Dominion Voting Systems have subpoenaed former Attorney General Fred Flintstone Bill Barr in their yabba-dabba-defamation suit against Fox News, looking to have Trump’s former top lawman help turn old dinosaur Rupert Murdoch’s defense team’s case into rubble, ABC News reports.

Some of the Fruity Pebbles employed by Fox News, like Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, famously propagated quite a lot of yabba-dabba-disinformation about Dominion, so here’s hoping the former AG’s bare caveman feet move extra fast in propelling his comical wood and stone car down to wherever this deposition’s going to be held. Crotchety old Murdoch’s going to need a lot of that sweet chemical Flintstones™ Kids daily multivitamin flavor to erase the taste of defeat.

Groups petitioning Michigan to put voting and abortion rights referenda on the ballot in November submitted on Monday roughly 679,000 and 750,000 signatures, respectively, to the Secretary of State’s office, well over the 425,059 required this year (fixed percentage of the total number of Michigan’s registered voters), WXYZ reports. Pending verification of the signatures – which is probably a surer thing these days for Dem-leaning petition drives in the state than it’s been for the other guys – the ballot measure for election reform would allow nine days of early, in-person voting, pre-paid absentee ballot postage, provide secure ballot drop boxes, and a statewide absentee ballot tracking system. The reproductive rights measure – which is going to be a solid turnout driver in the Dem-leaning purple state – would enshrine abortion access in the state’s constitution.

In related and unfortunate news, a similar abortion referendum petition in Arizona to guarantee did not reach the required threshold in time to get on the ballot in November. Why Michiganders were able to figure it out there but the Arizona libs couldn’t is unclear, but they’ll aim for 2024.

“Then he got ridda the pipeline.  He ridda the pipeline [indeciperable] the energy starts his downfall because we need energy for everything.  You all know that?” Republican Georgia Senate nominee Herschel Walker explains incorrectly during a campaign stop.  “And they were talkin’ ’bout the Green New Deal.  Y’know, climate change.  I’m gonna help y’all with that real quickly and I’m gonna do it in a Wrightsville way so you can understand what I’m sayin’.  We, in America, have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world.  So we gonna put, from the Green New Deal, million or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up, so all of sudden China India ain’t puttin’ nuthin’ in their [indecipherable] clean that situation up, so that all that bad air still there but since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China bad air, so when China get our good air, their bad air gotta move so it moves over to our good air space, and now we gotta clean that back up.”

First, let me apologize for the incomplete transcription of Republican Georgia Senate nominee Herschel Walker’s explanation of why American air is polluted.  His accent, his unique application of grammar, and his improper positioning of the microphone make it difficult to decipher every word, as does his Palinesque spaghettification of sentence structure.  I try to be accurate with transcriptions, but there are times when it just isn’t possible. 

The president of the union representing over 18,000 US Border Patrol agents on Monday diverged from fat former President Trump and endorsed a different woman whose name is more authentically Karen-ish in the Arizona Republican governor primary race. “Anyone can talk tough, but Karrin has the experience and conservative track record we can trust to get the job done,” said Brandon Judd, President of the National Border Patrol Council in backing businesswoman Karrin Taylor Robson over Trump-endorsed fascist QAnon freak Kari Lake. It’s clear that despite Kari Lake’s textbook I-would-like-speak-to-the-manager-immediately haircut and granite-chiseled resting bitch face that there’s nothing like the almost original article when it comes to Karens.

“Karrin” is a name CBP agents can trust to keep white Arizonans in a perpetual state of fear toward brown people from Central America whose kids might be better at sports than white kids or worse: take more effort and less racism than elected Republicans and party officials are willing to put in to make migrants and their families into reliable conservative voters. It’s just too bad for the Border Patrol union that Wendy isn’t running for governor. They’d be thrilled to have her support in obtaining nerve gas and anthrax to use against asylum seekers coming into Arizona.

Remember the Sarasota woman who published an op/ed in the local paper defending the Proud Boys?  Well, it turns out Melissa Radovich forgot to mention a few pertinent things in her submission.  When Radovich wrote, “When I think about the Proud Boys, I think of fathers, business owners and veterans,” it turns out she neglected to mention that when she thinks of “the Proud Boys,” she also thinks about her husband, who’s an active member of the group.  It was a huge oversight, given that the Sarasota Herald-Tribune published a different op/ed just three weeks ago noting they were married and that Nicholas Radovich was a member of the Proud Boys.

