Hahahaha! This is so much like Ron DeSantis, right? Isn’t it hilarious when Russians act like Republicans and vice versa? LOL! After the war began on February 24, employees of Prosveshcheniye, the main publisher of school textbooks in Russia (formerly a USSR state entity, privatized in 2011 in some oligarch scam), were ordered to remove or at least minimize all mentions of Kyiv and Ukraine from future editions of their course books in history and literature, Mediazona reports. “We are faced with the task of making it as if Ukraine simply does not exist… It’s much worse when the textbook just doesn’t mention a country. A person grows up without a knowledge base about some country, and then it is much easier for him to believe what he is told about it from TV,” said one source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he or she would be thrown out of a window if the FSB found out they were talking to reporters.

The Google translation of the Mediazona article is a little spotty, but one passage sticks out: “So, from paragraphs that give examples of the heraldry of different states, including flags, a few years ago it was strongly recommended to remove the flag of Ukraine and replace it with the flag of any other country. If it is necessary to give an example of the capital in the chapter, Kyiv was replaced by another capital. ‘A couple of times I had to remove the US flag as well, but it’s simpler there, our program pays little attention to world history,’ says one of the [Prosveshcheniye] employees. Now editors should remove references to Ukraine wherever possible.”

Charles Herbster, a real Nebraskan ladies man with all the right moves for making women feel sexy and special, has sued eight wet blankets who weren’t down for his love train, the Omaha World Herald reports. Defendants included State Senator Julie Slama, a sexy young thing who was just too ice cold that day when the Herbster’s flower was growing for her. The chemistry just wasn’t there, in fact it turned into a volatile reaction. Only legal action calling her a liar can turn this around.

• Disney should shut down its entire Florida operation for the last two weeks in August, through Labor Day. Brand it “The Summer without Disney.”  It can afford to take the financial loss, but DeSantis can’t afford to let people see how much more of an impact Disney has on their lives than DeSantis does.
• With every accusation of “grooming” made by Republicans, realize that the GOP has become Q. They are parroting the claims QAnon have made in 2016.  Q has become inculcated in Republicanism.  
• Kevin McCarthy will be out as leader of House Republicans very shortly for his words against Trump.  He should be out of Congress for his words supporting him.
• I think I figured out Ron DeSantis’s plan in attacking Disney:  He wants them to vacate their amusement parks and then hand them over to Trump to operate as TRUMPLAND, where nothing works and everything costs four times normal.  
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LXVI”

When it hit 100, I stopped counting the number of times Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon Congresswoman from Georgia, claimed she didn’t remember something.  “I don’t remember that.”  “I don’t recall.”  “I don’t know.”  “I don’t remember saying that.”  And that was with more than an hour remaining in her testimony.

Greene did what her lawyer likely told her to do:  she wasn’t belligerent.  She wasn’t overly loquacious.  She didn’t drop any major mistakes.  She kept to her script, which was to claim she didn’t remember specific events or her specific actions when given the opportunity, which is likely enough for her to keep her spot on the ballot.

This is where the Court of Common Sense conflicts with the court of law.  In the Court of Common Sense, we know beyond a reasonable doubt that Greene promoted Trump fanboys to be violent.  You don’t cut half a dozen ads with a weapon and think that when you say “fight” you mean it Socratically, particularly with a bunch of people who haven’t read more of the Constitution than a single amendment. 

We’re supposed to write an article rehashing the one Politico wrote when they obtained this photo but what the hell are we going to say? This is actually pretty tame by today’s standards. Would it have been a big deal had a similar photo of a sitting Republican Congressman surfaced in say, April 2018? Possibly. Maybe even probably. That was an absolute shitshow of a year in political news and it still likely would’ve rocketed to the top of the charts, 10,000+ comments on The Hill easily.

But it ain’t 2018. We’re chasing the dragon even harder now. This “Christian” Congressman wearing women’s lingerie while shitfaced drunk at a party is for lightweights. We need heavier shit.

Florida Gov Ron DeSantis ignored opponents’ objections citing damage to the state’s coffers and local taxpayers and on Friday signed the bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District that allows Disney World to self-govern its property in Central Florida, the AP reports.

With his political attack on Walt Disney Co.’s First Amendment rights for recognizing the existence of LGBTQ people, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will burden the citizens of Florida, particularly those in the county where Disneyland is located, with more than $1 billion in taxes, WFTV ABC-9 Orlando reports.

The revocation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which give Disney special operating allowances that lets it control services, expenses and upkeep on their properties, would mean that $105 million dollars per year in services Disney pays for itself would be spread among all taxpayers in the area, along with an additional $58 million per year in debt obligations Disney solely pays by itself.

The Biden Administration is about to implement a long-awaited ban on menthol cigarettes, something health professionals and anti-smoking advocates have wanted for decades, as a way to stop new smokers from picking up the habit, the Associated Press reports.

Menthol was the only cigarette flavor permitted after a 2009 law that gave the Food and Drug Administration jurisdiction over consumer sales of tobacco.  Elimination of menthol tobacco products has been discussed since then, but tobacco lobbying groups have prevented any action.

