A survey sent to each state elections chief by the Associated Press finds – surprise! – there were no widespread problems with the use of ballot drop boxes in the 2020 election and the MAGA bitching is just made up nonsense meant to excuse Trump’s loss – even in states where there are no ballot drop boxes. “People are still claiming drop box fraud must have occurred in North Carolina,” said Patrick Gannon, the State Board of Elections public information director in North Carolina, where there are none. “You can’t make this up. Oh wait. Yes, you can.”

Kevin “Ultra MAGA” Downey, Jr., a self-proclaimed “conservative comedian” known for his appearances on “Gutfeld!” and in the Schildwachter Home Heating Fuel commercial, was identified as one of the people who breached the Capitol during the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress, NBC News reports.

Downey was identified by a group of online volunteers dubbed “Sedition Hunters” who tracked his movements through the Capitol and match up social media posts he and his girlfriend made stating that they were available for media interviews because they had information on what happened inside the Capitol.

Downey has had sporadic appearances on television, having appeared on the Fox cable propaganda show “Gutfeld!” which pretends that it’s comedy-commentary show but it’s really just a bunch of people sitting around bitching and insulting people.  Downey was a makeover target on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” made a brief appearance on “America’s Got Talent,” and had his star turn in the Schildwachter Home Heating Fuel commercial in Westchester County, New York. 

By a 4-2 vote, Cobb County School Board, overseeing the second-largest school district in Georgia, has authorized non-police personnel to carry weapons in schools, they say, to compensate for a lack of trained police officers and resource officers for the schools, Reuters reports.

The policy does not allow teachers to be armed, but lets virtually any other school personnel, from janitors to administrators to school nurses, to pack heat so that when a schoolyard fight breaks out, staff members can feel safe to eliminate any threat to the themselves.

The school sheriffs will undergo the same amount of training as a school resource officers in the use of weapons, which will come on top of doing their normal job duties such as cleaning toilets, making mimeographs and patching up the bullet wounds that ended schoolyard fights.

The new Winnie the Pooh movie isn’t about your typical hunny-lovin’ bear and his band of pals in the Thousand Acre Wood.  “Winnie the Pooh:  Blood and Honey,” an ursine slasher movie, according to DreadCentral.com, will be directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, best known for… well, nothing, really, and it will feature no performers you know, but it will have a guest appearance by Piglet.

In case you’re wondering how Disney would let one of its valuable brands to be used in such a way:  this is not a Disney production.  The copyrights on The Pooh books expired, so anyone can use the characters, the names and the settings in creative pieces that don’t infringe on the characters and stories depicted in the Disney creations.

Performance artist on the taxpayers’ payroll Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) continues her ongoing crusade against logic, rationality, sanity and simple courtesy by hosting a misogynistic stalker on her podcast to mock vaccines because she’s got too much time on her hands because she’s a shitty legislator.  Oh, and then she says coronavirus vaccines give you Covid…. because she’s just that stupid.

Seriously, though, how warped do you have to be to mock people’s personal safety?  Warped enough to believe Donald Trump won in 2020 and the virus was born in a Peachtree dishes energized by Jewish space lasers.

Federal prosecutors asked a judge to sentence a convicted January 6th attacker to 15 years in prison, saying his participation was an act of domestic terrorism and merited a stiffer punishment, NBC News reports.

A member of the far-right ultranationalist III%ers, Texan Guy Reffitt was convicted by a jury of entering the Capitol with a gun and zip ties.  After deliberating for just two hours during the March trial, the jury convicted him of five counts including transport of a firearm in support of civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding.

In a court filing Friday, prosecutors asserted the domestic terrorism enhancement was appropriate “to deter others is especially strong because Reffitt engaged in acts of violence that were intended to influence the government through intimidation or coercion — acts that have been defined, by statute, as domestic terrorism.”

A moronic 1995 commercial for Pizza Hut’s then-revolutionary stuffed crust pizza starring Donald and Ivana Trump was posted on Truth Social without further commentary by Trump social media douchebag Dan Scavino on Saturday. Insatiably hungry for any sign or shibboleth from their savior, QAnon fans promptly went wild in the replies to the bizarre apparent “tribute” to the Donald’s recently departed first wife over the “pizza” reference in the ur-conspiracy of the QUniverse: The “Pizzagate” story where Hillary and John Podesta were murdering children in the basement of a pizza place in Washington, DC called Comet Ping Pong, which doesn’t have a basement.

