While continuing to mispronounce Kamala Harris’s name, Congresswoman Laura Barnhart [sic] (Q-Colo.) claims that she’s going have Joe Biden and Harris impeached and she’s going to get House Speaker Nancy Pelosi out of the House somehow.  Strutting around the stage like a tent revival preacher bragging about worshiping with snakes, Barnhart says little of policy and plenty of platitudes for the drooling CPAC attendees.  The performance artist from Rifle hasn’t introduced a single piece of legislation that has made it out of committee in her 14 months in office.

The Russian military assault on Ukraine began President Zelensky rallied his people with selfless bravery to defend the capital, but the prospects for keeping their nation intact remained very much in doubt. National Zero’s live coverage has been moved to a new article to make the comment thread more navigable.

Statement from Chief Tom Manger ahead of the State of the Union Address: pic.twitter.com/J645LV9i7e

— The U.S. Capitol Police (@CapitolPolice) February 27, 2022

Remember North Korea?  Remember its petulant leader?  Well, he’s demanding attention now that all eyes are on Ukraine, so he fired another ballistic missile into the sea off its east coast, ABC News reports.  It was North Korea’s eighth missile launch since the start of the year.

Given that the world’s a bit on edge about a major invasion on the other side of the world, firing missiles anywhere near Russia might not be the smartest idea right now.

“The Judiciary Committee should stop the DOJ from targeting political opponents whether they are parents, whether they are falsely labeled as extremists, or whether they are lawmakers engaged in the oversight of the DOJ,” shouts Florida Man and Johnny Bravo’s unhelmeted stunt double Matt Gaetz at the CPAC talent show, because that would have nothing to do with Gaetz being the subject of a federal investigation into child sex trafficking.

Two independent studies, both released Saturday, point to the so-called “wet market” in Wuhan as the origin point of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak, not the Chinese infectious disease lab in the province, the New York Times reports.

Two groups looked at the spread of the virus within the local population and found the market to have been the common point of origin for early patients.  The researchers believe the virus jumped from mammals in the market to humans at least once before event that triggered the global pandemic.

“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both studies.

Seventeen years ago, a California racist who fancied himself a computer savant, entered a federal prison to start a four year sentence after being convicted of a variety of computer related crimes directly related to his trolling internet message boards.

In the early 2000s, 39-year-old Allan Eric Carlson was a Phillies fan, or so he claimed.  (He’s claimed a lot, including being a “political prisoner” on his blog.)  He would go onto Phillies fan sites and post racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and homophobic screeds about Phillies players.  He would harass other posters, making the boards an unreadable cesspool of hatred and vitriol.

As a member of that community in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I would cringe when I would see one of his posts under a variety of monikers that typically had the name of Phillies Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt in the name because the post underneath would undoubtedly contain a reference to a Black player’s big lips or how a Latino player was a rapist from Central America.

Congresswoman and self-described imbecile Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) claims that she’s too dumb to have researched white nationalist Nick Fuentes prior to speaking at his white nationalist meeting where there were people handing out white nationalist propaganda prior to entering the hotel ballroom, where only white people, some wearing neo-Nazi pins and slogans on their clothing, were in attendance, which may not be something a Republican would think is unusual.

Greene apparently wants us to believe that neither she nor her staff vetted Nick Fuentes or the group before she accepted the speaking engagement.  Greene was filmed on stage with Fuentes last night.

National Park police were called to the stage of the Ellipse rally to break up a potential fight between different factions of the MAGA Reich early on January 6th, 2021 with one “establishment” side of Trump minion Katrina Pierson and the Kylie Kremer, daughter of “Women for Trump” founder Amy Kremer, calling the cops because she feared getting her ass kicked by MAGA activist Caroline Wren who was furious over assholes like Alex Jones and Ali Alexander being blocked from the speaker lineup, the Washington Post reports. Police records show the incident as being “resolved” without any arrests by 8:30 AM and per texts obtained by the committee Pierson texted Mark Meadows to tell him “I almost had Caroline Wren escorted off the property. I was able to keep the crazies off the stage.” Reporting from March 2021 detailed Jones threatening to physically toss Kremer off the stage which, if he did that prior to the cops arriving, raises the question of why she didn’t tell them about the threat and why Jones wasn’t arrested if she in fact did.

