2 PM EDT Wednesday, June 1: There is a high chance a tropical depression will form and move northeastward over the SE Gulf. Regardless of development, heavy rainfall is likely over portions of western Cuba & South Florida on Friday and Saturday. @NWSWPC pic.twitter.com/W3jIPZgJQK

— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) June 1, 2022

Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! BREAKING NEWS! The big celebrity case that went viral reaches a verdict! They’re going to read it any minute! THIS IS HUGE! Everyone’s talking about it! It’s like a really big moment! So go check TMZ or something because we’re not reporting it here. This is National Zero. Our big stupid meaningless verdict coverage was yesterday. And today. Probably a few more articles. Or “articles”. We’re not down with the celebrity bullshit court cases, just the political bullshit court cases.

A single plant of underwater seagrass that stretches more than 112 miles in the shallows of Shark Bay, Australia–perhaps the most Australian place name ever–has been dubbed the world’s largest plant, CNN reports.

The plant, known as Posidonia australis, grows in a protected World Heritage site and has grown so large it would stretch from Los Angeles to San Diego.  Scientists studied genetic maps of the plant from various locations from 2012 through 2019 and discovered it had the same DNA map, meaning that the offshoots were not separate plants, but part of a network of one giant organic structure.

“The plant has been able to continue growing through vegetative growth – extending its rhizomes (rootstalks) outwards – the way a buffalo grass would in your back garden, extending runners outwards. The only difference is that the seagrass rhizomes are under a sandy seafloor so you don’t see them, just the shoots within the water column,” said Elizabeth Sinclair, a senior research fellow at the School of Biological Sciences and Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has fired five general, including a Major General who was responsible for the logistics and medical support for the military, as his invasion of Ukraine drags on in into its fourth month, Newsweek reports.

Putin also fired the Major General in charge of the domestic police force under Putin’s direction.  While the Kremlin has described this as a normal rotation of staff officers, no new assignments for the officers have been announced.

Those fired were: Major General of Police Vasily Kukushkin, who was head of the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Vladimir region; Major General Alexander Laas, deputy head of the Main Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Altai Territory; Major General Andrey Lipilin, head of the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Yaroslavl Region; Major General Alexander Udovenko of the Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; and Major General Yuri Instrankin, deputy head of the Department for Logistics and Medical Support of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Let’s be clear: Hillary Clinton is an unindicted co-conspirator in the planning and execution of the Russia Hoax and the damage it did to this country the last six years.

No verdict by a jury of her donors can change that fact.

— Rep. Darrell Issa (@repdarrellissa) June 1, 2022

The December 13th, 2020 MAGA Reich “Stop the Steal” memo that California federal Judge David O. Carter found in March 2022 to have “likely furthered the crimes of obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States,” and thus ruled it “subject to the crime-fraud exception,” was quietly made public last week, and goddamn it sure looks like “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,” was right on the mark, as the evidence is laid out they knew the fake Trump electors were convening the very next day to sign fraudulent electoral votes for the swing states.

Written by right wing chode Kenny Chesebro, it lays out a game plan for early January, including nagging Lindsey Graham to hold Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the election to create a pretext for forcing Mike Pence to recuse from the vote count. The rest is a mishmash of picking and choosing different interpretations of the statutory and constitutional procedures to get the outcome they want and force the swing states to hold re-do the elections (which there was no fucking chance even if they somehow got the electors tossed), or more likely, use the fake electoral votes they’d have handy as they’d been signed a few weeks earlier.

Making time on Tuesday for an interview with low budget right wing propaganda channel Newsmax, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked by host Rob Schmitt if he thought “that different American leadership, do you think that different Western leadership, may have prevented this aggression? There are many Americans that believe that if somebody like Donald Trump was still in the White House that this invasion would not have happened. What is your position?”

Rather than unholstering his pistol and putting a sucking wound in the middle of Schmitt’s chest like any normal human being in his situation would do when asked such a stupid fucking question, Zelensky responded calmly and diplomatically, saying “Well I believe what’s the most important is the assistance from the people of the United States. They are paying the taxes, and the money being allocated to support Ukraine comes from the taxes, and it’s all of that humanitarian, financial, military support to Ukraine. So I am grateful to the current president of the United States as well as to those in the political parties that support us. I am sorry if I’ll be saying something that you don’t like but for us as the country in war, it doesn’t matter whether its Democrats or Republicans. It’s the people of the United States that support us… I don’t know what would happen if the president, if Donald Trump would be the president of the United States for this situation.”