The Herald-Tribune pulled the op/ed overnight. “Our editorial process failed to keep this column from being published as it appeared, which did not meet our standards. We are adding additional, higher level review of the process for accepting and editing guest columns for publication,” the newspaper said in a statement.

Thank you @DonaldJTrumpJr, @EricTrump, @TiffanyATrump, @IvankaTrump and Barron for never exposing or humiliating our country and the first family like some others!

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) July 11, 2022

We’re guessing this alleged hooker/QAnon dumbass is happy “Unprecedented” – at least in its presentation as aired – did not make the Trump family look any more stupid or evil than those of us with common sense and decency already knew them to be, thereby sparing their fans like Boebert the mental effort of coming up with moronic excuses or plot hole-riddled conspiracy theories to explain their behavior. We think. Then there’s also that 4chaners reportedly hacked into Hunter Biden’s iCloud account on Sunday, and Lauren might also be alluding to that which, if something really incriminating or embarrassing was found we’d probably know about it already. Definitely if it was as bad as Jared Kushner landing a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. That might be why Congresswoman Trailer Park Hot left Slenderman out of her thank you note.

Having already partied like it’s 1939 in Budapest earlier this year, American fascism fan fest promotion CPAC is inviting Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban to its next far right convention in Texas next month, Vice reports. “CPAC is proud to host Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The fight against socialism is a global one,” said globalist CPAC chode Matt Schlapp, probably no more than four or five years away from when they finally stop dog-whistling “socialism” and just say “Jews.”

Formula One founder Bernie Ecclestone has been charged with fraud after a UK banking regulator investigation found the proud 91 year old father of a two year old toddler with his 46 year old third wife had hidden £400 million in assets overseas, the Independent reports. “TThe CPS has reviewed a file of evidence from HMRC and has authorised a charge against Bernard Ecclestone of fraud by false representation in respect of his failure to declare to HMRC the existence of assets held overseas believed to be worth in excess of £400m,” said chief crown prosecutor Andrew Penhale.

The charges come just a day after Ecclestone apologized for saying in a recent interview he would “take a bullet” for “first-class person” Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, that Vlad’s brutal assault on Ukraine was “not intentional” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could’ve done more to avert the invasion. Just going to go out on a limb here and say that Ecclestone’s Trumpish comments and charges for financial scumbaggery are not at all unrelated.

Chinese authorities on Sunday violently crushed a protest by over 1,000 depositors whose savings have been frozen for months by the incompetence of the country’s banking system, CNN reports. The protestors had assembled early at the Zhengzhou branch of the ChiCom central bank, the People’s Bank of China, waving national flags to obscure their dissent, protesting the Henan provincial government’s fuckup which has frozen the accounts of hundreds of thousands of customers of four banks. The protest lasted for several hours before cops moved in.

“I did not expect them to be so violent and shameless this time. There was no communication, no warning before they brutally dispersed us,” said one protestor. The depositors were rounded up and thrown on buses to detention camps, with most being released later in the day. Others were taken to area hospitals after getting their asses kicked. The bank freeze has been going on since April, the result of some bizarre and nonsensical investigation into criminal fraud by executives at the banks which does nothing to explain why the lives of ordinary people have been disrupted.

The United States figured out how to prevent this sort of thing from happening about 80 fucking years ago with the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and from there a vast patchwork of other regulations and mechanisms, both public and private, to ensure banking customers’ access to their funds is rarely and very briefly if ever interrupted. The lynchpin of the ChiCom political system is the void of accountability from the public for bullshit like this and in that respect it has way more in common with the GOP vision for America than fanboys want to admit.

An early Monday court filing from federal prosecutors revealed that Trump attorney Justin Clark interviewed with the FBI on June 29th, telling agents that the fat former president never actually invoked “privilege” for Steve Bannon, Politico reports, calling it “a significant development that could reverberate in multiple investigations facing Trump’s inner circle.”

ERCOT appeals for conservation from 2-8 p.m. Monday, July 11. More details available: https://t.co/CVBehrr5J1 @PUCTX #txlege

— ERCOT (@ERCOT_ISO) July 11, 2022

ERCOT, the privately-run organization that manages the self-contained Texas power grid, is begging people to cut back on electricity usage or it may have to implement rolling brownouts as temperatures soar in the South. 

The inaccurately named Liberal Democratic Party of Japan took a commanding share of seats in the upper house of the nation’s Parliament, securing an uninterrupted term as Prime Minister for incumbent Fumio Kishida, who will not have to stand for reelection until 2025, the Associated Press reports.

