A pregnant Texas woman was issued a $215 ticket for driving “alone” in the HOV lane last week even though her fetus is now technically a person in the state, the Dallas Morning News reports.

A former 911 dispatcher for Greene County, Pennsylvania, in the extreme southwest part of the state bordering West Virginia, will face manslaughter and reckless endangerment charges for failing to send an ambulance to the home of a woman in extreme medical distress, who later died, USA Today reports.

Leon “Lee” Price, 50, of Waynesburg refused to send an ambulance to a remote part of the remote county unless he received assurance that the patient would be transported to a hospital.  Fifty-four year old Diania Kronk’s daughter pleaded for help, but Price demanded assurance that Kronk would accept treatment at a hospital about a half-hour drive away.

Kronk’s daughter, Kelly Titchenell, was driving to her mother’s house and assured Price her mother would go to the hospital “or she’ll die.”  Titchenell explained that her mother had been drinking heavily in the previous weeks and that the pallor of her skin had turned yellow.

https://twitter.com/gregkellyusa/status/1545537739638116354

Please enjoy this unfortunately not long enough parade of tears from MAGA World

Colorado state law enforcement agents arrested a man for threatening the life of the Democratic Secretary of State for Colorado, Jena Griswold, who reported a threatening call at the end of June, Reuters reports.

Police arrested 52-year-old Kirk Wertz after he allegedly called Griswold’s office and said in a voicemail message, “Hey, I’ve got a message for the Secretary and I want you to pass it along: The angel of death is coming for her in the name of Jesus Christ.”

According to court documents, a Colorado man named Kirk Samuel Wertz was charged with two counts of felony menacing and disorderly conduct after he pointed a gun at a car that he claimed cut him off in traffic.  After being convicted by a jury in 2021, his verdict was overturned based on the state’s self-defense provision that does not require a person to try to deescalate the situation.

In a completely meaningless gesture, Donald Trump is reportedly contemplating sending a letter to Steve Bannon waiving any claim of executive privilege and enabling Bannon to save face and avoid prosecution for contempt of Congress, the Washington Post reports.

As a former president, Trump has no authority to claim executive privilege, which can only be claimed by the current sitting president, which is Joe Biden, not Trump.  So Trump’s waiving of the privilege means nothing, but making a show of it, he can claim he still have the power to block testimony and that he is being benevolent.

Bannon, along with Trump advisor Peter Navarro, have been charged with contempt of Congress for failing to respond to properly issued subpoenas.  Bannon’s trial on the charges is scheduled to begin July 18th.

Lol

Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified to House January 6th Select Committee investigators for a full work day Friday, starting at 9 AM EST and going past 5 PM, with a half dozen short breaks in between, Politico’s Nicholas Wu reports. The overall length and the fact that NBC News separately reported earlier that Cipollone was largely cooperative and didn’t dick around much with claiming privilege on topics that aren’t actually privileged probably isn’t good news for Trump fanboys who just want this whole thing to go away. More terrifying for them is the possibility that Cipollone would’ve corroborated the really bad parts of the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony, which was pretty fucking damning on its own, much more so if another reliable witness backs it up.

Canadian “Freedom Convoy” organizer Tamara Lich, who founded the weeks-long clustertruck that paralyzed Ottawa and blocked key border crossings with the United States protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates, was detained for violating her bail conditions ahead of her trial on multiple charges of mischief and obstructing police over the occupations, the National Post reports.

Lich was caught appearing at an “awards gala” in Toronto last month, sitting with fellow clustertruck leader Tom Marazzo, whim she was prohibited from having any contact with. Lich was presented with an award for leading the clustertruck. One fan of Lich’s was seen openly weeping outside the courthouse Friday when she learned that Lich’s bail had been revoked.

Joining the Episcopalians and the Unitarian Universalists, the Presbyterians will now divest their investments from fossil fuel companies for failing to make a good faith effort to address the global climate change crisis, the Associated Press reports.

Meeting in virtual conference, the members of the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to divest the national organization from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66, and Valero Energy.  The assembly also encouraged local congregations to do so as well.

While the  Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s investments in the oil companies represent a small portion of the value of the businesses, the notice of divestiture influences the decisions of church adherents.

An extra dressed as the QAnon Shaman appears in the crowd during the final scene of the season finale of Amazon Prime’s The Boys, a brutally violent dark comedy action series about a team of superpowered crime fighters managed and merchandised by a large corporation that has gone completely off the rails. The show’s political real-world political overtones were never subtle in the first place but hit a level where the references relied on essentially National Zero reader-level familiarity with the political media environment of the 2020s in this latest season.

Without getting into the weeds of explaining the chyron at the bottom or why there are right wing protestors there because it would take at least 500 words to do so and spoil it for fans who haven’t seen the finale yet, this last scene truly epitomizes what the endgame is for right wingers and what they really want owning the libs to look like. It was horrifying and hilarious all the same. If you’re not a fan of The Boys yet then binge all three seasons ASAP to get to this moment. You will not regret it. It’s not the absolute greatest show on television, and it can be uneven and lame sometimes – as well as deeply fucking disturbing, even beyond the gratuitous gore – but it overall works far, far better than it ever should. And too bad for the real QAnon Shaman aka Jake Chansley, a shitty, unemployed actor currently serving for years in prison wasn’t available for the producers to cast playing himself and instead this guy got paid $750 or whatever to dress up like him.