“Omg….the comms here!!!” says the top reply, with “comms” apparently meaning “commands” or “communications,” as all messages from Trump and his minions are meant to be deciphered for their true meaning (This is what’s called “baking” in QAnon parlance). “Pizza is one of [the Democrat pedophiles’] evil key words and codes,” one QAnon fan user explains to a regular MAGA user who isn’t caught up. “He’s been taking a huge bite out of child sex trafficking for a very long time,” writes another user, interpreting the symbolism behind Trump biting a slice of pizza.

The Washington Post details an exploding number of cases where hospitals have had to pause treatment for pregnant patients facing life threatening situations because hospital administrators weren’t clear on what medical procedures were legally permissible under the new anti-choice laws imposed by Red states afte Roe was revoked.

A woman with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy had to flee to Michigan to obtain an abortion after her local hospital would not treat her.  Another Wisconsin woman who suffered a miscarriage and was bleeding severely waited ten days to receive an operation to remove fetal tissue because of questions if the procedure was legal under an 1849 anti-abortion law that is currently believed to be in force.

The tumult caused by the Supreme Court’s revocation of Roe means hospital administrators are trying to figure out how to CYA legally and financially, which means denying lifesaving care to pregnant patients at risk. 

State officials are investigating an incident where a West Virginia Circuit Court judge waved a weapon and laid it on the bench pointing at the defense team of lawyers who had just made a request for the judge to recuse himself due to a perceived conflict of interest, the Daily Beast reports.

New Martinsville Judge David W. Hummel Jr. was hearing a motion from the lawyers for EQT, a fracking company that leases lands from West Virginians to extract the fossil fuels, who urged Hummel to recuse because his parents receive payments under a similar lease that Hummel himself will eventually inherit.

The case concerned EQT cutting payments to local residents for the leases on their lands, with payments being tied to the amount of gas extracted from the lands.  EQT reduced the amount of gas extracted as the price fell, and residents were upset that their payments were cut.

A virus commonly found in toddlers is now spreading through hospitals’ neonatal wards, putting infants at risk for long-term complications and death, NBC News reports.

Like many viruses, parechovirus typically infects children from infancy to 5 years of age who recover after a few days of mild fever, nausea and gastric discomfort, while many are asymptomatic.  Many times, the virus manifests with rashes on the child’s hands and feet, leading to its nickname, “the mittens and booties rash.”  Like dozens of other viruses, most children naturally fend off the virus without medical intervention, which helps to develop their natural immune systems.

The circulating variant of the virus, A3, appears to target younger children, according to an advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  In infants, the variant can lead to more severe complications, including neurological issues like lethargy, seizures, an inability to eat or persistent fussiness that cannot be consoled in a percentage of patients.  Severe cases can lead to seizures and a reduction in white blood cell production in the brain and spinal cord. 

MAGA terrorists Cody Mattice, 29, and James Mault, 30, both of upstate New York, reportedly cried like babies in court Friday when a judge sentenced them to 44 months in prison for assaulting cops with pepper spray during the failed insurrection, Insider reports. In between their choked sobs, they asked DC Circuit Court Judge Beryl Howell for leniency and then cried more when she declined.

It’s not clear if tears were elicited by the reality that they will be showering naked with violent, hardened criminals known to force weaker inmates to perform sex acts on them for their cruel gratification every day of the next nearly four years or if they know their Lord and Savior, fat former President Trump could have pardoned them with the stroke of a pen but decided Jeannine Pirro’s ex-husband and Lil Wayne were more important than the people that fought for him.

Maybe it was both. The horror of the sentence must also have been even more agonizing by the fact that the judge is an Obama appointee. The woman who could have shown them mercy and did not was placed in that position by the tan suit-wearing alleged Kenyan Muslim socialist president.

“I’m gonna remind people now that the largest standing army in the world are American gun owners,” former local news anchor and person who abandons her friendships to pursue personal glory Kari Lake, a GOP candidate for Arizona governor claims incorrectly while appearing on a Zoom call.  “We’ve got over a trillion rounds of ammo out there.  And that fact is the only reason we’re a country right now and we’re not gonna let them take that away from us because we are protecting this country by being law-abiding gun owners and standing up for our Second Amendment.  It is the only thing keeping us free right now, and I wish our friends of the left would figure that out.”

