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— Louie Gohmert (@LouieGohmertTX1) December 8, 2021

With data coming from Europe and South Africa, scientists are learning the Omicron variant of the coronavirus may “evade” protections provided by available vaccines, but that boosters can re-establish some of their benefits, Politico reports.

Studies with limited patient pools from South Africa show that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is largely ineffective against Omicron in the two-dose version, but a third booster does does improve the vaccine’s efficiency.  A study in Germany showed vaccines available in Europe have limited effectiveness, but that boosters improve protections.

“It is very clear our vaccine for the Omicron variant should be a three-dose vaccine,” Ugur Sahin, co-founder and chief executive of BioNTech, told a press briefing.

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff and always whiny bitch Mark Meadows has sued House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol riot committee for something, we don’t know what, because the complaint has not been made public yet, per The Daily Beast. The very Trump-like move is probably some attempt by Meadows to regain the favor of his Orange Dungeon Master, who is reportedly seriously fucking pissed over Mark’s book. A book that Trump himself “recommended”.

Former Republican Georgia Senator David “Chickenshit” Perdue, now in a primary challenge against sitting GOP Governor Brian Kemp, told Axios in an interview that he would not have certified the state’s 2020 election result if he had been governor at the time, also adding he would have convened a “special session” for the legislature as Trump fanboys had been pestering Kemp to do.

“Not with the information that was available at the time and not with the information that has come out now. They had plenty of time to investigate this. And I wouldn’t have signed it until those things had been investigated and that’s all we were asking for”, Perdue said in response to the question.

On the day of the Georgia special election Perdue and then-Senator Kelly Loeffler both told Trump they would vote against certification in the Senate the next day. This was impossible for Chickenshit to commit to since his term had legally expired on January 3rd, and it was extremely unlikely for a win to have been certified and be be sworn back into office in under 24 hours had he won. He lost, but it should show his commitment to saying what Trump wants to hear. Also, Kelly Loeffler meekly reversed and voted to certify in disgust after the Capitol riot.

Speaking at a press conference introducing a resolution to remove QAnon fan and high school dropout Congresswoman Lauren Boebert from the committees she serves on, House Democrats pulled no punches. Rep Ayanna Pressley said when they “asked for an apology for her racist and blatantly false comments, we were met with even more racism and bigotry” while Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush called Boebert an “Islamophobic, race-baiting, violence-inciting, white supremacist sentiment-spreading, Christmas tree gun-toting elected official.”

California Congressman Jimmy Gomez told reporters how recently when he was riding the elevator on the way to vote for the Build Back Better plan, a Republican told him “You people are fucking ruining this country”, explaining that the “You people” part was meant to make minorities feel like they don’t belong here in America. “We are sending the message that this is hate that will not be tolerated in the halls of Congress” Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said of the resolution after fighting back tears. No word yet on when the censure will come to a vote, though expect another day of hateful bullshit coming from Republicans while the measure is being debated.

A swarm of more than 50 mostly minor earthquakes hitting the oceanic crust off the coast of Oregon is no cause for alarm, say the straight-laced, overly cautious seismology experts quoted in a Wednesday NPR article about the temblors. Fears that the shaking could portend a catastrophic megathrust earthquake and tsunami, causing untold destruction that would cost tens of millions of dollars in CGI production for a Summer blockbuster were downplayed by the experts.

“The Blanco Fracture Zone [a strike slip fault separating the Gorda and Juan de Fuca microplates off the Cascade region coast] is not connected directly to the subduction zone so it won’t affect the big fault under land (Cascadia megathrust),” said JPL geophysicist Eric Fielding, in an obvious contrast to what Jack Hall, Dennis Quaid’s rogue climatologist character from The Day After Tomorrow would have said. “[Magnitude 5 earthquakes] on Blanco are very common and have never been followed by something on land. Plate tectonics in real time” said UCLA seismologist Lucy Jones, not echoing what Anne Heche’s seismologist character from Volcano would have warned in this situation. “You need quite a bit of vertical displacement on the ocean floor to generate a tsunami, and earthquakes along the Blanco fault don’t generate it” said seismologist Jochen Braunmiller and not Pierce Brosnan’s volcanologist Harry Stamper in Dante’s Peak.

