We missed the Saturday night New York Times report that said Rudy Giuliani was talking to the House January 6th Committee about testifying and cooperating. We would however like to report it’s in all likelihood bullshit to get Trump to finally help out with Rudy’s legal bills which Donald’s been refusing to pay (both Rudy’s actual invoices for legal services rendered to Trump and all the legal fees that Rudy’s incurred in the numerous civil and criminal cases against him).

We’ve seen this before. Back during Trump first impeachment, on November 19th, 2019, Rudy told Fox News “I’ve seen things written like [Trump is] going to throw me under the bus. When they say that, I say he isn’t, but I have insurance,” said Giuliani in response to reporting about Trump letting the wolves come after him when his “Fraud Guarantee” pals were indicted. Then a few hours later:

TRUTH ALERT:

The statement I’ve made several times of having an insurance policy, if thrown under bus, is sarcastic & relates to the files in my safe about the Biden Family’s 4 decade monetizing of his office.

If I disappear, it will appear immediately along with my RICO chart.

— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) November 23, 2019

Not hard to imagine that within that five or six hour gap Donald got someone else to write a check for legal fees defending Rudy from whatever numerous federal investigations into him were going on at the time. Now that had been a thinly veiled threat Rudy publicly made and publicly walked back, so the next time we’ll hear about him “cooperating” will very likely be the committee saying he’s not actually cooperating. We’d love for the prediction to be wrong.

Law enforcement officers in Windsor, Ontario arrested the remaining protesters and started to tow cars and trucks off the road so they can reopen the 1.6-mile Ambassador bridge between Canada and the United States, the Wall Street Journal reports.

At 8 a.m. ET, police set up a perimeter around the protesters and started arresting and detaining them. Around a dozen protesters were arrested and two vehicles towed in the hopes of motivating others to leave the area; it’s apparently worked.  Authorities predict the bridge will be open to normal traffic sometime Sunday to normal traffic.  “We are hoping to have the roadway open and the bridge open later today,” Sgt. Steve Betteridge, a spokesperson for the Windsor Police, said. “But as you can appreciate, it’s a very fluid situation.”

The protesters, fueled by encouragement from an online community organized by foreign interests including American conservatives, protested mandatory requirements for truckers entering the United States to have coronavirus vaccines.

This is, again, very dense Wookiepedia-level fandom shit. We don’t really have that much time or bandwidth to delve into it, but per Empty Wheel, MAGA Cinematic Universe Special Counsel John “Durman” Durham wrote in a filing this week in the Michael Sussman case about some secret meeting over the AlfaBank server and the CIA and Dem elections lawyer Marc Elias and blah blah blah that theoretically could have been charged happened on February 9th, 2017. The statute of limitations on such crimes is five years. Durham didn’t charge Marc Elias.

Oh and Devin Nunes acolyte Kash Patel, who Trump installed at the Pentagon after he’d already lost reelection, knew about this meeting too. For five years. Didn’t do anything about it. Those two salient points are all we wish to report about Durham’s filing that the fanboys are currently going nuts over. Anything else would be almost certainly a waste of time and keystrokes.

Dutch airline KLM and a smaller charter airline have halted all flights to Ukraine as the diplomatic situation with Russia continues to deteriorate, the AP reports. KLM’s caution while other big name European airlines are still operating flights is owed to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, in which 198 Dutch citizens and 100 others on their way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed after being shot down by Russian-backed rebels over Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports NATO officials are eyeing a potential longer term threat to the EU and NATO member Baltic states Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia is developing with the likelihood of a permanent Russian military presence in Belarus. “The unprecedented mobilization of Russian troops in Belarus is of particular concern,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said earlier this week. “It is very important for Lithuania to have an increased NATO partners’ presence in Lithuania,” she added. Lithuania shares a 40-mile long frontier with fellow NATO/EU member Poland, which runs from the triple border with Russian Baltic enclave Kaliningrad and Belarus. The stretch has been long considered a high strategic priority among NATO and Russian officials.

"Investigative Reporter" Fails to Investigate Reporting https://t.co/Z9TUJelzdf

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) February 13, 2022

Last Saturday Dan Bongino made a colossally stupid error on his weekly Fox News show “Unfiltered” when he reported that the top ten unhealthiest cities in the United States were San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Austin, etc, something blatantly obvious that he and his production team simply misread “healthiest” as “unhealthiest”. Daily Beast media reporter Zach Petrizzo, true to his brand as a snot-nosed punk-ass Gen Z lib, filed an article about the error and then followed up a week later with a clip of Bongino’s 15-second correction with the headline “Dan Bongino Issues on-Air Correction After Failed Attempt to Own the Libs.” So Bongino’s revenge is posting a 3-month old article from his own website about some far more particulate error Petrizzo made over whether or not some asshole appeared on a multi-hour Bongino podcast video.