Right wing propagandist John Solomon, whose reporting at The Hill was so riddled with lies and errors that even they quarantined it and labeled it as “opinion” and published a lengthy correction following his ignominious departure from the site’s staff, tried to find a silver lining Tuesday to the outcome of the Sussman trial on his shitty new site JustTheNews.

“In the end, it didn’t matter,” Solomon wrote, ostensibly concluding the result of the only jury trial to emerge from the four year GOP counter-investigation to the Russia scandal, but in reality personalizing it and confronting the cold realization that for all the time and energy he put into creating a narrative that the FBI’s investigation into his Orange God Emperor beginning in 2016 was unfounded and unjustified didn’t matter. Couldn’t even get one libtard convicted. The other FBI guy’s conviction for a paperwork fuckup was all they got and that was a guilty plea that resulted in zero prison time. Shoplifters spend more time behind bars than Kevin Clinesmith did.

“The case was made against a backdrop of so many prior falsehoods and a growing belief in America that lying has become a norm in politics in Washington,” Solomon writes in the next sentence to make himself feel better. That he and his friends scored some sort of abstract victory, and he can both-sides a state of decay and also pretend he’s at a remove from it. As if his almost unanimously held reputation as a liar and a disgrace to this profession is neither a symptom nor cause of the miasma. Fucking “prior falsehoods”… Jesus Christ.

Slide from Politico’s Wednesday exposé on the Republican plot to install “poll watchers” at majority Black voting precincts in Michigan, with the goal of creating doubt in elections and having them thrown out by courts and/or the Republican-controlled legislature.

The federal government will cut the price it charges for leases on public land to renewable energy companies to encourage solar and wind companies to develop projects on federal land, Reuters reports.

The price cut, announced by the Department of Interior, comes as the federal government has a goal of producing 25 gigawatts of renewable energy produced on federal grounds by 2025; currently, energy generation stands around 2.9 gigawatts.

The Interior Department will cut prices by 50% for existing leaseholders and future projects.  It also announced that it was increasing the number of staff positions reviewing applications and opening field offices to coordinate local efforts in Washington, Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah.

Last week, Girl Scouts of the USA posthumously bestowed upon Amerie Jo Garza, 10, of Uvalde, Texas, one of the highest honors in Girl Scouting: the Bronze Cross. The Bronze Cross is awarded for saving or attempting to save life at the risk of the Girl Scout’s own life. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/bFjz0I4awa

— Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas (@girlscoutsswtx) May 31, 2022

What would happen if you made Barbie suddenly became life sized?  She’d have gaudy make up; stringy, unnaturally-colored hair; and she’d still have nothing between her ears.  In other words, you get Monica Crowley, who claims only Donald Trump is ever held accountable and that Democrats “fail up” in politics.  Funny how she doesn’t say the same about the man who inherited his father’s fortune and then bankrupted a football league, three casinos, an airline and a country.

“That’s right.  There’s only accountability, Laura, if you’re a Republican or a conservative or President Trump [scoff],” Crowley scowls indignantly.  “If you’re a Democrat in office, all you do is fail up.”

“… run by adults who hold themselves AND the kids accountable is of paramount importance,” Lady Hitler says.  “A dysfunctional home life, where drugs are easily accessible puts too many people on a highway to hell…”

But Frau Ingraham, you’ve told us over and over and over that 18-year-old are adult enough to own guns and have the right to carry them anywhere.  Eighteen-year-olds ARE the adults, not the kids, you claim.  And you’re blaming “pot” in the house, but you’re unable to show the shooter’s alleged “pot” use–even if true–caused this.

The Justice Department has filed an appeal of a federal judge’s ruling that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not have the legal authority to issue a masking wearing mandate on airliners and other modes of public transportation, NBC News reports.

In April, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, the 35-year-old US District Court Judge for Middle Florida whose nomination to the bench by Donald Trump drew a rare “not qualified” label from the American Bar Association, ruled that the CDC did not have authority to issue a mask mandate.  In her ruling, which she issued without hearing arguments in the case, Mizelle referred to several debunked scientific and medical claims as if they were fact.

