Perhaps if the CIA was focused more on actual threats to our country’s infrastructure instead of making videos about intersectional feminism we wouldn’t have a gas shortage due to hackers right now.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) May 11, 2021

“Republicans are preparing to launch an all-out assault on sweeping voting rights legislation, forcing Democrats to take dozens of politically difficult votes during a committee hearing that will spotlight the increasingly charged national debate over access to the ballot. The bill, as written, would bring about the largest overhaul of U.S. elections in a generation, touching on almost every aspect of the electoral process. Democrats say the changes are even more important now as Republican-controlled states impose new voting restrictions after the divisive 2020 election.”

“Yet it’s a motivating issue for Republicans, too, with GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell so determined to stop Democrats that he will personally argue against the measure, a rare role for a party leader that shows the extent to which Republicans are prepared to fight as a hearing for the bill begins Tuesday. That’s on top of scores of amendments Republicans will propose to highlight aspects of the bill they believe are unpopular, including public financing for congressional campaigns and an overhaul of the federal agency that polices elections. What’s typically an hourslong legislative slog could drag into a dayslong showdown in the Senate Rules Committee, as Democrats look to advance one of their key priorities to a vote in the full Senate. ‘It’s a vast federal takeover of all American elections. It’s a horrible bill,’ McConnell said during an interview that aired last weekend on KET, a PBS affiliate in his native Kentucky. ‘I’m going to do everything I can and my colleagues are going to do everything we can to prevent it.’ The action in Congress comes as states including Georgia, Florida, Arizona and Texas are pushing new voting rules, spurred by former President Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud after his 2020 loss” – AP.

CNN: “Federal investigators scrutinizing Rep. Matt Gaetz are seeking the cooperation of a former Capitol Hill intern who was once a girlfriend of the Florida Republican, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. Investigators could also soon gain the formal cooperation of a second key witness, former Florida county tax collector Joel Greenberg, who is approaching a deadline this week to strike a plea agreement with the government on more than two dozen charges he’s facing.
The pursuit of the cooperation comes as investigators are nearly finished collecting evidence, one source said. The probe, which is examining whether Gaetz broke federal sex trafficking, prostitution and public corruption laws and whether he had sex with a minor, has been ongoing for months.”

“But decisions on whether to charge Gaetz have yet to be made and will fall to prosecutors in the public integrity section of the Justice Department. That decision is likely to take some time, another source familiar with the matter said, as the Justice Department considers whether there’s sufficient evidence for an indictment. The cooperation of Greenberg and the former girlfriend could be among the final steps in the probe of Gaetz. Investigators view both as crucial to understanding the relevance of hundreds of transactions they have obtained records of, including those involving payments for sex, sources familiar with the investigation tell CNN. The ex-girlfriend could also be questioned by investigators about a second woman as they try to determine whether Gaetz may have slept with that woman when she was only 17. The former girlfriend, who did not work in Gaetz’s office on Capitol Hill, is of interest to investigators because she was on a trip Gaetz took to the Bahamas in 2018 and is believed to have knowledge of drug use and arrangements with women, the sources say.”

“To avoid the usual midterm bloodbath, Democrats need to reverse the usual script, and remain unified while Republicans divide. As it stands, that’s what happening. After Democrats passed $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief, Republicans purged Rep. Liz Cheney for insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may insist that “one-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” but Senator Shelley Moore Capito is trying to strike a bipartisan deal on infrastructure, and Senator Tim Scott sounds hopeful for a bipartisan deal on police reform. If Democrats can keep their focus on helping Americans, while Republicans squabble among themselves, 2022 won’t have the same political dynamics as most midterm years.”

“Gaming out what may happen on Election Day is not just an exercise for academics and bettors. Knowing how presidential parties have bucked the historic trend should inform Democratic strategy. Yes, Democrats should deliver policies that help people get through this crisis. But since crises don’t always cooperate, they also need to manage expectations so they don’t get held to an unrealistic standard. One encouraging sign is that Biden has tended to lowball vaccine targets, making them each time. And he does remind people that we’re still in a crisis, helping to guard against complacency. Yes, Democrats should feel free to use reconciliation to avoid having to toss away their agenda to get a few GOP votes. However, bipartisan bills have the advantage of not only being more enduring, but they widen fissures in the GOP. Anything that gets Josh Hawley barking at Susan Collins is its own reward” – Washington Monthly.

