“Never in my life could I have dreamed that something I posted on Facebook would be used against my husband, would lead him to be arrested” Chruchville, Pennsylvania woman Lynn Edwards said to a federal court in DC on Monday, per the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her husband Gary Edwards, 68, was sentenced to one year of probation, 200 hours of community service, and a $2,500 fine for entering the Capitol on January 6th. He was not implicated in any other crime besides the trespass.

At least $100 billion in pandemic relief funds designated to help small businesses and the unemployed were stolen through fraudulent claims according to the Secret Service, the Associated Press reports.

Roy Dotson, the agency’s national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator, said the estimate is based on information from the Secret Service, the Department of Labor and the Small Business Administration.  The calculation comes to about 3% of the $3.4 trillion dispersed in the various programs implemented since March 2020.

The Secret Service has either recovered or confiscated about $3.5 billion in investigations, and it has 900 active investigations underway.  In separate investigations, the Justice Department has prosecuted more than 150 defendants for recovery fund fraud, recovery about $75 million.

Army scientists at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center are weeks away from announcing the development of a coronavirus vaccine that will be effective against the Omicron variant and future variants of this SARS virus, Defense One reports.

Known as the SpFN–for Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle–vaccine, the new vaccine has gone through animal testing and finished Stage 1 human testing this month, with both showing positive signs for the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine.

When they began attempts to develop a vaccine, the scientists at Walter Reed aimed at producing a vaccine that would work for any version of the SARS virus stemming from this coronavirus, foregoing trying to prevent individual strains. 

Because Republicans believe socialized medicine is bad, a Florida couple who had a complicated birth with their child is facing a $550,000 bill from AdventHealth healthcare system for a 56-day stay for the baby in the hospital neonatal intensive care unit, NPR reports.

Being ever so helpful, the hospital’s billing department offered to split the payment into twelve interest-free monthly installments of $45,843.  And guess what?  That’s AFTER getting the basic payment from her insurance provider.

The invoice sent to the family–the baby survived a breach birth in the back seat of an SUV as Dad drove Mom to the hospital–reflects costs of $660,553, with the patient responsible for 550,124.  The monthly installment appears to be an automated option put on invoices over a specified amount.

Just days after he apparently put a stake in the chances to get a signature Biden bill through the Senate, Joe Manchin joined his Democratic colleagues to discuss the plan to advance the Build Back Better bill, NBC News reports.

“We are going to vote on a revised version of the House-passed Build Back Better Act — and we will keep voting on it until we get something done,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a letter to Democratic colleagues on Monday.  Manchin’s participation on Tuesday’s caucus call may be a sign that he’s listening to alternatives presented by fellow Senators.

Democrats are working overtime on trying to work out Manchin’s objections to one of President Biden’s campaign promises.  Asked about Manchin today, Biden said he is in contact with him.  Washington Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has said she would sit down with Manchin and go over the House-passed version of the bill line-by-line to find out what he objects to.

Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday that all health care workers in the state will be required to get the vaccine booster shot to be considered fully vaccinated and stay on the job, Politico reports.

“Omicron is spreading rapidly and we must do all we can to keep staff at hospitals and medical facilities healthy and safe to protect Californians during a potential winter surge,” Newsom tweeted late Tuesday afternoon.  California requires health care workers to be fully vaccinated.

Disgraced general and QAnon’s sometimes boyfriend (it’s complicated) Mike Flynn has filed a lawsuit attempting to block the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on Congress from getting his phone records, NBC News reports.

Flynn’s motion before a Florida federal court, to dismiss the committee’s subpoena, claims that the subpoena violates Flynn’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and his First Amendment right to free speech.

“Without intervention by this Court, General Flynn faces the harm of being irreparably and illegally coerced to produce information and testimony in violation of the law and his constitutional rights,” said the lawsuit.

