https://youtu.be/9zV6k5B9Z3I
Either that, or the Fox News graphics team put up a photo of Gavin Newsome instead of Donald Trump, the real autocratic, dictatorial, egocentric, lying, condescending, self-absorbed, self-righteous, sanctimonious, smarmy pig.
“An Instagram post says: “6,000% Increase in Reported Vaccine Deaths 1st Quarter 2021 Compared to 1st Quarter 2020.” An article from a media outlet called The Daily Expose carried the headline: “Number of women to lose their unborn child after having the COVID vaccine increases by 366% in just six weeks.” The headline on an article from former GOP congressman Ron Paul’s website, shared widely on Facebook, reads: “Coronavirus Vaccinations Seem to be Causing 50 Times the Adverse Events of Flu Vaccinations after Just the First of Two Shots.” Politifact reports that: “We’ve fact-checked these claims and several others about the purported effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, and we found them to be false.”
The extreme number of reports related to the Covid19 vaccine has many wondering if anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters and possibly even Russian bot-nets are engaged in a fake comment campaign similar to the fake Net-Neutrality comments campaign recently discovered by the office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
The US State Department has already identified several websites that promoted disinformation designed to undermine faith in the Covid19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, and information warfare experts claim that kind of approach is consistent with Russia’s history of having a “living off the land mentality”, where they quickly adapt to the information landscape and use whatever opportunity they can to try to weaken powerful nations. In this case, promotion of vaccine skepticism would be an effort to continue the need for masking and social distancing protocols, as well as the development of new infection hot spots within the United States. The high cost of treatment for Covid19 also means that the Federal Government will be saddled with increased Medicare and Medicaid costs, as hospital bills for ventilated ICU patients frequently run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Although the VAERS system notes that filing a false VAERS report is a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1001, it’s extremely likely that most anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters (unless they read the comments on TheHill and are familiar with the work of the NationalZero community) have no idea what that section is, or they think that the government can’t charge you for filing a false report if you’re white. Ultimately, the only real solution to this problem may be to identify someone who knowingly submitted multiple false reports, see to it that they get sent away to Federal Prison for five years, and publicize the hell out of the story so that anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters can see that there can be consequequences for their actions, no matter how loudly you insist that you “ain’t no real criminal like one o’ them people from the city!”
Today our family lost a true friend and loyal companion. For more than a decade, Bo was a constant, gentle presence in our lives—happy to see us on our good days, our bad days, and everyday in between. pic.twitter.com/qKMNojiu9V
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 8, 2021
A report from the office of New York Attorney General Leticia James found that the broadband industry financed an effort to influence the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to vote down net neutrality regulations.
According to the report, released Friday, the “broadband industry funded six companies that engaged in illegal activity and impersonated millions of Americans.” The report found the companies paid $4.2 million for the companies to generate more than 8.5 million comments to lobby the Commission against rules that would require internet service providers to treat all websites equal access to bandwidth.
Net neutrality would have also classified internet service providers as “key to the economy and society” under the 1934 Communications Act, putting them under FCC regulation.
Maya Angelou and Sally Ride will be the first two women to appear on US quarters as part of the American Women Quarters program of the United States Mint, ABC News reports. Five designs will honor Ride and seven will honor Angelou.
The Mint will feature twenty women on quarters minted through 2025, with up to five new quarters debuted each year. Poet and civil rights activist Angelou and NASA astronaut Ride will have their coins debuted in 2022.
“The Mint will issue circulating and numismatic quarter-dollar coins with reverse (tails) designs emblematic of the accomplishments and contributions of a prominent American woman beginning in January 2022,” according to the United States Mint’s office.
A Friday evening cyberattack on a company that operates a pipeline running half the fuel used on the East Coast of the United States prompted the operator to shut down the pipeline, a move that could spike gas prices, Politico reports.
The Colonial Pipeline, a 5,500 mile pipeline that delivers 2.5 million barrels of refined product daily, was shut down after the operator reported a ransomeware attack on the company’s IT system. Colonial said it contracted with an outside security company to address the attack.
“I’m unaware anything approaching this magnitude in the U.S.,” said Bob McNally, president of energy consultancy Rapidan Energy, who served on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. “In the U.S., this is a new escalation, a much more important attack on a vital piece of infrastructure.”