Police in Ontario have been unsuccessful in clearing the vital Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan of the truckers protesting vaccine mandates, the New York Times reports.

In below freezing temperatures, police pushed back a line of protestors earlier Saturday, but they were unable to clear the bridge of truckers. By early evening, supporters started coming back to the bridge, and officials kept it closed for the foreseeable future.

“We don’t have a time frame actually, that’s something that we’re not imposing,” Deputy Chief Jason Bellaire of the Windsor police said on Saturday afternoon. “They are professionals, they know what they’re doing, and they are pacing themselves.”

An Orange County (California) deputy sheriff won’t face criminal charges for shooting and killing a homeless man in the midst of a mental health crises the deputy had stopped to cite for jaywalking, the Washington Post reports.

Kurt Andreas Reinhold, a 42-year-old Black man, was alleged targeted by deputies and the jaywalking stop was a pretext to detain him, his family claims.  Two deputies, Eduardo Duran and Jonathan Israel, claim Reinhold tried to grab Israel’s gun before Duran shot him.

The incident was captured by the deputies’ dashcam at a distance as well as a bystander’s cell phone closer to the event.  The Orange County District Attorney’s Office released a 10-page explanation for the denial of charges, saying “There is substantial evidence that [Duran’s] actions were reasonable and justified under the circumstances when he shot and killed Reinhold on Sept. 23, 2020.”

French authorities made an all-out effort to prevent people from joining an anti-vaccine mandate protest in Paris styled after the trucker protests in Canada and designed to shut down the French capital, Politico reports.

Police have intercepted convoys of trucks trying to enter Paris and issued more than 200 citations to drivers attempting to block streets.  Still, hundreds of cars, vans and RVs have met up in the outskirts of the city and attempted to go downtown.  One convoy had more than 400 vehicles in it.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex defended the protest ban in Paris, saying: “The right to protest and to have an opinion is a right that’s constitutionally guaranteed in our republic and in our democracy. The right to block others … is not.”

Trump says he understands impetus behind GOP bill to link Ukraine military aid to US border security https://t.co/8DphVPO2Js

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 12, 2022

MyPillow Man Mike Lindell was on hand in a Wisconsin high school gym Saturday Hardcore Trump fanboy and 2020 conspiracy extremist Assemblyman Timothy Ramthun, fresh off his failure to pass a resolution decertifying the electoral college votes in the state, launched his 2022 campaign for governor on Saturday, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Patrick Marley reports.

Marley’s thread is dozens upon dozens of tweets long, but here are some choice quotes from Ramthun: “I don’t like to watch paint dry. And I don’t want to watch grass grow. I want to get stuff done yesterday…” about the decertification resolution, explaining he moved forward with it recently “We hadn’t done diddly-squat,” he says. “I really started thinking they were running out the clock on purpose.They ignored the resolution. They meaning the Legislature. They didn’t want to talk about it…” Ramthun said. When asked about the mockery he received for the resolution’s failure, Ramthun told reporters “I’m the truth,” and his campaign is a result of his failure to decertify the election.

Ramthun’s entry could seriously fuck things up for the GOP’s hopes of taking down Dem Governor Tony Evers with what had been a clear path for Republican primary frontrunner and former Lt Governor Rebecca Kleefisch as recently as a month ago before jackass Kevin Nicholson launched his campaign on January 27th. Ramthun would be a serious contender for a Trump endorsement given his fanatic loyalty – and as such a serious liability in the general election.

They didn’t just spy on Donald Trump’s campaign.

They spied on Donald Trump as sitting President of the United States.

It was all even worse than we thought. https://t.co/z991l7Mc9r

— Mark Meadows (@MarkMeadows) February 12, 2022

WHAT THE FUCK?!? THEY SPIED ON PRESIDENT TRUMP! HUGE! MASSIVE EXPLOSIVE ALLEGATION! THEY actually spied on him WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT! This-This-This-This is bigger than fucking Watergate and Benghazi COMBINED! Actually COMBINED AND THEN MULTIPLIED BY URANIUMGATE! Libs are FUCKED! Mark this day my friends! IT IS OVER FOR DEMOCRATS! We’re talking like 24 hour coverage, explosive testimony, BIG REVELATIONS! Just wait! ??? ???