Part of Kishida’s platform for the remainder of his term included something he referred to as introducing “new capitalism,” an amorphous idea he did not detail.

The Liberal Democratic Party was led by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who was assassinated by a gunman who shot him twice with a homemade shotgun in a rare gun violence incident in the country.

Democratic New York Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a distant cousin of comedian Amy Schumer, has tested positive for the coronavirus and reportedly has mild symptoms, CNN reports.

As the Senate returns from its Fourth of July recess, Schumer will work from home until he tests negative for the virus.  Schumer’s office reports that the Senator is vaxxed and boosted.

“Anyone who knows Leader Schumer knows that even if he’s not physically in the Capitol, through virtual meetings and his trademark flip phone he will continue with his robust schedule and remain in near constant contact with his colleagues,” spokesman Justin Goodman said in a statement.

President Joe Biden will unveil the first official photograph from the James Webb Space Telescope on Monday, a moment that will mark a new chapter in deep space exploration, NBC News reports.

Scheduled for 5 p.m. ET at the White House, the event will debut “Webb’s First Deep Field,” the longest and deepest look into the galaxy.  The Hubble Deep Field, which looked at an area of sky equivalent to a tennis ball placed 100 yards away, was a signature photograph of that program; the Webb Deep Field will look even further back in time.

The Webb Deep Field will look at various ranges of light to compile a photograph of what the universe looked like 13 billion years into the past.

The annual meeting of the Nebraska Republican Party fell into pandemonium after members voted to oust long-time state Party chairman Dan Welch, prompting ten Republicans to resign their memberships on the spot.   The fracas led former Republican US Senate candidate Matt Innis being arrested for assault and trespassing after he was removed as a delegate.

Depending on who you talk to, this past week marked the 75th anniversary of either the most persistent conspiracy theory of modern times or the Earth’s initial contact with an alien life form: the supposed crash landing of a UFO on a cattle ranch outside of the town of Roswell, New Mexico.

Did the US government find a crashed alien craft in the desert of the Southwest? Did the military discover alien bodies – or even a live extraterrestrial in the wreckage? Has every major technological leap – from velcro to microchips to stealth aircraft – been thanks to back-engineering of alien technology? And is it responsible for everyone reading this paragraph using a conspiratorial voice in their head? The fact of the matter is, while an alien crash is possible, it isn’t probable. Our technological leaps are due to good ol’ human innovation, not alien invention. And you’re using that voice again, aren’t you?

Only in Florida would a mother–supposedly concerned about her children’s education and safety–write an editorial for the local praising the Proud Boys as “concerned fathers” for attending local school board meetings to yell against things like CRT, LGBTQ and apparently higher IQs.

In an op/ed for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Karen Melissa Radovich, “a mom who will do what is best for my kids,” says that a local school board candidate criticizing Proud Boys attending a meeting with a Sarasota School Board members is off base.

“When I think about the Proud Boys, I think of fathers, business owners and veterans. These fathers have spoken at many School Board meetings,” Radovich wrote seriously.  “They are concerned about the direction that their local schools are heading in, and I commend them for coming to School Board meetings.”

Republican Florida Senator Rick Scott, who frequently looks like he just realized he farted, is starting to work the ground in Iowa, the traditional first battleground state for presidential campaigns looking to gain momentum.  Apparently, Scott doesn’t understand he’s already fourth on the list of Florida Republicans after Trump, DeSantis and Rubio.

The Discovery+ documentary series “Unprecedented” by filmmaker Alex Holder is certainly well produced as a time capsule of the 2020 campaign and its aftermath from the Trump family side. The footage Holder’s team captured outside of one of the entrances to the Capitol during the insurrection is raw and visceral. But if you were expecting basically a documentary film version of one of the major “bombshell” books like “Frankly We Did Win This Election” by Michael Bender or “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, then you’re probably going to walk away disappointed.

There was literally nothing in the three hour long episodes that to our recollection wasn’t previously covered here one way or another. Seriously, besides that Don Jr became a hunter out of resentment for his dad’s love of golf and isn’t really faking his “outdoorsman” persona – which, who really gives a shit – the series did not tell us anything we don’t already know. It’s certainly possible that the material that would be most of interest to National Zero readers and the House January 6th Committee was left on the cutting room floor, but that’s neither here nor there when we’re talking about whether or not you should sign up for yet another “plus” streaming service just to watch this documentary then the answer is no. If you already do then yeah, check it out. Like we said, it’s well made and features some solid commentary from folks like Anne Applebaum, just don’t expect anything new in terms of damning new footage or information.