“The concern with this process is that, in the past, political considerations have overtaken the scientific analysis of the FDA,” said Matthew Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “But I’m optimistic that the rule will come out in substantially the same form as the agency proposed it.”

“The Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) – which is breaking new ground in America providing transparency and accountability to voter rolls by allowing the public to see them – is adding the ability to track absentee ballots in primary and general elections in 2022. Starting this week, the public can go to a VRF portal to track on a daily basis sent and returned absentee ballots in North Carolina, Georgia, and Wisconsin. In coming weeks, Michigan and Nevada will be added.”

“The states operate their primaries in various months ranging from May through August. As it does with the voter rolls, VRF is compiling publicly available information and publishing it in an easy-to-digest format. The portal, which will be updated daily, will be available via the Voter Reference Foundation website. ‘Our mission is to make voter information more accessible to the public. It is the public that bears the cost to collect and maintain this data across the country,’ said VRF Director Gina Swoboda. ‘We are making elections more transparent, piece-by-piece.'” says the VRF.

ProPublica characterizes the VRF as a “Billionaire-Backed Group” formed to enlist “Trump-Supporting Citizens to Hunt for Voter Fraud Using Discredited Techniques” which, while we don’t dispute on a factual basis, kind of misses the now entirely predictable arc of these voter fraud fairy tales. Of course ostensibly real concrete efforts like this sound good on paper and get the fanboys all hot inside their MAGA superhero undies when they’re announced but, assuming it works as intended and are actually accurate, then that does not help further their bullshit narrative about rampant voter fraud. Hell, National Zero literally wrote an editorial spitballing an idea for a system bearing many similarities because some form of real-time transparency is the only way forward.

Trump fanboys do not want this, at all, because if it’s real then the actual information and stats will break the magical ambiguity their narrative relies on. In fact, it’s more likely than not that if this portal does display accurate, real information about ballots requested and returned they’ll think it’s even more “proof” of fraud – and then the Voter Reference Foundation will immediately become traitors running a Deep State psyop. Just ask the CyberNinjas, they’ll tell you.

“But let me be clear to all of you, and I’ve been very clear to the president. He bears responsibility for his words and actions. No ifs, ands, or buts. I asked him personally today, does he hold responsibility for what happened? Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened. And he needs to acknowledge that,” said House Minority Leader Kevin “The Cuck” McCarthy to his caucus on January 11th, 2021.

McCarthy, a lowly coward who makes Paul Ryan look like Thaddeus Stevens, has gone back and forth repeatedly regarding his conversations with the disgraced fat fuck ex-president surrounding the events of January 6th, 2021, just wishing he could use magic fairy dust to make it all disappear.

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a primary advocate for purging voting rolls of duplicate and inactive registrations which could delete legitimate voters against their wishes, not only voted in a district where he had no permanent residence, but he also was simultaneously registered to vote in three different states, the Washington Post reports.

A full-time resident of northern Virginia during the Trump Administration, Meadows was also simultaneously registered to vote in North Carolina and South Carolina.  Meadows’ various voter registrations have come under public scrutiny after it was disclosed that Meadows used the North Carolina address he used to register was a mobile home he never stepped for in, but his mother lived in from at least 2014 to 2017; she registered to vote in Georgia in September 2018.

Meadows used the address based on a “government service” provision in North Carolina law that allows a person to use an address in the state as their legal residence for voter registration if the person had spent one night there but had moved to Washington to work in a federal or military job.  There’s no record of Meadows ever staying in the mobile home, which his mother sold to move to a retirement community in Georgia. 

The Department of Justice and the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre have asked a federal bankruptcy court to delay the start of bankruptcy proceedings for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s business entities because they believe he’s trying to hide assets from court judgements, Politico reports.

Just as the National Rifle Association unsuccessfully tried to go into bankruptcy to protect its tens of millions in assets in a New York case probing illegal spending and self-dealing of its executives including Wayne LaPierre, Jones filed to drop his enterprises into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect their assets from adverse court judgements.

“Why didn’t Alex Jones or FSS file for bankruptcy relief when Debtors did? They are both defendants in the same litigation as Debtors, and all of them have been found liable in those cases,” attorneys Jayson Ruff and Ha Nguyen wrote for the Justice Department unit. “It appears that Jones intends to leverage the bankruptcy filings of his holding companies to extend the automatic stays of pending litigation against Debtors to him and FSS, while he maintains full control of FSS and its assets going forward. Thus, this Motion … seems to be just the first step for Debtors to carry out Jones’s and FSS’s scheme of avoiding the burdens of bankruptcy while reaping its benefits.”

While I was rallying in Wyoming against Liz Cheney…

Kevin McCarthy was defending Liz Cheney among House Republicans…

While Liz Cheney was secretly recording Kevin McCarthy for the New York Times.

@GOPLeader – you should have trusted my instincts, not your own. pic.twitter.com/teTxIvUAUt

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) April 22, 2022

The campaign for Republican Michigan state Senator Tom Barrett, seeking the GOP nomination for the US House from Michigan’s 7th District, is sending out some twisted shit to voters in the district, with fundraising texts and emails “reminding” them of their child’s gender reassignment surgery appointments “tomorrow”, Michigan Advance reports on the latest anti-LGBT fear porn coming from MAGA World. Leaving aside how fucked up this is, it’s also pretty goddamned stupid.

