Politico: “Less than a year ago, Minnesota looked every bit a swing state. Donald Trump was pouring millions of dollars into his campaign there, after nearly flipping the state in 2016, Republicans were making inroads in the ancestrally Democratic Iron Range. In the Twin Cities suburbs, nervous Democrats feared protests following the police murder of George Floyd could turn some voters to the GOP. That all fell apart with Joe Biden’s victory in November. And nine months later, the resignation of the Minnesota Republican Party’s embattled chair, Jennifer Carnahan, on Thursday night marked a new low for a state party in decline.”

“The proximate cause of Carnahan’s departure was a firestorm that engulfed the party in recent days, after a GOP donor she was close to, Anton ‘Tony’ Lazzaro, was indicted on federal sex-trafficking charges. A pile-on ensued, with Carnahan, the wife of Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Hagedorn, accused by party officials and former staffers of running a toxic, retaliatory workplace, mismanaging party finances and, through the use of non-disclosure agreements, squashing transparency. ‘The party is in ruins,’ Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota GOP, said on Friday. Even with Carnahan gone, Republicans are confronting what will likely be a monthslong slog of internal reviews and ongoing headlines about the saga – a drag on the party just over a year ahead of the midterm elections. First term state Sen. Julia Coleman, who was among the first GOP elected officials in the state to call for Carnahan’s ouster, said a big reason she decided to run for office was to get more young people, particularly women, to embrace the Republican Party, but that the current scandal has undermined those efforts. ‘If I was a young woman recently graduating, I wouldn’t want to come anywhere near the MN GOP.'”

A growing number of schools are finally putting their foot down with the anti-vax bullshit and telling faculty and students if you want to be work or study at this school, you have to get your jabs. Cornell University recently posted to their website that “Cornell requires vaccination for students returning to Ithaca, Geneva and Cornell Tech campuses for the Fall 2021 semester.” The same requirement is in place at other top named schools like Harvard and Columbia University.

“Millennials and Gen Zers are more likely to have cut ties over COVID-19 vaccine disagreements than other generations, according to new data from The Harris Poll provided first to Axios. ‘It’s the new cultural dividing line,’ John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, told Axios. ‘Three in 10 Gen Zers, and even more millennials, have ghosted friends who would not get vaccinated.'”

“Opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema secured a stunning landslide victory over incumbent Edgar Lungu in Zambia’s presidential election, results showed on Monday. The electoral commission said Hichilema got 2,810,777 votes against Lungu’s 1,814,201, with all but one of the 156 constituencies counted. ‘I therefore declare that the said Hichilema to be president of Zambia,’ electoral commission chairman, Esau Chulu, said in a packed results centre in the capital Lusaka. That would make the third time that power has shifted peacefully from a ruling party to the opposition since the southern African country’s independence from Britain in 1964. Across Zambia, celebrations broke out in the streets as Hichilema’s supporters wearing the red and yellow of his United Party for National Development (UPND) danced and sang, while drivers honked their horns” – Reuters.

Tropical storm Henri has been upgraded to a Hurricane. The NOAA reports the storm now has maximum sustained winds of 75 mph, and as of the Saturday August 21st, 11am update was located East of the North Carolina coastline and moving North by Northeast at fourteen miles per hour.

Protestant Evangelicals are no doubt preparing their speeches insisting the storm is “punishment from God” for all those New York liberals who refuse to accept “the truth” about minorities and who keep pushing “the gay agenda”. NationalZero writers will be keeping a close eye out for the first Florida Republican who will choose to make a total ass out of himself or herself by insisting that Northeastern states don’t deserve FEMA funds. Hopefully we’ll get a real jackpot and some right-wing jagoff will start insisting that the punishment from God is because Joe Biden is President and if Trump were installed in the White House then the storm never would have happened.

Donald Trump admitted in his rally speech in Wellington, Ohio that he engineered the withdrawal from Afghanistan so that it would turn into a disaster for Joe Biden.

In a transcript of the speech provided by Rev.com, Trump declares at the 22:53 mark: “21 years is enough. Don’t we think? 21 years. They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process when other things…yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It’s a shame. 21 years, by a government that wouldn’t last. The only way they last is if we’re there. What are we going to say? We’ll stay for another 21 years, then we’ll stay for another 50. The whole thing is ridiculous. So we’re bringing our troops back home from Iraq. We’re bringing troops come from Afghanistan. We brought them back home from Syria.”

“Even though brain–machine or brain–computer interfaces (BMI/BCI) have come a long way since Hans Berger discovered the presence of electrical activity in the human brain in 1924, seamless communication between our brains and machines remains a holy grail of computer science. The past few years have seen incredible advances in non-invasive wearable BMI research in terms of helping disabled or paralyzed people move again, control robotic prosthetics, or command computers by the power of thought, and give blind people bionic vision,” reports IEEE Spectrum. 

