Pennsylvania Lt Gov John Fetterman leads quack dog killer Mehmet Oz in the race for the senate seat being vacated by retiring GOP Senator Pat Toomey in the latest Suffolk/USA Today poll.

The head of the Russian-installed regional government in Kherson, Ukraine confirmed that the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the region have been successful in liberating a number of villages and pushing Russian forces further back, USA Today reports.

“It’s tense, let’s put it that way,” Vladimir Saldo, the commissioner put in place by the Kremlin said in a television interview, confirming that a village northeast of the city of Kherson were now back in Ukrainian control.

The Kremlin’s version of Baghdad Bob, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov, said in his daily briefing that “with superior tank units … the enemy managed to penetrate into the depths of our defense.” But Konashenkov said Russian troops had fallen back to a defensive position and “continue to inflict massive fire damage” on Kyiv’s forces.

I LOVE my son no matter what

— Herschel Walker (@HerschelWalker) October 4, 2022

With a credible claim that he paid for a former lover to get an abortion, Herschel Walker took to Twitter to tell one of his unknown number of children that he still has his father’s love, even though that father abandoned him and his mother to have multiple affairs and apparently, leave a string of impregnated women around the country.

One note:  Spartan and I made a decision when Walker’s campaign got underway to not cover Christian Walker and his social media posts.  It seems pretty clear the guy has some mental issues, and it seemed below even us to mock him.  Tonight, though, as Christian posts a string of tweets calling out his father’s hypocrisy, it seems he’s the latest to be hit with a large dose of reality.

In the soft, comfy confines of Trump advisor Sean Hannity’s right-wing snowflake globe of a television show, Texas resident Herschel Walker tries to “tut-tut” the fact that he paid for a woman’s abortion:  prior to this clip, Walker said “I have no idea” when Barney Rubble Hannity asked if he knew the woman to whom he will later admit to paying to get an abortion.  But when Hannity asks if he remembers this woman–to whom he sent a $700 check and a signed card, and with whom he reportedly had a long-term relationship–Walker’s CTE apparently kicks in and he opens the door for a lot more women to come forward:

Well, I-I send money to a lot of people, and that’s what’s so funny an, an let’s go back to my par (?).  You know, I do scholarship for kids.  I give money to people all the time because I’m always helpin’ people because I believe in being generous.  God has blessed me; I want to bless others.  I got into this race because I’m a christian.  I love the lord Jesus Christ and I always tell everyone that.  ‘No weapon formed against me shall prosper.’ So whoever, ah, been out there wanna lie on Herschel Walker, you’re lyin’ on the wrong one.  It’s best that you s’go somewhere else ’cause I’m gonna win this seat for the great people of Georgia because Georgia deserve to have a Senator dat trust an da Georgia people not no one that trust in Joe Biden likes Senator Warnock does.

“‘… a tremendous opportunity.  In fact, a tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.’  Now that’s an admission,” Hungary booster and guy who makes the alt-right look quaint Tucker Carlson states, without actually understanding what “an admission” is.  “That’s the clearest admission we are ever going to get.  No one can miss it, least of all the Russians.  The Biden Administration is responsible, either directly or through proxies, for the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines and the environmental catastrophe and the economic collapse that will certainly follow.  That is true.  It’s done.  So the question is where does that leave us and that’s the problem.  This act leaves us, the United States, with no option but total war with Russia.  There is no offramp now.  There is no way out.  We are all in, no matter what that means, no matter where it goes.”

Okay, let’s parse this:  (1) It’s not a clear admission; in fact, it’s not anything close to an admission because the Biden Administration has explicitly denied any involvement.  (2) It’s NOT true. It’s NOT done.  (3) There’s a HUGE jump to “total war” with anybody.  (4) And yes, there IS an offramp for viewers:  turn off Fox.

Donald Trump has filed a $475 million lawsuit against CNN, claiming the cable news pioneer fears a successful 2024 Trump presidential campaign so its attempting to preempt the campaign by slandering him.

