noted, but in line with sentences handed out to other convicted January 6th secessionists.  Howell noted that Bledsoe’s testimony that he did not realize what as happening around him constituted criminal activity.  “You knew what was going on,” Howell said to Bledsoe.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jamie Carter told Howell that there will be a steady flow of January 6th cases coming before the court, with the pace determined only if the Justice Department could “get bodies” to bring the cases to court.  Republicans, who believe they are going to take control of at least the House in the midterm elections, have vowed to cut funding for prosecutions by limiting the ability of the Justice Department to hire additional prosecutors, just as they wish to disempower the Internal Revenue Service from conducting audits and enforcing tax law.

Former Fox darling Lara Logan, a one-time respected member of the media, will not appear on conservative cable propaganda network Newsmax as a guest in the future after going on a full-blown conspiratorial rant Wednesday that involved anti-Semitic “blood libel” and a claim that the “global cabal” planned to infiltrate 100 million undocumented immigrants into the United States to overtake the American democracy.

The screed aired Wednesday, and by Thursday evening, Newsmax management announced Logan would no longer appear on the network.  “Newsmax condemns in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by Lara Logan and her views do not reflect our network,” the network said in a statement. “We have no plans to interview her again.”

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago recovered top secret documents concerning US intel capabilities in Iran and China, sources tell the Washington Post about former President Trump‘s crimes.