AP: “China will now allow couples to legally have a third child as it seeks to hold off a demographic crisis that could threaten its hopes of increased prosperity and global influence. The ceremonial legislature on Friday amended the Population and Family Planning Law as part of a decades-long effort by the ruling Communist Party to dictate the size of families in keeping with political directives. It comes just six years after the last change. From the 1980s, China strictly limited most couples to one child, a policy enforced with threats of fines or loss of jobs, leading to abuses including forced abortions. A preference for sons led parents to kill baby girls, leading to a massive imbalance in the sex ratio. The rules were eased for the first time in 2015 to allow two children as officials acknowledged the looming consequences of the plummeting birthrate. The overwhelming fear is that China will grow old before it becomes wealthy. China long touted its one-child policy as a success in preventing 400 million additional births in the world’s most populous country, thus saving resources and helping drive economic growth.”

Josh Duggar, the Evangelical former reality TV asshole charged with child porn and supposed persecution victim because he starred on the TLC show “19 Kids and Counting,” currently facing trial on possession of child pornography, argued in court Thursday for the case against him to be dismissed because Trump’s former Acting Secretaries of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan and Chad Wolf were unlawfully installed through a violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

You read that right. That’s Duggar’s newest get out of jail free card, that the DHS agents assigned to investigate Duggar were acting without legal authority to do so because acting DHS secretaries Kevin McAleenan and the Chad Wolf were not confirmed by the Senate and therefore not serving lawfully, somehow is supposed to invalidate every investigation agents serving under their command did – including the ones who discovered more than 200 pornographic images of children on their computer. An argument the Biden Administration has been using in court to dismantle certain Trump Administration immigration enforcement policies enacted after DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned in 2019 found its way into a federal criminal court because some Evangelical Conservative pederast doesn’t want to go to prison for possessing child pornography.

pic.twitter.com/4OPqjx82Po

— Dan Patrick (@DanPatrick) August 20, 2021

• Lindsey Graham reportedly telling President Biden that he meant no harm by repeatedly flogging a debunked Hunter Biden story to cater to Trump supporters demonstrates how little personal integrity Republicans have.  It’s not about supporting good people; it’s about catering to the foulest wingnuts in the Party.
• IHOP is adding alcohol to its menu.  But at 3:00 a.m., when the bars are all closed, you need a place that doesn’t serve alcohol to stop the “Oh, I guess one more won’t hurt” urge.
• Red Hats:  “I do not believe medical experts about vaccines.”  Also Red Hats:  “I’m going to take a horse dewormer because I read it works on coronavirus on the interwebs.”
• Today’s FBI report stating that January 6th insurrectionists didn’t coordinate their attacks on the Capitol doesn’t mean that the attack wasn’t pre-planned; it was.  The domestic terrorists brought weapons and wore body armor for the attack.  The report just means the various players, like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, didn’t communicate with each other how they would attack.  It’s tactics versus strategy.

Michigan “election fraud” expert Mellissa Carone, famous for her testimony at a December 2020 state legislative hearing on the election and for her “expertise” on Coronavirus vaccines spoke at the Grand Rapids, Michigan “Health and Freedom Conference” organized by MAGA doomsday cult “entrepreneur” Clay Clark, opening her speech with “It’s so good to see this many people gathered together, especially when they are trying to push this Delta variant on us… As if anybody with half a brain cell would actually believe that. Hahahahaha! I mean, you guys know that It-It-It’s not true.”

Nice to see an event sponsored by “AmericanFaith.com” is cool with a woman who in 2019 pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges over having recorded multiple videos of herself having sex with a man and then sending those videos to that man’s ex-wife, which is a totally Christian thing to do. But forgiveness is what Christianity is all about. It also seems like they’ve at least partially forgiven Betsy DeVos for resigning from Trump’s cabinet in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, as this event was held at the DeVos Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“Any Mississippian diagnosed with COVID-19, even those who are fully vaccinated, must immediately isolate at home, according to an order issued Friday by State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs. The order is statewide and effective immediately” WLOX reports.

“The order is very similar to one Dr. Dobbs issued at almost this exact same time in 2020. But the language is updated to include ‘fully vaccinated individuals, infected with COVID-19.’ Failure or refusal to obey the lawful order is, at a minimum, a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of $500.00 (41-3-59) or imprisonment for six months or both. If a life-threatening disease is involved, failure or refusal to obey the lawful order of a health officer is a felony, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 or imprisonment for up to five years or both (41-23-2).”

Too bad a certain someone isn’t allowed on a certain social network anymore, otherwise we might be seeing him post “LIBERATE MISSISSIPPI!” Oh wait, the Governor of Mississippi is a Republican and it’s not 2020 anymore, so there’s no stupid fucked up reason to tweet such a thing.