The repeat drag queen performance patron is completely wrong about this.  By definition, a “standing army” is a military made up of full-time, professional soldiers, not any yahoo who has an assault rifle in the back of his closet.  And what’s protecting our Republic is adhering to the rule of law, not the threat posed by said yahoos to overthrow the government at the behest of an immature, narcissistic reality television character. 

The United States National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 is now also, as of Saturday, also available at 988, the result of a national push to expand access to mental health emergency care, the Associated Press reports. Americans experiencing a crisis can call or text the new short and much easier to remember number to be connected with a counselor.

Suicide takes the lives of tens of thousands of Americans a year, more than half of them via firearms due to the convenience and painlessness of a self-inflicted bullet to the head, as well the ease of following through on the impulse – as opposed to tying a noose, waiting for a freight train, or whatever other means requiring more time, effort, and/or pain inflicted on a person committing suicide. There’s a strong relationship between a state’s gun laws and its per capita suicide rate. For example, the Giffords Center gives California an “A” and Wyoming an “F” on its 2021 annual gun law scorecard – mapping very neatly onto the 10 per 100,000 suicide deaths in California to Wyoming’s 30 in 2020. These numbers don’t lie, no matter what you think about gun policy.

Most of the talk about tackling America’s gun problem is focused on the wanton violence armed psychopaths have wrought on innocent people, and not wrongly so. It would’ve been great if Bobby Crimo, Salvador Ramos, and Peyton Gendron had just blasted themselves instead of 40 people between the three of them. But hidden in the backdrop is the epidemic of self-inflicted gun violence, which is more prevalent than gun homicide – 19,384 people were murdered with a gun in the US in 2020, while 24,292 died of self-inflicted gunshots. The bottom line is that effective gun control policy is effective suicide prevention policy. Seriously taking it on would do much more to save the lives of those suffering from a crisis than just shortening one phone number.

Join us today in #Queens for an #FDNY Block Party from 11-4! Meet @SirenFDNY and @HotDogFDNY our Fire and Life Safety Mascots. pic.twitter.com/EVZfjEqg7G

— FDNY (@FDNY) July 16, 2022

The taxpayer-funded New York City Fire Department is set to host a “block party” event Saturday, subjecting children to their hateful “fire safety” agenda with free propaganda coloring books, plastic fire helmets bearing the FDNY’s logo, and cardboard fire trucks distributed to impressionable youngsters whose brains aren’t developed enough to comprehend that fire is a good thing.

The FDNY will never acknowledge this, but for the vast majority of human history prior to the invention of the light bulb and microwave, fire was the only method of indoor lighting and heat source for food preparation. It’s probably no exaggeration to say it is the single elemental force that drove the development of civilization. “Fire safety” focuses only on the negative incidents like the ones in San Francisco in 1906, Chicago in 1876, London in 1666, Rome in 64 AD and others that just got a little out of hand. They never want to acknowledge the positive role that fire plays in our world. For example, did you know that the Great Fire of London ended a deadly breakout of bubonic plague? Or that the rebuilding of Chicago created hundreds of thousands of jobs for local workers? No one likes to talk about these things because they’ve been cowed into silence by fascist, un-American Stalinist scumbags like the New York City Fire Department.

There’s no opposing view being presented at these “block parties.” Pro-fire New Yorkers will be denied a platform to counter the FDNY’s lies. That may be the worst lesson of the day for the children attending this event and being groomed to hate fire: That other voices don’t matter.

A federal judge in New Mexico has denied a request by fascist MAGA lawyer John Eastman to shield his phone from investigators who seized it from him in the state on June 22, CNN reports. “Because there is no evidence that the Government has searched the phone or plans to search it without the benefit of a Filter Team, and because the warrant specifies that no search of the phone will occur until further order of the court, Eastman fails to show a likelihood of success,” Judge Robert Brack wrote, with “filter team” being the method to separate evidence that could fall under an attorney-client relationship, something Eastman doesn’t have a great track record of proving.