It is unknown if any real life rogue scientists were fired for disagreeing with what their boss said about not causing a panic. We will update this story if any of them currently drinking whiskey in an Astoria, Oregon bar have their thinking suddenly jarred by something mundane and rush back to the office in their open-topped vintage Jeep to explain the worrying new plot development.

“It’s a tree that unites us, that brings us together,” the shorter blonde hostess of “Fox & Friends” declares.  “It’s about the Christmas spirit.  It is about the holiday season.  It’s about Jesus.  It’s about Hanukkah.  It is about everything that we stand for as a country:  freedom and being able to worship the way you want to worship.  It makes me so mad.”

Historically, bringing a cut evergreen tree into homes dates back to Roman times, when people in Germanic tribes would decorate their homes with cut branches (likely to mitigate the odors collecting in a house during the winter).   The tradition was brought to the US by Hessian soldiers working with occupying British redcoats, and gained wider popularity as Germans migrated to the US in the 19th Century.  It’s not associated with Hanukkah at all, and it’s connections to Jesus are tenuous rewrites of history.

Earhardt seems to want to change a “Christmas tree” to a “holiday tree” by associating the evergreen with various religions, which is not a factually-based claim unless you take it in a strictly secular sense.

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin “very sorry for not understanding that” she needed to quarantine after coming into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, an urgent message she missed because she’s a millennial who doesn’t take her job seriously enough to bring her work phone to the club when she’s drinking all night, the BBC reports.

Marin didn’t see the message until Sunday morning, probably when she was having avocado toast and mimosas for brunch while wearing slate grey Lululemon leggings and laughing with her friends about the hilarious new “Tick Tock” video that’s trending viral or whatever they call it.

On November 6th, 2020, Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows responded “I love it” when texted by a Republican House member about a plan to appoint a fraudulent state of electors to cast EC votes for Trump in contested states, CNN reports on a letter from House Capitol riot committee Chairman Rep Bennie Thompson to Meadows threatening contempt charges.

Lynda Blanchard, former Trump administration ambassador to Slovenia, will drop her Alabama Senate bid and challenge sitting GOP Governor Kay Ivey in the primary, AL.com reports. Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that Blanchard, who had fallen out of Trump’s good graces by faking his endorsement – which she then lost out to insurrectionist Congressman Mo Brooks – had been in discussions with the Donald to change races and take down Ivey over a July 3rd Trump rally that had been canceled by the USS Alabama Memorial Commission.

Yeah, Ainsley Earhardt actually fucking says Fox News will “build back better” their “tree” (which was actually a conical metal scaffold covered in green material, as the conflagration revealed). This video is amazing. Please take the time to watch. It’s like Christmas came early.

More than 40 camels competing in the beauty pageant portion of the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival were disqualified after event officials discovered their owners had sexed them up with botox injections and facelifts to make them appear more attractive, Sky News reports.

You may be thinking something along the lines of “Why the fuck is there a beauty pageant for camels?”, and reasonably so, but it’s actually something much closer to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, with a $66 million dollar prize awarded to the winning camel breeder rather than the $1 million or whatever the WKC Best in Show wins. Why they would still call it a “beauty” competition, we don’t know, but at least the money explains the cheating. Otherwise we’d have some concerns about why people would put in effort to make livestock look more attractive.

The Saturday, December 4th march in Washington DC by White Supremacist group Patriot Front is being painted as a false flag and/or FBI operation across the MAGAverse, a review of several websites home to right wing bullshit revealed. Trump fanboys, an already deeply paranoid cohort, did not offer much in the way of evidence on why they believe the Patriot Front or its leader Thomas Rousseau is an FBI asset besides “hunches” such as the group’s generic-ish name, tendency to wear masks during their marches, or their physical fitness and discipline relative to other groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

Threatened with total cancelation by MAGA state Rep John Ragan, the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners voted to delete a policy from its website stating that doctors who push demonstrably false information about COVID-19 vaccines would face suspension or revocation of their medical licenses, the Tennessean reports. Ragan, co-chair of the Joint Government Operations Committee, and plainly a fucking asshole right wing control freak, said the board did not have the authority to create new disciplinary policy without legislative approval and privately threatened the state Department of Health that he would move to dissolve the board.