Owen Shroyer, the host of a program on the Infowars platform, was arrested by federal agents Friday for his role in the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, the Associated Press reports.

Shroyer was charged with misdemeanors such as disorderly conduct and entering a restricted area of Capitol grounds.  He was recorded on the Capitol steps urging the crowd to attack the building.  “Today we march for the Capitol because on this historic January 6, 2021, we have to let our Congressmen and women know,” Shroyer said, “and we have to let Mike Pence know, they stole the election, we know they stole it, and we aren’t going to accept it!”

Shroyer already enjoyed a deferred prosecution from a December 2019 incident where he attempted to disrupt a House impeachment committee hearing.  In exchange for not being prosecuted, Schroyer agreed to to do community service and follow certain conditions, like not engaging in disorderly or disruptive conduct on Capitol grounds, according to court documents.  None of those conditions has, as yet, been complied with.

This is a perfect example of why no one should take FOX News seriously. The arbitrary massacre of civilians is a war crime and, a violation of the Geneva Convention and would be grounds for trying all parties involved in the killing before the International Criminal Court.

“A Columbia, South Carolina Tea Party Republican who recently helped turn over the party leadership in South Carolina’s largest county has died from complications of COVID-19. Over the summer, Stutts led a group loyal to former President Donald Trump to force the resignation of several Greenville County Republican Party leaders. Stutts said he was following Trump’s wishes to kick anyone who didn’t fully support the former president out of the Republican party. Stutts had been hospitalized with COVID-19 since late July, frequently updating his health on Facebook. Stutts wrote COVID-19 was serious, but he couldn’t support mask or vaccine mandates because they encroach on American freedoms. His final post came five days before his death, when he wrote he chose to go on a ventilator and planned to ‘wake up from this short rest and be back in the game soon! This is my OWN decision. I trust God to keep me. I ask you to trust Him, too'” WOLO reports.

In honor of Stutts passing I would just like to take a moment to say that I hope his death was incredibly painful, and that in his final moments he came to the realization that his sociopathic and fascist behavior truly made the world a worse place. We are all far better off for that bastard being dead, and it’s people like him that make me question being an atheist, because it would be so pleasurable to imagine that awful piece of shit rotting in hell for all of eternity.

“A new poll from The Federalist and Susquehanna Polling & Research contains troubling news for President Joe Biden and his policy agenda, with the 46th president’s approval rating falling to just 38 percent in the days following his administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. The full poll, which surveyed 800 likely voters on from August 12 through August 18, found that 49 percent of those surveyed approved of the job Biden is doing as president, while 45 percent disapproved. However, a sub-sample of 327 likely voters polled between August 16 and August 18 when news of the fall Afghanistan became public found that only 38 percent approved of Biden’s job, while 51 percent of those polled after Afghanistan fell disapproved of Biden’s job so far” reports a website that literally got banned from using Disqus.

Not even the fucking Gateway Pundit has been banned from Disqus (yet), and the Federalist got booted for failing to impose any moderation whatsoever on the racist conspiracy freaks posting there. Disqus actually fired them as customers. They said “Here’s you money back, now fuck off”.

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to give final, full approval to the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by Pfizer on Monday, paving the way for government entities, businesses and other organizations to require inoculations, the New York Times reports.

While most of the process is complete for the vaccine, which received an emergency use authorization May 10th, the tedious task of filling out the required paperwork will push the final review to Monday.

The approval was also anticipated, with the FDA having set a goal of Labor Day for the process to be complete.  The Pentagon had already announced its intention to require vaccinations by the middle of September.

Republican Maine State Assemblywoman Heidi Sampson calling Dem Gov. Janet Mills the moral equivalent of infamous Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele at an anti-vax rally in Augusta on Thursday, while her colleague, State Assemblyman Chris Johanson, who lost his wife Cindy Johanson, a county GOP official, to Coronavirus just last week, according to the Daily Beast.

“Do I need to remind you of the late 1930s and into the 40s in Germany. And the experiments with Josef Mengele? What was it? A shot. And these were crimes against humanity. And what came out of that? The Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Trial. Informed consent is at the top and violating that is punishable by death” said Sampson to the crowd at the event, also alluding to the Tuskegee experiments when ranting over Mills’ ordering mandatory vaxes for all Maine healthcare workers.

Really says something that a man who lost his wife to Coronavirus eight days earlier still publicly rallies against vaccinations is not the main lede here, that an elected official comparing her state’s governor to Josef Mengele, whose gruesome, often fatal, experiments conducted on Holocaust victims are so horrific I won’t even allude to them. Just wall-to-wall MAGA here.