• At one point, the Supreme Court and the Secret Service ranked at or near the top of the most revered and trusted federal institutions.  How times have changed.
• Under Alabama’s law granting personhood to a fertilized egg, Alabama now becomes the worst jurisdiction in the world for official fetal mortality rates at 319 per thousand, topping Afghanistan’s 109 per thousand rate.  (Roughly one-third of all fertilized eggs are passed naturally, so obviously Alabama will proceed to indict those people who discharged fertilized embryos, right?)
• I’m appalled that the GOP used the rape and ensuing pregnancy of a 10-year-old to try to show their opposition to Joe Biden.  To them, everything is a prop in their performance art.  
• Conservatives are upset that a bunch of people unrelated to Brett Kavanagh demonstrated their anger with him and forced him to use a back alley to extricate him from a situation he didn’t want to be in.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LXXVIII”

The RNC site selection committee have picked Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the site of the 2024 convention, teeing up the final approval for an August leadership meeting, Politico reports. “Today, the Site Selection Committee voted to recommend Milwaukee to host the 2024 Republican National Convention and it is a testament to the forthright and professional behavior embraced by Milwaukee’s city leaders throughout the process. A final decision will be made by Chairwoman [Ronna] McDaniel and the full RNC in the coming weeks,” said some dickweed in a statement.

The largest city in the crucial swing state, Milwaukee would have been the site of the 2020 Dem Convention had the COVID-19 pandemic not forced a virtual formal for the pageantry. Fat former President Trump famously abused the White House and used it for his 2020 re-coronation after the cancelation of the planned Charlotte, North Carolina site for the pagan spectacle.

“A Jewish anti-gun activist, Steve Dettelbach, has just been made director of the ATF. The Jewish junta is getting stronger and more aggressive. He won the nomination 48 to 46, thanks to two Republican Senators voting for him (Susan Collins of Maine and Rob Portman of Ohio), as well as Ben Sasse (Nebraska) and Risich of Idaho not even showing up to vote — an obvious tactical choice since they don’t want to have to explain it to their heavily rural gun loving voters in the future. Sasse and Risich could’ve caused a tie and forced Biden to have to send Kamala Harris to break it. Could’ve been a huge publicity moment for the GOP as midterms near, but they passed on it. It’s obvious they want to move on from having to defend gun owners,” said a Friday post on the Bracken County, Kentucky Republican Party’s Facebook page before it was deleted.

Bracken County GOP Chairwoman Karin Kirkindol later wrote “Earlier today, I was made aware of an inappropriate post on the Bracken County GOP Facebook page. That post does not represent the values of the Bracken County Republican Party. It was incredibly insensitive. We will investigate how this occurred and we commit to tighter oversight of our social media going forward,” but that post is also unavailable as, again, they deleted the entire Facebook page, probably because they were still getting too much shit to handle over that terrible, half-assed apology.

Disgraced former President Trump on Friday announced via Truth Social that his Saturday MAGA rally in Arizona would be postponed until next Friday “out of love and respect for Ivana.” Trump had faced well deserved criticism after the New York State Attorney General let him weasel out of his scheduled deposition with her office’s investigators (Ivana’s kids Ivanka and Don Jr were much more understandably excused too) but still planning to hold the Arizona rally with his slate of evil far right candidates Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Mark Finchem, and other scumbags.

“Ivana is burning in hell,” says the top reply to Trump’s Truth Social post, written by a user with the handle @queerTrump. It’s been up for 5 hours, so Devin Nunes has some explaining to do.

pic.twitter.com/b91USjDbtv

— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) July 15, 2022

Widely respected former federal prosecutor and New York City Mayor Rudolph W Giuliani on Friday shared the news he’s been honored by a trusted bedding retailer with a promotional discount code in his name that could be redeemed for savings on “Percale” Bed Sheets. The former mayor did not elaborate on the promotion, probably owing to his well-earned reputation for humility and integrity, simply tweeting the picture of the bedsheets. It’s extremely unlikely that Giuliani is receiving any sort of compensation for the promotional code as he is a wealthy and successful man who does not face any civil or criminal liabilities. The same goes for the bedding retailer’s founder, Michael Lindell, a very successful businessman. Neither of the two men are desperate for money at all.

National Zero will resume our regular news coverage now that we’re done pretending for our right wing readers. We hope they enjoyed this “Virtually every word is a lie by omission” article.