“Chairman Ragan also made clear he has no qualms above moving forward with dissolving the BME and reconstituting it with new members. He has in fact done this with another state agency, so it is not a hollow threat” Board attorney Jennifer Putnam warned members in a letter obtained by the Tennessean, adding his “displeasure” with the policy was expressed “in the strongest terms.”

Fox News suffered a major setback in the War on Christmas early Wednesday, a sneak attack in which the brightly decorated Christmas tree outside their headquarters in Manhattan was set ablaze by a 49 year old homeless man whose name hasn’t been released by the NYPD. The attack bears all the hallmarks of a secularist, possibly Antifa-affiliated saboteur, marking a symbolic victory for Team Happy Holidays. National Zero will continue to monitor developments as they unfold, specifically if or when Kirk Cameron commits seppuku with an electric carving knife.

Senator Tim Kaine claims there’s movement for some kind of secret cheat code to work around the filibuster in order to pass election and voting reforms that have stalled multiple times in 2021, necessary to prevent a complete implosion of American Democracy in 2024, Politico reports.

“We’re not going to abolish the filibuster. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has made [it] very plain we’re not abolishing the filibuster. We’re looking at a number of complaints that Democrats and Republicans have had about the way the place operates to see if we can restore it to operating better and do it in a way that would facilitate passage of voting rights” said Kaine in an interview, adding “[Biden] has the additional possibility” by January, “to be moving down the field, and maybe with a win under his belt on voting rights”. Movement is expected to begin once the Build Back Better plan, also stalled as fuck but closer to the finish, is passed.

“The Federal Trade Commission and its state co-plaintiffs, New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, filed an order in court today that shuts down an illegal scheme masterminded by ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli that fleeced patients dependent on the life-saving drug Daraprim. The order follows a January 2020 complaint against Shkreli, his associate Kevin Mulleady, their company Vyera Pharmaceuticals LLC, and its parent company Phoenixus AG.”

“Enforcers alleged that Shkreli, currently in prison for securities fraud, and Mulleady hiked the price of Daraprim by 4000 percent and then concocted an elaborate web of restrictions to illegally block competitors from producing a cheaper option. The order bans Mulleady from the pharmaceutical industry and requires Vyera and Phoenixus AG to provide up to $40 million in relief for victims. Shkreli, who allegedly pioneered the scheme as Vyera’s first CEO and continued to mastermind it from prison, is set to begin trial later this month” says the Federal Trade Commission.

The Defense Appropriations bill passed by the House Wednesday night establishes a new joint Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) investigation office to conduct field investigations of sightings reported by military personnel, Yahoo News reports. The line item specifically mentions expertise required to analyze any recovered materials or medical effects caused by proximity to phenomena. This marks the first time in American history that Congress has passed any legislation specifically mandating study of potentially extraterrestrial spacecraft, said researcher Doug Johnson. “I have looked, and I think you will not find anything. You will find cases where Congress engaged in discourse on the issue,” Johnson told Yahoo.

A 49 year old man was arrested by the NYPD after he was caught setting Fox News’s massive Christmas tree on fire outside the network’s headquarters early Wednesday, WNBC reports.

With progressives pushing to increase the number of seats on the bench, a blue-ribbon commission of 36 academics, Constitutional scholars, historians and legal experts completed the first draft of its report Monday, the Associated Press reports.

Led by Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel for former President Barack Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale Law School professor who served in the Office of Legal Counsel for Obama, the panel was not tasked with identifying ways to alter the political lean of the court, which currently have a significant 6-3 slant to the conservative slant.  Instead, this report reviewed discussions on court reforms, including building on earlier work of the commission which looked into the feasibility of standard term lengths and mandatory rotating retirements for justices.

This report summarizes the potential of allowing justices to retire from the Supreme Court after a certain length of service on the high court and then returning to a lower court of their choosing.  The report also discusses how to make the court more “citizen friendly” through broadcasting arguments.