CNN: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has a clear pathway to running for president in 2024, emerging from the coronavirus pandemic as the most recognizable Republican governor in the country. But Democrats, hoping to reverse years of letdown in marquee races and mismanagement inside the state party, are eager to stop the Republican governor before he even gets to the starting line of a presidential bid, viewing the 2022 gubernatorial election in Florida as a chance to cut short the governor’s surge. ‘It is always easier to stop someone’s rise sooner rather than later,’ said David Turner, spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association.”
“‘You don’t lose your race for governor and then run for president.’ DeSantis burnished his position as a conservative media darling on Thursday when he signed a controversial bill aimed at curbing access to voting in the state during a so-called exclusive event with Fox News. A group of organizations swiftly filed a lawsuit against the bill, but the point already had been made: DeSantis has the Fox News platform and can use it to deliver on Republican priorities. ‘Me signing this bill says: Florida, your vote counts, your vote is going to be cast with integrity and transparency and this is a great place for democracy,’ DeSantis said on Fox after the signing.”
For us outside of the GOP world, this story is pretty overblown. Yes, Republicans tossing one of their leaders who refuses to go along with the bullshit 2020 conspiracy theories does have implications for all of us in the next election cycles. But overall it’s not terribly interesting and has been dragging on far too long. Like it’d be nice if we could just report she’s been canned and move on, rather than having this day-to-day micro-drama with Liz Cheney, Kevin McCarthy, and Elise Stefanik dominating the news cycle way more than it ever should, especially here on National Zero.
However, there’s one important plot point the Washington Post reported Saturday, and quite possibly what set all of this renewed push to kick Cheney out of House Republican leadership. The Post reports that at the GOP conference retreat in Orlando last month, NRCC staffers briefed members about the latest polls in battleground districts, they purposely omitted an important finding: Trump’s favorability in ratings in these districts were underwater by 15 points, which is obviously pretty bad news when Trump plans on holding MAGA rallies and handing out endorsements to House candidates in the next election cycle. The same thing had happened in March at a retreat for House GOP committee ranking members, the Post reports, adding “Both instances, [Cheney] concluded, demonstrated that party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid the truth.”
Here at NationalZero we often like to mock really over the top fast food items. Now, fast food websites have started posting nutrition information on their company’s menu pages. Some of those really over the top items have really over the top calorie and fat counts, but the thing that really makes fast food so unhealthy is that items are often consumed in multiples (don’t try to tell me you’ve never scarfed down two or three Sausage McMuffins or Wendy’s Junior Cheeseburger deluxe in one sitting because I know you’re lying). Following is a brief sample of some fast food items, some of them are those really over the top giant menu items, but I’ve also collected several examples of common long-time menu items that people frequently scarf down two or three at a time.
Daily Beast: “A Utah man accused of assaulting police officers during the Capitol riots invited several of his MAGA friends to his Thursday court appearance – then wreaked havoc during the hearing, repeatedly screaming at the judge and court officials. ‘You people fucked this up,’ Landon Kenneth Copeland ranted during the Zoom hearing on Thursday. ‘You’re going to give me a psych eval. I don’t like 70 percent of my income going to the government. Fuck all of you!’ Copeland, a 33-year-old who on Thursday described himself as a veteran who ‘got shot in Iraq,’ faces several charges, including assaulting officers and disorderly contact, for allegedly attacking several law-enforcement officers during the Jan. 6 siege. Prosecutors allege that during a scuffle, Copeland grabbed a riot shield, shoved a fellow insurrectionist into a police line, and threw ‘a metal bike rack fence barricade’ at officers. During his Thursday hearing, Copeland was joined by some of his Trump-supporting friends and, at one point, his mother. Magistrate Judge Robin Meriweather ended up kicking out one of his friends after they chose an ‘expletive’ as their Zoom username.”
“The chaos began even before Copeland’s hearing, as he shouted while other accused rioters made their appearances before the judge, forcing court officials to put him on mute. At one point he tried to object to another defense lawyer claiming his client had ‘Foxitus’ after watching six months of Fox News during the pandemic. The second he was taken off mute, Copeland began to scream, ‘I’m going to tell the truth.’ ‘I don’t like you people… you’re a robot to me… you can’t come get me if I don’t want you to… Fuck all of you… Fuck all of you,’ he shouted during his tirade, at which point a judge put him in a separate Zoom room so that he could no longer interrupt the proceeding. ‘I wanna talk in open court you motherfuckers!'”
“There shouldn’t have to be a section for this on anyone’s campaign site, but because some people will not let this go away, I must address it. When November elections come up every year, it is inevitable that we all say to each other, ‘Are these the best two people we can get in this race?’. Many times, the reason for that is because qualified people won’t get into politics because silly things in their background will come up, that they have no control over, and they don’t want to deal with it. I fully realize that when you run for an office as high as that of District Attorney, you will be examined with a magnifying glass and even a microscope. It is what it is.”