Wouldn’t people simply not show up to this fictitious “gender reassignment surgery” for which no hospital or clinic’s address is listed? What if they don’t have kids? Isn’t it more likely to be reported as spam if it has some bullshit message like that? When a Trump fundraising email says “700% MATCH ACTIVATED FOR THE NEXT HOUR ONLY” that’s a call to action to sucker in gullible idiots who don’t really understand what it’s supposed to mean (neither do we really, but that’s besides the point). There’s an ambiguity to it and it doesn’t need to be rooted in material reality. Barrett meanwhile might as well be leaving campaign mailers made to look like parking tickets on people’s car windshields… Actually that’d probably be more effective than this bullshit.

This is the Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania who apparently gets his clothes from the Department of PRISONS. Very eccentric ⁦guy. But he’s got lots of “Tricks” —-only ⁦@DrOz⁩ can Beat him. And Beat him BAD. PENNSYLVANIA SENATE RACE! pic.twitter.com/yTB6IGVVPe

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) April 22, 2022

French President Emmanuel Macron appears to be headed toward a 10-point win against Putin-backed far right shitbag Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s presidential election, if Politico EU’s “Poll of Polls” is to be believed. Electing Le Pen would have dire consequences for the European Union and NATO as France’s membership in both blocs would be seriously in doubt, so fingers crossed.

This is a National Zero Special Bulletin. The following Americans have been identified as “groomers” as in persons who have knowingly engaged in sexual relations with underage or near-underage persons and/or have been caught in possession of child pornography. Avoid them at all costs.

JOSH DUGGAR
Conservative Christian. Wanted to run for office as a Republican before arrest and conviction on federal charges of possession of child pornography. Incarcerated until we don’t know but it’ll be a shit ton of time in the tombs.

MARK FOLEY
Conservative former Florida Congressman, resigned in disgrace in 2006 after he was caught drunkenly trying to break into a dorm housing underage boys who worked as congressional pages and sending them sexually explicit texts. Still donates to GOP-aligned causes and Republican candidates in Florida.

DENNIS HASTERT
Republican former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, served from 1999 to 2007. Pleaded guilty in 2015 of molesting four high school boys he had coached on a wrestling team in the 1970s.

JOHN ROSE
Current Republican Tennessee Congressman who allegedly started dating his now-wife Chelsea when she was 16 and he was about 40 or 41. Definitely married her while she was still in college. They met when Rose was the Vice Chairman of the Future Farmers of America youth organizations Tennessee chapter and Chelsea was a participant. Rose voted against certifying the 2020 election and also voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the US Capitol Police after the January 6th, 2021 MAGA insurrection.

JIM JORDAN
Notorious fucking prick Republican Congressman from Ohio, unaffectionately nicknamed “Gym Jordan” over credible accusations of purposely ignoring sexual abuse of wrestlers by the team doctor on the Ohio State University wrestling program, on which Jordan was an assistant coach in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Read More ▶ “National Zero Special Report: Groomers on the loose!!!”

The bride and the caterer she hired for her celebration have been arrested and charged with two felonies after getting the guests at the bride’s wedding stoned by serving them cannabis-infused food at the reception, the New York Times reports.

After the meal celebrating Andrew and Danya Svoboda’s nuptials, the guests started feeling various things:  an uncle of the groom started feeling his heart racing.  Others felt nauseated; one woman thought her heart was stopping.

When asked by a guest if she had spiked the olive oil put on guests tables to dip bread, Danya Svoboda nodded and giggled.  But the laughing (mostly) stopped when one of the guests needed an ambulance.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was so livid with Donald Trump in the wake of the January 6th domestic terrorist attack at the Capitol that he was going to confront Trump and recommend he resign from office.

And according to the New York Times, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced his displeasure with Trump, but was happy the Democrats were in charge and would impeach him.  “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” McConnell said to two close friends while eating Chik-fil-A in a friend’s Kentucky office.

The complete report by the Times lays out the anger–and patriotism–of Republican leaders who would act in the interest of the nation.  But they are now going to ride his coattails–his angry, angry coattails.

A federal judge blocked from going into effect a new Kentucky state law that was so obtrusive it effectively banned all abortions in the state, the Associated Press reports.

U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings ruled that the state had not issued clear guidelines on what was needed to constitute a legal abortion or about new paperwork the law required.  Because of that, the law made it impossible to comply with itself, so the law could only be in force when the state issues those cited guidelines.  Jennings, who was a Trump appointee, did not block the law from being enacted after guidelines are issued.

In the meantime, the two abortion clinics in the state will reopen their doors when the rules go through the state legislative process and future legal challenges.  “This is a win, but it is only the first step,” said Rebecca Gibron, the CEO for Planned Parenthood in Kentucky, where its clinic is immediately resuming abortion services. “We’re prepared to fight for our patients’ right to basic health in court and to continue doing everything in our power in ensure abortion access is permanently secured in Kentucky.”