“The Plaintiff, President Donald J. Trump, has been a long-time critic of the Defendant, Cable News Network, Inc. (“CNN”)—not because CNN does a bad job of reporting the news, but because CNN seeks to create the news (‘fake news,’ as the Plaintiff has characterized it in public statements),” the 29-page complaint alleges.  “Beyond simply highlighting any negative information about the Plaintiff and ignoring all positive information about him, CNN has sought to use its massive influence— purportedly as a “trusted” news source—to defame the Plaintiff in the minds of its viewers and readers for the purpose of defeating him politically, culminating in CNN claiming credit for “[getting] Trump out” in the 2020 presidential election. CNN’s campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander against the Plaintiff has only escalated in recent months as CNN fears the Plaintiff will run for president in 2024.”

Cyclopian Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers anti-government nationalist movement, claimed that his group was in Washington, DC January 5-6, 2021 to provide security to some of the VIPs participating in the “Stop the Steal” rallies.  Another defendant, a trans woman, said she went along with the violence because she “wanted to fit in” the male-dominated clique.

But according to Reuters, prosecutors undermined those excuses in their opening, describing a plot that went as far back as election week 2020, with Rhodes messaging his followers, “We must prepare for civil war.”  “It will be torches and pitchforks time if they (Congress) don’t do the right thing,” he wrote in another.

Prosecutors illustrated a long-designed plot to attack Congress to prevent them from certifying the results of the 2020 election for Democrat Joe Biden, with Jessica Watkins leading a mob down a corridor to the Senate side of the Capitol, telling the insurrectionists, “They can’t hold us!”  Her lawyer,  Jonathan Crisp, said that as a transgender woman, Watkins “never felt like she fit in and a lot of things she did that day were to try to fit in, good and bad.”

Mentally ill Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who supports a national ban on abortion with no exceptions, paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, according to receipts and a “get well soon” card he wrote to the woman which she provided to the Daily Beast.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson testified Monday against Donald Trump inaugural committee chair and long-time Trump ally Tom Barrack, saying that Barrack would have frequent meetings with Trump to get information from him and to urge Trump to take positions favorable to his benefactor, the United Arab Emirites, ABC News reports.

Barrack is charged with a number of offenses, including acting as an unregistered foreign agent, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators.  Prosecutors allege Barrack would use his access to Trump to lobby for UAE interests, using two men–Matthew Grimes, 27, an Aspen, Colorado-based former executive at Barrack’s company, and Rashid al Malik, 43, an Emirati national–to get messages from the UAE’s government.  Both men are facing charges, but Malik fled to the UAE before being detained.

While Barrack served as Trump’s inaugural chair and as an unofficial Trump advisor, he was seeking an investment from the UAE valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.  Barrack failed to reveal his connection to the Emiratis in various disclosures, including when he was being interviewed by the FBI.

Republicans in Florida and Ohio who contracted coronavirus were 76% more likely to die of Covid than Democrats who contracted the disease because they refused to get vaccinated or take measures to protect themselves from the virus, a new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research asserts.

“Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democratic-leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views,” the study, done by researchers from Yale’s public health and business schools, states.

Linking the 2017 voter registration records of 577,659 people age 25 or older who died between January 2018 and December 2021, researchers calculated the “excess death rate”–that is, the number of additional people who died over that time period versus what was statistically likely.  Comparing the number of deaths from the period after the vaccine was introduced to the numbers of people before the pandemic and in the early stages of the pandemic before a vaccine was available, researchers then looked at the mortality rates for the period after vaccines were introduced. 

The Supreme Court issued rejected ruling on two cases pending before it, ruling legal the federal ban on bump stocks that for all intents and purposes allow a gun to function as an automatic weapon capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute, ABC News reports.

The cases, Aphosian v. Garland and Gun Owners of America v. Garland attempted to claim that the regulation of the accessory violated the Second Amendment freedom to own a firearm even though the device is not actually a firearm:  it uses the inertia of a firing semi-automatic weapon to quickly chamber and discharge a round without requiring the shooter to physically squeeze the trigger.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives banned the sale and use of bump stocks after the 2017 massacre of scores of people attending a Las Vegas concert by a man armed with a small arsenal who sprayed the audience with gunfire from a hotel overlooking the venue. 