AP: “China’s ruling Communist Party has opened a new front in its long, ambitious war to shape global public opinion: Western social media. Liu Xiaoming, who recently stepped down as China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the party’s most successful foot soldiers on this evolving online battlefield. He joined Twitter in October 2019, as scores of Chinese diplomats surged onto Twitter and Facebook, which are both banned in China. Since then, Liu has deftly elevated his public profile, gaining a following of more than 119,000 as he transformed himself into an exemplar of China’s new sharp-edged ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy, a term borrowed from the title of a top-grossing Chinese action movie. ‘As I see it, there are so-called ‘wolf warriors’ because there are ‘wolfs’ in the world and you need warriors to fight them,’ Liu, who is now China’s Special Representative on Korean Peninsula Affairs, tweeted in February.”

“His stream of posts – principled and gutsy ripostes to Western anti-Chinese bias to his fans, aggressive bombast to his detractors – were retweeted more than 43,000 times from June through February alone. But much of the popular support Liu and many of his colleagues seem to enjoy on Twitter has, in fact, been manufactured. A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, found that China’s rise on Twitter has been powered by an army of fake accounts that have retweeted Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times, covertly amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people – often without disclosing the fact that the content is government-sponsored. More than half the retweets Liu got from June through January came from accounts that Twitter has suspended for violating the platform’s rules, which prohibit manipulation. Overall, more than one in ten of the retweets 189 Chinese diplomats got in that time frame came from accounts that Twitter had suspended by Mar. 1.”

Last Thursday, Fox News Host (and person incapable of every fully opening his eyes) Tucker Carlson said that a CDC database listed a death of a two-year-old as a result of her receiving the coronavirus vaccine.

Unshockingly, that was a lie.  According to analysis by USA Today and CDC personnel, there were no verified deaths of children who received the vaccine.  As reported by the unreliable Nature News website, the child “received her second dose of Pfizer’s vaccine on February 25the, suffered “some kind of serious adverse reaction” on March 1st and died March 3rd. The report also said she had been hospitalized since February 14th, suggesting ‘she may have gotten sick from the first shot.'”

The problem:  Pfizer didn’t start its clinical trial for children receiving vaccines until March, so the timetable outlined would’ve been impossible. 

The former CEO of some woke bullshit corporation, Glenn Youngkin, whose name sounds vaguely Chinese and Clinton-tied, stole the 2021 Virginia Republican gubernatorial nomination from patriotic, Trump-loving state senator Amanda Chase on Monday, probably using bamboo ballots. This is an outrage and the steal of Chase’s sacred, landslide victory must be stopped at all costs.

National Zero’s editorial stance is that this convention result cannot be trusted because, first of all, there were no observers allowed in the room while they were counting the ballots. Secondly, the ranked choice format was unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will overturn it, but Amanda Chase’s team needs to lose a case first so they can appeal, then lose again to appeal, and then again so it can finally get to the Supreme Court. So let’s have a trial by combat, no holds barred.

The Cyber Ninjas with their glowing neon cyber throwing stars and cyber katanas will defeat Youngkin’s Jewish space laser troops any day, any time. They won’t even see them coming, because they’re ninjas and they’re good at sneaking up on America-haters. Stop the coverup, show us the code of your cyber algorithms, and just wait for discovery, because UV light is the best disinfectant. The truth will be known. God has willed it. He told us in a vision.

Leaders at the Pentagon have announced that they are reviewing the needs and specification of proposed switch to a Cloud computing system, called JEDI, and jeopardizing a $10 billion contract it had previously awarded to Microsoft.

As reported by US News & World Report, the Microsoft contract is being challenged on a number of legal front, the least of which is not a challenge from Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services was largely considered the favorite for the contract until Donald Trump voiced his opposition to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper Trump frequently claimed exhibited biased against him.

“We are going to have to assess where we are in regards to the ongoing litigation and determine what the best path forward is for the department,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Jamal Brown said, citing remarks by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks at a public forum late last month.