Here’s a little tip from your Uncle Jack for all you people planning to take on seditious and criminal activities in the future:  don’t sign on with filmmakers to record the planning and execution of your crime.  Stop thinking “Ocean’s Eleven” was a cool documentary; it wasn’t.

According to the Guardian, filmmakers Jason Rink and Paul Escandon embedded themselves with Stone and others involved in the “Stop the Steal” fraud from November up until the time of the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress.  The pair has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but the Danish filmmakers are challenging the subpoena claiming press freedoms, and the Committee is honoring the claims of freedom of the press at this point by not demanding the team turn over film.

The film crew followed Stone and Alexander in the months after the November election, including to backstage meeting with people like Republican Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn. 

A Russian court on Friday sentenced a Moscow municipal elected official to seven years in the gulag for speaking out against the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine, the New York Times reports. Aleksei Gorinov, a municipal deputy in Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district, was convicted of spreading “false” information about the absolute shitshow war effort. “Aleksei was the first who didn’t plead guilty – that’s why the sentence was so harsh,” Gorinov’s lawyer said.

“Our country is waging an aggression,” said Gorinov at the district council’s meeting in March. “My opinion is that all of civil society’s efforts must be aimed at stopping the war and withdrawing Russian troops from Ukraine.” Councilwoman Yelena Kotyonochkina called Russia “a fascist state,” at the same meeting. She was charged with the same crime but has since fled Russia.

Oath Keepers founder Stewie Rhodes’s attorney on Friday told CBS News the MAGA terrorist traitor was willing to testify publicly to the House January 6th Select Committee, and would not plead the 5th to any questions. Rhodes was already deposed by the committee earlier this year, but wants to respond to statements made by Liz Cheney about his group’s connections to Trump minions.

President Joe Biden addresses the issues facing women and families seeking family planning options and women’s bodily autonomy in the light of the Supreme Court’s rule to overturn Roe v. Wade.

As the video above from Media Matters shows, the hosts of the Chicken Little of cable “news” networks spent much of Friday morning trying to spin the much-better-than-expected federal jobs report that showed 372,000 new jobs created in June, far exceeding expectations.  As Fox hosts had been pushing for days, they expected a weak jobs reports, which as one host put it, would be the lowest jobs report since April 2021, when the US created 263,000 jobs.

What they won’t tell you is that Biden’s nadir of job creation–April 2021’s 263,000 jobs–was better than 34 of Donald Trump’s 48 months in office.  After 17 months of the Biden Administration, the US has seen a job increase of nearly nine million versus 3.3 million after Trump’s first 17 month.  And lest we forget:  over the course of his 48 months in office, Donald Trump saw a job DECREASE in the US of 2.6 million jobs.

Trump supporter and spouse of Trump’s Small Business Administration director, Vince McMahon paid four women more than $12 million in total to secure their silence relating to his sexual harassment and abuse, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The CEO of professional wrestling producer WWE, Vince McMahon reportedly used WWE funds to pay off the women and secure their silence through non-disclosure agreements.  McMahon stepped down from the daily operations of WWE, which produces homoerotic staged and scripted interactive gymnastics, typically with men wearing Speedos, for an audience that’s overwhelming white conservative “Christian” males, many of whom will swear the stages exhibitions are real competitions.

According to the Journal, McMahon paid women to hide the fact that he was having multiple extramarital affairs, cheating on his wife.  The payments from the coffers of WWE, which is a publicly traded company, may spark an investigation by the SEC for improperly reporting the settlements to stockholders and federal regulators.

Determined to water down the effects of the Supreme Court ruling overturning the state’s strict permitting criteria for concealed carry permits, New York lawmakers have made the new process a pretty solid filter to deter right wing psychopaths from walking around with weapons in public and turning every mild misunderstanding into a potentially fatal confrontation, the AP reports.

Among the measures imposed on the permitting process are hours of safety training, prove they’re proficient at shooting, provide four character references, and sit for in-person interviews, and the URL of every social media account used within the past 3 years, under pain of perjury. And to the no doubt extremely frustrated squeals of the fanboys, a case that took years to make it to the Supreme Court was neutered by New York State’s infamous red tape in a matter of weeks.

Despite the hyperventilation by the right-wing echo chamber and conservative media that paints Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the next star of the GOP, a new poll shows that underrated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris would beat him in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, Newsweek reports.

The poll, from Harvard University Center for American Political Studies (CAPS), shows Harris capturing 39 percent of the vote versus just 37 percent for DeSantis, who has come under harsh criticism nationally for handing down executive orders that address Republican culture war issues but don’t address the crime, disease and high cost-of-living expenses in Florida, the most expensive state in the nation to live in.

DeSantis would face an uphill battle on a national stage to justify pushing state policies that are highly unpopular with voters, including barring teachers from addressing LGBTQ issues in schools, obstructing the distribution of coronavirus vaccines, allegations of political favoritism, and using his office to impose punishments to his political opponents.

The Wisconsin state Supreme Court’s Conservative majority on Friday ruled ballot drop boxes are illegal under state law, banning their use in all elections. Drop boxes were not technically legal in Wisconsin ever, but for decades had been permitted by fiat of state election authorities. Now finally because the fat Orange God Emperor lost the state in 2020 by roughly the same number of votes he won it in 2016, Republicans decided they weren’t fair. Still legal however is to place an absentee ballot in a US Postal Service mailbox for delivery to election clerk offices, underscoring how fucking stupid and pointless it is to ban essentially the same thing but dedicated to ballots only.