“And, and, and you’re right.  The Democrats have so many anti-semitic, um, er er er remarks on on on their, um, account and and even anti-American remarks,” Congresswoman (and below-average student of history) Lauren Boebert (Q-CO) says.  “I mean, when we, when we, when are we gonna have a State Department that combats, ah, elected representatives hating the country they were elected to serve.  Um, so, the, the, the, there’s a lot more we could focus on that they would like to distract from that.”

She has in her hand a list of over 200 people…

Two McDonald’s locations in China have added power-generating exercise bikes for customers to charge their devices while consuming the global fast food chain’s calorie-laden offerings, Fox Networks reports. We here at National Zero cannot help but admire the ingenuity of this setup – customers pay for the food, their bodies convert it to kinetic energy (however inefficiently given the dubious nutritional content) to power the bikes, which then in turn saves these McDonald’s locations the cost of electricity required to recharge the batteries of the patrons’ electronic devices.

In the middle of a story from USA Today on the number of space launches in 2021 rivalling the heyday of the Space Race in the 1960s, a sentence about the traffic on Florida’s Space Coast stands out as an example of how needs in one industry impact the performance of another:

SpaceX and United Launch Alliance had been looking to push that number closer to 40, but chip shortages and the need for liquid oxygen – a critical rocket propellant – to treat coronavirus patients slowed the cadence.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused a shortage of computer chips, which are needed for space launches using liquid oxygen, which is in short supply because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Former Utah Republican Congresswoman Mia Love, the only Black woman member of the GOP to serve in Congress and one of only eight Black Congressional Republicans since Reconstruction, appears to believe West Virginia and Virginia are the same state, claiming that West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin should listen to the messages from Virginia voters.  “Remember, this is Virginia,” Love says.  “Remember what happened with Youngkin….”

Happy Holidays from the FDNY! Sing along with the FDNY singer’s new holiday safety jingle! Check out our latest #FDNYSmart Podcast for kids wherever you get your podcasts. pic.twitter.com/L3rTIVeXNB

— FDNY (@FDNY) December 21, 2021

Not even Christmas – oh, sorry “the Holidays” – are free from the woke fascist scumbaggery of the New York City Fire Department’s relentless propaganda arm. Surprised they haven’t canceled the WPIX Yule Log yet. Even if it’s on television it might be “glorifying” fire to these America-haters.

Breaking from the fossil fuel focus of the previous administration, President Joe Biden has already permitted two major solar energy projects to rise in the California desert, and he intends to license other renewable energy projects on federal land, Reuters reports.

With permitting through the Department of the Interior, the projects continue the Biden Administration push to make federal land available for solar, wind and tidal energy projects to help the nation achieve Biden’s carbon-neutral goal.

A third project, Intersect Power’s Oberon Solar project, is expected to be approved in the coming weeks.  With all three projects online, they will produce a combined gigawatt of electricity, enough to power a city of 174,000 households. 

They’re obnoxious, destructive and pushy, and they’re causing the city of St. Paul, Minnesota to forgo the city’s annual holiday light display at a downtown park due to the damage they caused last year, the Associated Press reports.

And the display is not being undermined by protestors or religious fanatics.  It’s being canceled due to squirrels, the arguably cute little rodents that are chewing through the lights wires.  The vendor that installed and maintained the light display in Mears Park declined to continue the contract because of the cost and hassle of repairing the damage done by the furry creatures, who are attracted to the coating of the wiring.

Park visitors who feed the rodents have spoiled the squirrels, who now seek out easy food sources.  The squirrels are reportedly attracted to corn syrup used in the protective coating of the electric wires.

Followers of QAnon sub-cult leader Michael Protzman, aka “Negative 48”, are drinking chlorine dioxide, an industrial-grade disinfectant from a communal bowl at their coven’s gathering site, the family of a Delaware woman who abandoned her husband and children to join Protzman, the Dallas Observer reports. “She was proud to tell us that she was the one mixing it up and giving it to everybody,” said one member of the Leek family, who did not identify their relative by first name.