At the time of Mizelle’s ruling, the Biden Administration said it would not appeal the decision because coronavirus infection rates were dropping and the mask mandate was likely to be allowed to expire.  But with coronavirus infection rates ticking up and the clock running out on the window to appeal, the DOJ decided to file.

You need to work on your math.

That’s not 40-50 people.

(More leftist reporters wrote puff pieces about the protest than people actually showed up.) https://t.co/XzojDHCC63

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 1, 2022

A 6-foot tall tabernacle covered in gold and jewels and valued at $2 million was stolen from a Roman Catholic church at some point Friday night, ripped out of the sanctuary of Brooklyn, New York’s St. Augustine parish in Park Slope, the Washington Post reports.

In the Roman Catholic faith, a tabernacle is the vessel used to hold the unleavened bread and wine that gets transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ during the Holy Eucharist.  The unused portions are stored in the church’s tabernacle to be consumed later.

A parish priest left the rectory to go to another parish to hear confession when he noticed the front door of St. Augustine’s open.  He saw the hosts that were stored in the tabernacle scattered around the altar and went behind the altar to find the tabernacle ripped from its alcove.

The captain of a parasailing adventure boat in Marathon, Florida cut the line connecting the parasail to the boat in high winds, causing the sail to drag the three people in the harness–a mother, her son and her nephew–across the water before crashing into a bridge, killing the mother, the Miami Herald (via Yahoo) reports.

The three were pulled from the water by a charter fishing boat that came to the rescue.  Supraja Alaparthi, a 33-year-old from Schaumburg, Illinois was killed in the accident.  Her 10-year-old was was pulled from the water injured but conscious.  Her 9-year-old nephew was unconscious and wrapped in the chute’s cords when he was found.  The Good Samaritan boater and his two clients got the three aboard their boat and rushed them to a nearby restaurant to rescue personnel.

The captain of the parasailing boat said that an incoming storm had such force that it “pegged” the sail, pulling the boat backwards, forcing him to cut the cord before the boat was dragged backwards underwater.  Parasailing industry experts, however, say cutting the cord is an absolute last resort and that the captain had many other maneuvers he could have done before the cord needed to be cut, including zigzagging the boat to reduce the force of the wind on the sail.

An elderly woman was killed and two men shot in the parking lot of the historical black Xavier University in New Orleans following a high school graduation at the college’s arena, WAFD CBS-9 in Baton Rouge reports.

The shooting seems to have started as an argument between two women in the parking lot that caused people to draw guns and open fire because everyone should be able to draw guns anywhere to protect themselves from people who draw guns.  Anyway, someone shot first and then everyone fired.

The elderly woman who was killed was not a member of either party involved in the gunfight and was an innocent bystander fatally struck by a stray bullet.

A nine-year-old girl hiking on a Washington mountain trail with two of her friends Saturday morning fought off an attack by a cougar, surviving with wounds to her face and chest, NBC News reports.

While their friend was getting mauled, the other two girls ran away and got help.  The girl fought until the cougar ran off, before adults made it to the scene.  The girl, covered in blood, was flown to a local hospital, where is she is being treated for her wounds and is expected to survive.

The young male cougar suspected in the attack was hunted down and killed.  Wildlife officials say a cougar attack on a human is a rare occurrence, typically when it’s a mother protecting an unseen cub den.  In this case, the cougar attacked like the girl was prey.  “In this instance, this little girl did nothing wrong,” Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Staci Lehman said. “It happened so quickly, and there’s nothing she could have done to prevent it.”

A lawyer for the unnamed teacher accused by law enforcement officials and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Quintana Roo) of facilitating the murder of 19 students and two teachers by propping a back door to the school open said the teacher intentionally closed the door when she realized there was a gunman on the loose, the San Antonio Express-News reports.

The statement further clouds the issue of the reliability of the accounts given by the school police, the local police, state officials and Cruz, who has lambasted the teachers he thinks should have more responsibility for defending students from gunmen than police or government officials.

On Friday, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told the media that a teacher had intentionally propped the door open; that claim appears in doubt now.