The population of mainland China was calculated at 1.41 billion in 2020, a 5.38% increase from 2010, but short of the goal of 1.42 billion the government had set as a goal in 2016 and a slower growth rate than the previous decade, Reuters reports.

The government of China set a “one-child policy” in the 1970s to control population growth, but that was lifted in 2016 with a “two-child policy” in a goal to grow the population of the country faster.

Statisticians at the United Nations have predicted that China’s population will start falling in 2030 as the children of the “one-child” policy become the largest part of the population.  A source to Reuters said that the population of mainland China fell from 2020 compared to 2019, but official Chinese numbers do not support that claim.

UPDATE #2: Victor Hugo Cuevas is in custody. The whereabouts of the tiger are not yet known.

Anyone with information on the tiger is urged to contact HPD Major Offenders at 713-308-3100.#hounews https://t.co/TkaAtK45MC

— Houston Police (@houstonpolice) May 11, 2021

“The major Michigan Election Fraud case has just filed a bombshell pleading claiming votes were intentionally switched from President Trump to Joe Biden. The number of votes is MASSIVE and determinative. This will prove true in numerous other States.”

“All Republicans must UNIFY and not let this happen. If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds (the 2020 Presidential Election), the diamonds must be returned. The Fake News media refuses to cover the greatest Election Fraud in the history of our Country. They have lost all credibility, but ultimately, they will have no choice!“ says the Orange Allah in another rant.

CNN: “A man has been charged with felony evading arrest after he escaped from police while housing a Bengal tiger in his yard. Victor Hugo Cuevas, 26, was out on bond for a murder charge in Fort Bend County, when neighbors spotted the big cat, Houston Police Commander Ron Borza said during a news conference Monday. There were also reports that the suspect had monkeys, which are not illegal to have in the city, Borza said. Having a tiger, though, is illegal.”

“An off-duty deputy went to the house to confront the suspect, Borza said. But when Houston police arrived at the scene, Cuevas put the tiger in a white SUV and drove off. ‘There was a brief pursuit, and the man got away with the tiger,’ Borza said.”

Arizona Republic: “A Maricopa County Superior Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit involving GOP activists’ quest to redo the Arizona Republican Party’s election of officers over what they deemed various irregularities during the Jan. 23 vote. Judge Michael Kemp agreed with the state party’s attorney that the dispute is limited to internal political party elections – not public elections – and cannot be decided in a court of law. The ruling is a victory for state party officials who have downplayed problems in the election and have cast the activists as the disgruntled opponents of state GOP Chair Kelli Ward and her brand of politics. ‘Whether or not any chicanery took place in the voting process on January 23, this Court finds that it does not have judicial authority to intervene in an inter-party dispute that is guided by rules and procedures agreed upon by an independent political party,’ Kemp wrote. In his ruling, which appeared electronically Monday, Kemp said the case presented a ‘non-justiciable’ internal political dispute. He noted that political parties are distinct from other private groups and are subject to less judicial scrutiny than others.”

“Two GOP activists, Bill Beard and Sandra Dowling, helped spearhead support to redo the election after Ward and state party officials would not heed repeated calls to audit the results and procedures, even as she made similar demands after former President Donald Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden. Ward narrowly won re-election in a race that went to a run-off. She and state party officials claimed the activists had not gathered enough signatures to force another election and accused the activists of tricking people into signing onto their effort. Arizona Republican Party representatives said they reviewed the signatures presented by the activists and found some were duplicative or ineligible. Others asked that their names be removed.”

So, in case the headline didn’t exactly explain what was going on here, washed-up comedian Joe Piscopo, the current host of 77 WABC’s “Ramsey Mazda Sundays with Sinatra”, a gratingly stupid Frank Sinatra tribute radio program on New York City’s conservative AM radio station – also home to Rudy Giuliani’s daily radio show – is at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota on Monday to headline MyPillow dickhead Mike Lindell’s “FrankSpeech Rally“. You may just want to skip the video and take my word for it. I have a sudden and uncontrollable urge to drink Everclear after having watched it and the other clips I found on Twitter. This was the least unwatchable one.

