Jill Lawrence, USA Today: “U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik wants New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to ‘resign and be arrested immediately.’ The New York Republican is incensed on behalf of the 11 women who, according to evidence in a report from the state attorney general, he sexually harassed. “These brave women deserve swift and definitive justice,’ Stefanik says. How rich is that? Cuomo absolutely should resign, and if authorities deem it appropriate, he should be charged. This is a mainstream position: A Quinnipiac Poll released Friday found that 70% of New York state voters think he should resign and 55% said he should be charged with a crime.”

“What’s rich is Stefanik passing judgment on Cuomo when she has sold her political soul to former President Donald Trump and the ethically, morally, legally, constitutionally and sexually compromised mess of a party he leads. She got her leadership job – No. 3 in the GOP House hierarchy – after Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming was ousted for insufficient fealty to Trump. Cheney had voted to impeach him over his role in the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attack by violent Trump supporters. ‘We need to make sure that there is equal justice under the law. And whether you’re the most powerful elected official in New York state, laws apply to you just like they do to every other New Yorker,’ Stefanik said of Cuomo Sunday on Fox News. But like most of the GOP, she apparently supports a separate justice system for Trump. At least 19 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, from harassment to rape. He is on video discussing his penchant for grabbing women by the pussy.’ And his onetime lawyer Michael Cohen implicated him in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn actress and a former Playboy model to keep them quiet about alleged affairs.”

“A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction, which paves the way for the Norwegian Cruise Lines to require documentation confirming a guest’s vaccination status prior to boarding. This order will now allow the company to operate with 100% vaccination of all guests and crew when sailing from Florida ports. Norwegian’s first sailing from Florida is scheduled on August 15, 2021 on Norwegian Gem departing from Miami. ‘The health and safety of our guests, crew and the communities we visit is our number one priority, today, tomorrow and forever,’ Frank Del Rio, president and chief executive officer of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd said in a statement.”

“‘We want nothing more than to sail from Miami, the cruise capital of the world, and from the other fabulous Florida ports and we welcome today’s ruling that allows us to sail with 100% fully vaccinated guests and crew which we believe is the safest and most prudent way to resume cruise operations amid this global pandemic’. Norwegian Cruise Line asked Kathleen Williams, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida on Friday to block a Florida law prohibiting cruise companies from demanding that passengers show written proof of coronavirus vaccination before they board a ship. Norwegian contends the ‘vaccine passport’ ban, signed into law in May by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, jeopardizes the health and safety of passengers and crew and is an infringement on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee, among other things.” – NBC Miami.

AP: “Earth’s climate is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations calls a ‘code red for humanity.’ ‘It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,’ said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. ‘I don’t see any area that is safe… Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.'”

“But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes. The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and ‘unequivocal,’ makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013. Each of five scenarios for the future, based on how much carbon emissions are cut, passes the more stringent of two thresholds set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. World leaders agreed then to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century because problems mount quickly after that. The limit is only a few tenths of a degree hotter than now because the world has already warmed nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century and a half. Under each scenario, the report said, the world will cross the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming mark in the 2030s, earlier than some past predictions. Warming has ramped up in recent years, data shows.”

The iconic Jazz Fest festival has been canceled by the city of New Orleans as the number of cases of the coronavirus have skyrockets in Louisiana, with the seven-day running average peaking at its highest rate during the pandemic last week.

This marks the second consecutive year Jazz Fest has been canceled due to the coronavirus.  CNN reports that the groups including the Rolling Stones, the Foo Fighters, Lizzo, and Dead and Company were scheduled to perform at the festival this year.  Official called the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Jazz Fest was scheduled for October 8 through October 19.

After Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest is typically the second largest festival in New Orleans, bringing nearly 500,000 people to the city.

The pastor of a 6,000-member non-denominational church in Jacksonville, Florida has changed his tune on his congregant getting the coronavirus vaccine after six members of his church have died of COVID-19 in the last 10 days, the Washington Post reports.

Bishop George L. Davis of Impact Church in Jacksonville took to the pulpit to urge the church’s members to get the coronavirus vaccine, saying the vaccine was a miracle produced by scientists God put on Earth to help us.

The change comes in the wake of six members–including four under the age of 35 who Davis described as healthy and without significant pre-existing conditions–dying of COVID.  Previously, the bishop, who says he’s a believer in divine creation, had been agnostic in promoting vaccines.

“The U.S. labor market hit a new milestone recently: For the first time, average pay in restaurants and supermarkets climbed above $15 an hour. Wages have been rising rapidly as the economy reopens and businesses struggle to hire enough workers. Some of the biggest gains have gone to workers in some of the lowest-paying industries,” reports the Washington Post.