• Ya gotta love slow news weeks.  I hope we have one again soon.
• Congrats to Ketanji Brown Jackson on her nomination to SCOTUS.  I can’t wait to hear from Republicans how appointing her is an attack on the Constitution while they simultaneously claim the January 6th attack was just a rowdy Capitol tour.
• When Judge Jackson gets confirmed, it will be the first time in the Court’s 233-year history that two Black people will have seats on it.  And no, right wingers, that doesn’t mean racism is over.
• In my piece about Trump’s enabling Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, I missed a point about why Putin didn’t invade when Trump was in office.  Putin’s overall goal is to destabilize democracies.  Simply put, he didn’t have to do anything while Trump was in office because Trump was accomplishing his mission for him, including throwing Ukraine’s democratically-elected government into the midst of an international scandal.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume LVIII”

During an interview with the House January 6th Select Committee on Friday Georgia Republican Party Chair David Shafer told investigators the Trump Campaign had commanded the party to put together the fake slate of electors after Trump lost the state in 2020, sources tell CNN.

“This is new video taken outside Kyiv moments ago,” an obviously perturbed Tokyo Rose wannabe and Fox host Tucker Carlson says.  “Of course while Russia was planning this, planning its invasion of Ukraine, the Biden Administration wasn’t simply weak as the Republicans are telling you, it was ridiculous and subversive as the Pentagon was focused on something called White Rage.  The Biden Administration itself, the White House, was concerned about maternity flight suits.”

Unlike Tucker Tovarish, other people can do multiple things at once.  But Tucker is apparently feeling sad because his sponsor nation is conducting a full scale invasion, not just a “border protection” operation.

The Russian and Belarusian military assault on Ukraine continued to see setbacks on its third day as President Zelensky rallied his people with selfless bravery to defend the capital, but the prospects for keeping their nation intact remained very much in doubt. National Zero’s live coverage has been moved to a new article to make the comment thread more navigable.

Hank the Tank, the 500-pound bear thought to be responsible for a series of more than two dozens burglaries in South Lake Tahoe, California wasn’t working alone:  authorities have now identified two other bears in the ring, the Associated Press reports.

Scores of houses have been damaged, and 28 houses have been broken into, with the bear-gurlers raiding refrigerators and cupboards looking for food.  Most of the time, the bears broke through garage doors or front doors, but in one instance, a bear climbed through a 20-inch-square window.

Wildlife management officials will undertake a trapping operation to relocate the bears to remote areas, in hopes the bears have not already become dependent on human sources for food.

Don Jr’s fifty-something sexy cheerleader woman apparently freaked out Friday morning during a Zoom call meeting with the House January 6th Select Committee when she saw that Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, and other members of Congress had joined the call rather than just committee staff and lawyers as had been her “understanding” beforehand, CBS News reports.

“Ms. Guilfoyle, under threat of subpoena, agreed to meet exclusively with counsel for the Select Committee in a good faith effort to provide true and relevant evidence. However, upon Ms. Guilfoyle’s attendance, the Committee revealed its untrustworthiness, as members notorious for leaking information appeared,” said her lawyer Joseph Tacopina in a statement that did not explain why that would matter if Schiff and Raskin would have just seen a recording and/or transcript afterward anyway. The likely real reason the gorgon freaked out was the two’s reputation for tenacity, with Schiff in particular known for being a tough questioner given his background as a criminal prosecutor. That’s why Kim peed herself and ran away.

Janna and I are incredibly happy for Ketanji and her entire family. Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji's intellect, for her character, and for her integrity, is unequivocal.

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) February 25, 2022

Judge Kentaji Brown Jackson’s husband is Patrick G. Jackson, whose twin brother is Paul Ryan’s brother-in-law. So we think that means they have a brother-in-law in common. Either way, Paul was smart enough to turn off replies to his congratulations, lest the MAGA kids freak out at him.

Five district attorneys representing some of the most populous counties in the state have written to Republican Texas Governor Gregg Abbott educating him that his recently enacted ban on treatment for transgender children is “un-American” and an assault on Americans’ freedoms, ABC News reports.

Earlier this week, Abbott signed a sweeping executive order barring any gender-affirming medical procedures for transgender children under the age of 18 and calling for any parent or medical professional providing such treatment to be charged with child abuse.  The letter was signed by John Creuzot of Dallas County, José Garza of Travis County, Joe Gonzales of Bexar County, Mark Gonzalez of Nueces County; and Brian Middleton of Fort Bend County.

“We are deeply disturbed by Governor Abbott and Attorney General Paxton’s cruel directives treating transgender children’s access to life-saving, gender-affirming care as ‘child abuse,'” the letter read, continuing “This is part of a continued onslaught on personal freedoms. Elected officials should be protecting our most vulnerable. These two, instead, want to irrationally target and restrain children seeking medical assistance — and force caregivers to participate.”