Even though Pope Francis has barred Catholic priests from participating in same sex marriage ceremonies, many German priests are openly defying the Pope’s orders by blessing the civil marriages of LGBTQ couples, the Washington Post reports.

The priests are so brazen that they’re livestreaming their blessing ceremonies online.  The Vatican’s doctrinal body issued the decree, signed off on by Francis, reaffirming the church’s ban on blessing same sex relationships, saying the church cannot “bless sin.”  Francis’s own words, however, have been more accepting of LGBTQ relations, famously commenting, “Who am I to judge?”

“The rainbow is a political sign,” one priest, Hans-Albert Gunk of the Dominikanerkloster St. Albertus Magnus, told congregants at one of the first events in the multiday procession of ceremonies, culminating Monday. “God excludes no one from his love.”

Daily Beast: “Since at least October 2019, federal investigations have been looking into Rudy Giuliani’s effort to convince the White House and a reluctant State Department to grant a visa to a former Ukraine official, according to two people briefed on the matter. These sources tell The Daily Beast that the visa issue is one aspect of the federal probe into whether Giuliani’s efforts during the Trump-Ukraine saga constituted illegal lobbying on behalf of foreign officials or individuals. According to people with knowledge of the matter, including Giuliani’s own legal team, federal investigators are also investigating his attempt to get the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired. The feds are reportedly working to determine if Giuliani’s Ukraine work ran afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which demands Americans register with the Justice Department when lobbying on behalf of foreign interests. The former New York mayor and Donald Trump attorney and confidant has yet to be charged with a crime in this investigation, but the probe already resulted in the raid on Giuliani’s office and apartment late last month.”

“Several attorneys for Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment on this story. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York declined to comment. Giuliani’s efforts to secure a visa for at least one Ukrainian official, the controversial former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, became well known during the first Trump impeachment trial. Shokin’s name appeared as one of 12 people whose communications with Giuliani prosecutors sought under a search warrant executed by the FBI at the former mayor’s apartment late last month. Giuliani first became involved in attempts to secure a visa for Shokin in early 2019 when he invited the former Ukrainian prosecutor to New York to interview him about his allegations of corruption against Biden and his son, Hunter. The failed effort to secure a visa was a flashpoint between Giuliani and Yovanovitch and provided fodder for his campaign to have her fired.”

On Wednesday, our GOP Conference will be voting to remove Liz Cheney from the chair.

A vote some of us already took.

Currently, we only have one member running for chair.

I want a break before we vote on a replacement.

Options are good and so are conservative votes.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 10, 2021

Wall Street Journal Congressional Correspondent Lindsay Wise tweeted about an exchange between Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst and another reporter when, after Ernst affirmed Biden’s legitimacy as winner of the 2020 election, the unnamed reporter said “Liz Cheney appears to be getting cast out of the party for expressing a similar point of view.”

“You know cancel culture is cancel culture no matter how you look at it,” said Ernst, devastatingly using the dreaded CC-word about her fellow Republicans. Ernst’s fellow Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who is old as dirt, was also present, though he doesn’t give a shit about what goes on in the House and brushed it off as “inside the Beltway” stuff, CNN’s Manu Raju reported.

Separately Senator Bro from MO, Josh Hawley said “[Liz Cheney’s] still going to be a member… it’ll give her, certainly, a media platform. I don’t think it’s being canceled in terms of she’s being silenced. It’s a decision for the House caucus who represents them” in response to a similar question about Cheney’s cancellation from Vice’s Elizabeth Landers.

The Food and Drug Administration expanded its emergency use authorization of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine to children as young as 12 years old, providing further protections for children and adults as schools expand opening to classroom instruction, the Associated Press reports.

The federal vaccine advisory committee is expected to expand the use of the vaccine to children aged 12 to 15 during a virtual meeting on Wednesday.  The vaccine had already been approved for use on people 16 and older, but most states only allow people over the age of 18 to get vaccines at this time.

Pfizer completed a trial in older children to qualify for the FDA usage expansion.  Children received the same two-dose regimen as adults get.  In a trial of 2,000 child volunteers, none of those receiving the vaccines contracted the coronavirus.