Pic from a Saturday tweet by Texas Governor Greg Abbott that reads “A great day in Austin County! These [sic] group of patriots are doing their part to keep Texas RED”, two days after we posted a clip of a Texas Tribune story under a headline that said “Texas nurses leaving jobs in droves over burnout as Delta Coronavirus ravages state and Wheelchair Nero fiddles“.

Sometimes we like to say “we totally called it” on some lame right wing reaction, but this is goddamned ridiculous. Is Greg Abbott seriously trolling people now? Two Texas hospitals just closed their emergency rooms because of staff shortages and he’s literally fucking fiddling?!?

Barack Obama was absolutely correct when he said in a recent interview that the GOP had convinced rural and working class whites that they are victims. If the Democratic Party is to succeed at attracting support from working class voters, it is essential that the party leadership make a greater effort to understand where that sense of victimization comes from, and make an effort to describe how Democratic Party policies are likely to produce more positive outcomes for working class voters.

Trump spokesworm Liz Harrington points out an apparent inconsistency between the broadcast of Trump’s Saturday interview with host Dan Bongino and Fox News’s YouTube upload of the clip, that the Donald’s words “You have a Fake Election, you have an election with voter abuse and with voter fraud like nobody has ever seen before and based on that and based on what happened they are destroying our Country…” were subtly removed from his rambling complaint.

And here is what Fox News posted to YouTube: pic.twitter.com/P7B6Otbv4S

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) August 8, 2021

Seems almost like Fox News doesn’t want to get in trouble with YouTube for posting Trump’s bitching about the election, much like we here at National Zero have multiple times. Host Dan Bongino responded on Parler, claiming he was unaware of Fox’s perfidy against the Orange Pharaoh and promising to look “into this right now and I will provide a full account of what happened”.

AP: “Facebook already asks for your thoughts. Now it wants your prayers. The social media giant has rolled out a new prayer request feature, a tool embraced by some religious leaders as a cutting-edge way to engage the faithful online. Others are eyeing it warily as they weigh its usefulness against the privacy and security concerns they have with Facebook. In Facebook Groups employing the feature, members can use it to rally prayer power for upcoming job interviews, illnesses and other personal challenges big and small. After they create a post, other users can tap an ‘I prayed’ button, respond with a ‘like’ or other reaction, leave a comment or send a direct message.”

“Facebook began testing it in the U.S. in December as part of an ongoing effort to support faith communities, according to a statement attributed to a company spokesperson. ‘During the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve seen many faith and spirituality communities using our services to connect, so we’re starting to explore new tools to support them,’ it said.”

The original idea behind the alt-right movement was to try to be the “friendly face” of Naziism. The idea was that putting forward people who were well dressed and looked like well-scrubbed and professional looking white kids from the suburbs would help to make extreme right ideology easier to market, thereby allowing right-wing extremists to move the “Overton window” of public discourse, with the result that conservative political leaders could openly make comments that would have been considered career ending in the pre-Trump era.

“So you can print out as many ballots as you want?”

– The current top comment on The Gateway Pundit article “CA Implements Audit-Proof Way To Steal Election That Goes Into Effect Just In Time For Newsom’s Recall Election“, posted Sunday.

Now, we can’t blame any National Zero reader who doesn’t want to check out the article or the comments, but the multi-layered intricacy of the dumbassery here is actually quite breathtaking. First you have the commenters who didn’t even read the article and think that Californians can just print out a whole a ream of paper’s worth of ballots at home and each of those will count as votes as if the file for the ballot is not already pre-filled with the registered voter’s info.

When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if DeSantis is right to ban local mask mandates in Florida, Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy says “I’m a conservative. I think you govern best when you govern closest to the people being governed… I do disagree with Gov. DeSantis. The local officials should have control here.” Bash then asks if DeSantis is wrong and Cassidy agrees, but again goes into general platitudes about public health and the impact of Delta Coronavirus on schools. Almost like he doesn’t want to take the bait on MAGA Land’s golden prince of lib owning.

New York Times: “The aggressive fund-raising tactics that former President Donald J. Trump deployed late in last year’s presidential campaign have continued to spur an avalanche of refunds into 2021, with Mr. Trump, the Republican Party and their shared accounts returning $12.8 million to donors in the first six months of the year, newly released federal records show. The refunds were some of the biggest outlays that Mr. Trump made in 2021 as he has built up his $102 million political war chest – and amounted to roughly 20 percent of the $56 million he and his committees raised online so far this year. Trailing in the polls and facing a cash crunch last September, Mr. Trump’s political operation began opting online donors into automatic recurring contributions by prechecking a box on its digital donation forms to take a withdrawal every week.”