This is not the first report of the Dallas cult gathering – who have been there awaiting JFK and/or JFK Jr’s return since early November – ingesting potentially hazardous substances. On the December 1st edition of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, in an interview that was recorded the week prior to Thanksgiving, Arkansas nurse Katy Garner whose sister – also a nurse – abandoned her husband a three young children to join the cult, Garner told the hosts Travis View, Julian Field, and Max Rockatansky that her sister was drinking hydrogen peroxide and “bio pellets”.

The staff at Just Security weighed the questions of why National Guard troops were not stationed at the US Capitol prior to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th and why they took so long to respond to the riot once it began in earnest and concluded that it’s quite possible senior military leaders did not want to hand Trump the firepower to seize control of Congress and prevent the certification of the 2020 election. They cite the evidence that it was concerns over “optics”, that they would want to prevent a deadly confrontation between troops and the MAGA horde, that certain officials wanted to let the Capitol riot happen, bureaucratic inertia, or some combination of the above as insufficient explanations for why the day happened the way it did.

They believe that the Department of Defense held back because they had reason to believe Trump would have used the presence of troops there to declare an emergency and then somehow use the troops to maintain power, likely via the Insurrection Act, writing “With respect to planning for Jan. 6, the publicly available evidence to date very strongly suggests that the senior defense officials’ concerns led them to impose unprecedented constraints on the authorizations and substantive conditions for use of the Guard – Miller admitted as much. Those constraints help explain the substantial delay in sending a first group of Guardsmen to the Capitol. What’s more, the evidence also indicates that the same concerns potentially explain why the Pentagon did not approve deployment of the National Guard in sufficient time – and, indeed, authorized the deployment only after President Trump eventually made a public announcement (at 4:17 pm) that he was not in favor of continued occupation of the Capitol” before going into a lengthy timeline.

It’s a hell of an account and it is very well documented. Check it out if/when you have the time.

#MelaniaNFT#art @MACOULONhttps://t.co/XJN18tMllg

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— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) December 21, 2021

The former “Black Voices for Trump” executive director Harrison Floyd told Reuters on Monday he recruited publicist Trevian Kutti to fly to Georgia and coerce temporary election worker Ruby Freeman to falsely confess to participating in a plot to steal the election from the Orange Warlord. Freeman, who along with her daughter and fellow election worker Shaye Moss recently filed a defamation suit against The Gateway Pundit over a number of articles in which both were falsely accused of rigging the vote count against Trump, was told by Kutti (who gave her name but did not identify herself as working for Kanye West, telling Freeman she was a “crisis manager”) she would be thrown in jail if she did not confess to the plot within the next 48 hours.

Accompanying Kutti was a Georgia staffer for Black Voices for Trump, Garrison Douglas – now a current employee of RNC. Douglas told Reuters “On January 4th, I was unemployed and received a call to serve as a volunteer driver, as I had many times in the past. I had no involvement in the meeting beyond the task of driving” though Freeman said specifically that a Black man who did not identify himself also came to her door along with Kutti during the visit.

Freeman said a “Harrison Ford” (she likely misheard “Floyd” as “Ford”) was put on speakerphone during the meeting said he had “authoritative powers to get you protection” (Yeah it’s also confusing that the men are named Harrison and Garrison). This is significant because it implicates a senior figure in the Trump campaign in the plot to intimidate a woman who was just doing her job into falsely confessing to a crime for political reasons. Floyd was essentially the highest ranking Black official on the Trump 2020 campaign, charged with all African-American outreach.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, call on Fox to fire host Jesse Watters after Watters called on people to “ambush” to administer a “kill shot” to the federal official.

“Well, John, that’s horrible,” Fauci responded to CNN host John Berman.  “I mean, that’s just a reflection of the craziness that goes on in society.  The only thing I have ever done throughout these two years is to encourage people to practice good public health practices, to get vaccinated, to be careful in public settings, to wear a mask.  And for that, you’ve got some guy out there saying that people should be giving me a kill shot, to ambush me.  I mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days?  That’s awful that he said that. And he’s gonna go very likely unaccountable. Whatever network he’s on is not going to do anything to him. That’s crazy. The guy should be fired on the spot.”