TD Bank has frozen two personal bank accounts which had collected over $1.4 million in donations to the Ottawa and Windsor clustertruckers, pursuant to an Ontario Superior Court of Justice Reuters reports. One of the accounts received a $1 million lump sum through GoFundMe while the other collected about $400,000 via wire transfers. TD asked the court to allow them to seize the accounts and reimburse donors. Keith Wilson, a MAGA lawyer for the “Freedom Convoy” assholes, said in an email to Reuters that TD has been put “on notice that their actions are improper and disappointing,” in a letter that completely misses the point of TD’s actions as well as a larger understanding of the fundamental principles of capitalism in which businesses are as free to choose with whom they do business with as consumers are. “We are also going to be taking the Ontario government to court to seek an immediate lifting of what we consider to be an unlawful order,” said Wilson, who might as well claim that he’s going to “Release the Kraken” on them.

Dishonest reporting at it again. Everything has been done lawfully, & all documents are in the works. Read with caution-typical corrupt media.

We are working w/Bradley Impact Fund, a Donor-Advised Fund, to select charities that will receive the donations to foster children. https://t.co/5ZKr5SwIZz

— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) February 12, 2022

An unnamed sex worker provided the Dallas Morning News with video evidence anti-human trafficking activist and Republican House candidate Brad Namdar twice solicited sex from her last spring. The woman asked the Morning News to withhold her name for fear of retaliation from MAGA terrorists. “There’s dangerous people. They’ll manufacture things. They can make videos. They can do things that [are] pretty dangerous and since I have decided to run for Congress, it’s only increased threats I’ve received on my life,” Namdar told the Morning News in response to the evidence, because it can never be that they’re horny degenerates and everything’s always a fucking Deep State conspiracy that goes to the highest levels of power.

Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin was guest hosting on The View again Friday when she revealed that her father, Joseph Farah, founder of hardcore alt-right conspiracy website WorldNetDaily, skipped his own daughter’s wedding over her disloyalty to the Orange Allah, the Independent reports. The View panel – which National Zero does not cover when it can be avoided, but this story’s kind of apart from the show itself anyway – had been discussing wedding issues when Farah brought up her asshole dad skipping her November 2021 wedding, specifically citing “political differences after I spoke out against President Trump.”

Farah quit her White House job in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 and publicly called on the Donald to resign. The fat Former Guy melted down over her occasional guest stints on the View and some CNN interviews around the same time of her wedding.

Despite the reduction in diplomatic staff, the core embassy team, our dedicated Ukrainian colleagues, and @StateDept and U.S. personnel around the world will continue relentless diplomatic and assistance efforts in support of Ukraine’s security, democracy, and prosperity.

— U.S. Embassy Kyiv (@USEmbassyKyiv) February 12, 2022

CBS News’s Eena Ruffini reports the embassy staff have been destroying documents, a senior State Department official telling her it’s “standard practice to reduce those holdings in high risk security situations like this”. Staff are headed to a consulate in Lviv, close to the Polish border.

New Zealand authorities turned to water and music torture Saturday in an attempt to disperse a crowd of anti-vax protestors outside of Parliament in the capital Wellington, with Barry Manilow tunes and the dreaded Macarena playing on loop amid drenching rain and lawn sprinklers running around the clock, Stuff.co.nz reports. “No one who is here is here legally, and if they’re getting wet from below as well as above, they’re likely to be a little bit less comfortable and more likely to go home,” NZ Parliament Speaker Trevor Mallard said. “Some people have suggested we add the vaccine in the water, but I don’t think it works that way.” A number of the protestors began dancing the Macarena in response, displaying iron determination in their quest to destroy human civilization.

The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported Friday that the Donald is furious that George W Bush-era scandal figure Scooter Libby, whom he pardoned in 2018, participated in a fundraiser for Congresswoman Liz Cheney. The Washington Posts’s Josh Dawsey confirmed this by adding that the Former Guy has asked if he can rescind the pardon too, as if an ex-president can do that.

• “Owning the libs” is not a winning campaign theme, and at this point, it’s all the GOP has.  Well, that and disinformation.
• The dilemma for Democrats:  our patriotism prompts us to want a strong, sane opposition Party for the sake of the nation, but we know the current GOP is dysfunctional and treasonous.  
• RTF LVI and Super Bowl LVI in the same weekend.  Coincidence?  I think so.
• The ones saying that they’re sick of Covid and they’re going to go about their “normal” lives are the soldiers in the war movie who are pinned in a foxhole by massive machine gun fire, but they’re like, “I can’t take it anymore!” and jump out from cover and immediately get killed in a tenth of a second.