“Donors would have to notice the box and uncheck it to opt out of the donation. A second prechecked box took out another donation, known as a ‘money bomb.’ The Trump team then obscured that fact by burying the fine print beneath multiple lines of bold and capitalized text, a New York Times investigation earlier this year found. The maneuver spiked revenues in the short term – allowing Mr. Trump to spend money before the election – and then caused a cascade of fraud complaints to credit cards and demands for refunds from supporters. The refunded donations amounted to an unwitting interest-free loan from Mr. Trump’s supporters in the weeks when he most needed it. New Federal Election Commission records from WinRed, the Republican donation-processing site, show the full scale of the financial impact. All told, more than $135 million was refunded to donors by Mr. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021 – including roughly $60 million after Election Day.”

“Members of the right-wing Proud Boys militia group and left-wing Antifa, also known as anti-fascists, clashed at a rally in downtown Portland on Saturday, according to the Portland Tribune. The confrontation took place at a religious gathering organized by Pastor Artur Pawlowski at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. Pawlowski is a controversial Canadian pastor known for his street sermons. He has previously claimed that floods in Canada were caused by God’s unhappiness about homosexuality and has called police who enforce COVID-19 safety rules “Nazis.” The Portland Tribune reported that around 50 people attended Pawlowski’s event and that members of the Proud Boys appeared to be acting as event security” Insider.com reports.

AP: “Belarusian authorities long ago removed the makeshift memorial to a protester shot by police at the start of last year’s massive protests against the country’s autocratic president, replacing flowers and placards with a garbage can. Alexander Taraikovsky died as protests swelled, a day after President Alexander Lukashenko’s reelection to a sixth term in the Aug. 9, 2020, presidential vote that the opposition denounced as rigged. Police dispersed the peaceful demonstrators with rubber bullets, stun grenades and clubs in a stunningly brutal crackdown.”

“Lukashenko earned the nickname of ‘Europe’s last dictator’ in the West for his relentless repression of dissent since taking the helm in 1994. But when last year’s protests presented him with an unprecedented challenge, he responded with an unusual ferociousness. That turned out to be the opening salvo in a year of intense repression, the most shocking example of which was the arrest of a journalist after his flight was forced to divert to Belarus. Authorities first claimed that Taraikovsky, 34, was killed when an explosive device he intended to throw at police blew up in his hands, but Associated Press video showed that he had no explosives when he fell to the ground.”

“Officials later acknowledged that Taraikovsky might have been killed by a rubber bullet. But they never opened an inquiry. ‘It was a premeditated murder, but they don’t want to recognize it,’ Taraikovsky’s partner, Elena German, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Minsk, Belarus’ capital. ‘There is no law. We haven’t yet received a formal refusal to open a criminal case, so we can’t even appeal,’ she said. ‘They didn’t even return the clothes Sasha (Taraikovsky) was wearing when he left home on that day.’ Even as Belarusian authorities responded with mass arrests and beatings, peaceful demonstrations, some of which drew up to 200,000 people, continued for months. Eventually, relentless repressions – and winter weather – took their toll, and the protests withered. Opposition leaders have been either jailed or forced to leave the country, and authorities have moved methodically to stamp out any sign of dissent.”

https://youtu.be/P-K4N460oIg

Donald Trump took the Fox News Saturday show hosted by carpetbagger Don Bongino to claim he would’ve handled the pandemic much better than President Joe Biden has… if only he had been the president when the virus hit.  He’s apparently blocked his entire presidency from his memory.

“Well, first of all, can you image if I were president right now, and we had this massive attack from the coronavirus, ya know, now they like to call it– They have new names and they’ll have other new names, but it’s exactly what we had,” Trump rambles.  “We had the same thing.  If that were me, they’d be saying, ‘What a horrible thing.  What a horrible job.’ I don’t ever hear that, you know, and these are numbers, in some cases, that are equivalent to what it was, but we don’t hear that.”

MAGA pundits are doing their deathbed confessions “please go out and get vaccinated, this virus ain’t no joke!”, children’s wards in hospitals are packed all across the Southeast, Florida’s announcing over 20,000 new Covid infections per day, and the Trump base are still saying “I need to see more evidence about this vaccine”. These are the same asshats that will gladly drink colloidal silver, run to their doctor for a prescription for hydroxychloroquine, or head to the farm supply to load up on Ivermectin if Alex Jones or the former guy tells them to, but when advice comes from the CDC and the NIH, they insist “Oh no I need to see more evidence”.

“A group of parents and their children with disabilities filed suit against the state of Florida Friday claiming Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ban on mask mandates in schools violates the Americans with Disabilities Act,” reports ClickOrlando.com.

“Two Central Florida families are plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including students who attend Volusia County and Orange County schools. The federal lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Florida includes 27 parents and children who claim DeSantis ‘does not have the authority to threaten school districts with loss of funding if they protect their students with disabilities health and rights to be in an integrated learning environment.'”

“WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration [after fat Billy resigned], has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews,” reports the New York Times.