QAdulteress Marjorie Taylor Greene’s long suffering soon-to-be ex-husband Perry Greene has withdrawn his initial request to have all the filings and motions to be sealed for 25 years, Attorney Don Lewis reports. It’s not clear why Perry withdrew the seal motion or why he had even asked for it in the first place.

“What are we doing to our kids? Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry?” asked Minnesota Republican governor candidate Scott Jensen at a campaign event last week, according to CNN. “We’ve lost our minds. We’ve lost our minds,” added Jensen, without so much as hint of irony or self-awareness.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a petition from the Church of Scientology to intervene in the lawsuit from That 70’s Show actor Danny Masterson’s accusers and side with the church’s argument that the case should be forced into its internal “religious arbitration,” anti-Scientology Substacker Tony Ortega reports.

In yet another episode highlighting Republican projection and hypocrisy, the head of the Alabama Republican Party used a homemade identification card in the last few election cycles as the state-required photo ID needed to cast a ballot, AL.com reports.

John Wahl, the Alabama Republican Party Chairman, created his own fraudulent identification card which he presented to polling site workers to verify his identification although the state accepts everything from driver’s licenses, passports and student IDs as approved identification.  Wahl reportedly claimed the ID was a state issued employee identification card, claiming he was “Regional Press Secretary” presumably for the “Office of the State Auditor.”

Wahl’s bio page on the state GOP website is blank.  A March 2021 report on his election to lead the state’s Republican Party lists him as campaign manager for Auditor Jim Zeigler; he never actually worked for the state government, however.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected MyPillow assclown Mike Lindell’s bid to dismiss the $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, Axios reports.

With Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, a former television commentator, trailing badly in the polls and major funders refusing to send good money after bad, Michigan’s Gratiot County Republican Party decided to produce it’s own ad showing representatives of the county’s populace.

Obviously not cast with professional actors or even people who performed in their junior high’s version of Guys and Dolls, the cast laments how bad Michigan has been under Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer while bedecked in their biker regalia.

The Supreme Court announced that one of the cases it will hear relates to Section 230 of the Communications Communications Decency Act, which shields websites from liability claims for content posted by third parties, NBC News Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley tweets.

The issue regarding Section 230 is a double-edged sword:  Conservatives believe revoking Section 230 would lead to laws that would prevent social media companies like Facebook and Twitter from censoring violent posts, misinformation in an emergency, and targeted harassment because it would allow conservatives to sue.  Democrats, on the other hand, advocate for the revocation of Section 230 will lead to social media platforms more closely self-regulating because they would be liable for the violence that stems from posts on their sites, like the domestic terrorist attack that happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

With at least 42 people dead, officials in Lee County, Florida face criticism for their efforts to evacuate residents in the path of Hurricane Ian last week, ignoring the county’s own emergency planning, NPR reports.

Prior to Ian hitting shore, the National Hurricane Center estimated the expected storm surge to be 4- to 7-feet along Lee County’s entire gulf shoreline, from Englewood to Bonita Springs to Fort Myers.  The county’s emergency plan called for the evacuation of of barrier islands, low-lying communities and neighborhoods bordering the Caloosahatchee River; those evacuation orders were not issued in advance of the hurricane reaching Florida.

With more than half of the hurricane’s current known 76 fatalities, Lee County didn’t issue an evacuation order until about 12 hours before the storm hit land Wednesday, with a notice going out Tuesday afternoon as winds and rain picked up.  Neighboring Charlotte County had issued an evacuation warning Monday, giving its residents more than 24 additional hours to vacate. 

National Zero is experiencing some technical difficulties from a really shitty old computer having to stand in for a less shitty computer that is shutting off repeatedly. This leaves this reporter unable to write articles with any actual worthwhile content until he can visit an Apple store around noon Eastern time on Monday.