“In 2013, I was dating a girl for about 6 weeks, and didn’t really know her. I learned more about her after she died by reading an investigative article done by Philadelphia Magazine, written by Lisa DePaulo, which opened my eyes. In short, the best way to start with this is the Medical Examiner’s report. She was a .45 BAC. That means that 45% of her blood was alcohol!!! The cause of death was alcohol intoxication, but because she was found in my tub, everyone, including myself, assumed she drowned. So many empty vodka bottles were found, it looked like there was a party in my house, but inspection of the security video of people entering and leaving showed only her. I was called the morning after she died, and raced back to Philadelphia. My phone pings demonstrate that I was in Avalon when I got the call, and it pinged all the way to Philadelphia, as I was on my phone the entire time with people and I was in an upset state” and no, I’m not making this up. This shit is really on this guy Charles Peruto’s site. Read more at PerutoForDA.com.
“The problem is not that the audit is now not credible, but that it was never credible in the first place. The audit could never have succeeded. If Cyber Ninjas finishes and announces that it has validated the original results in Maricopa County, that result still wouldn’t satisfy angry Trump supporters, for the same reason that the state Senate conducted the audit in the first place: If you lie to some people long enough, they’ll believe you. And if Cyber Ninjas claims it has evidence of widespread fraud, practically no one who didn’t already believe fraud claims is likely to be persuaded, because the company’s qualifications, conduct, and statements give no reason to trust it. (Beyond that, even if the audit were to magically produce evidence of fraud, there’s no process for overturning an election that has already been certified)” – The Atlantic.
Daily Record: “A far-right bigot has been humiliated after their attempt to become an MSP in Glasgow ended in total failure today. Jayda Fransen won a paltry 46 votes in Glasgow Southside just hours after she confronted Nicola Sturgeon while out campaigning. The Record first revealed in January her bizarre plan to stand for election, when she said in a statement: ‘I am going to be standing in the Scottish elections in May against these SNP commie, Marxists, naughty people.'”
“Speaking after the result was announced, Sturgeon condemned Fransen. The SNP leader said: ‘Yesterday the constituency was targeted by far-right thugs, the far-right thug that led that confrontation got 46 votes, and I am proud that once again that Glasgow Southside has shown the racists and the fascists that they are not welcome in Glasgow Southside, they are not welcome in Glasgow and they are not welcome anywhere in Scotland. And let that be a note of unity.'”
Dutch researchers have trained honey bees to detect the specific scent given off by people who are infected with the coronavirus and identify them by sticking out their little bee tongues, the Washington Post reports.
Scientists have long known that animals’ superior senses, particularly their senses of smell and taste, can identify physical ailments in humans. Dogs, for example, have been trained to assist people experiencing seizures or having diabetic episodes.
While traditional laboratory tests are by far more accurate in identifying patients, trained bees could be an inexpensive way to do a preliminary scan of people, thereby reducing the need for more expensive lab tests.
https://youtu.be/lXX2AiYd0tQ
Fox News host (and individual who personifies why Dancing with the Stars is a misnomer) Tucker Carlson interviewed Sid Miller, the Agriculture Commissioner of Texas, to discuss a state bill that would prevent gender reassignment surgery on children under the age of 18.
Now, before we go on, I just want to point out that that was not a typo. Carlson actually had on the guy in charge of regulating and assisting Texas farmers and ranchers on his show to discuss LGBTQ legislation. And Miller, in cowboy hat and with six-shooter pin on his lapel, dutifully complied, because an Agriculture Commissioner knows so much about transgender issues, right? The guy responsible for animal husbandry is now the go-to expert for Tucker Carlson on transgender issues.
“A Republican state lawmaker who authorities say let violent protesters into the Oregon Capitol in December says he is ill with COVID-19. ‘I have a really bad case of COVID and I’m kind of on the mend a little bit,’ Rep. Mike Nearman said on a conservative radio talk show. Nearman faces a hearing in Marion County Circuit Court on Tuesday on charges of official misconduct in the first degree and criminal trespass in the second degree for the Dec. 21 breach of the state Capitol by people protesting coronavirus restrictions. Both are misdemeanors, but carry possible jail time.”
“Rep. Mike Nearman, a Republican from outside Independence, was criminally charged by the Marion County District Attorney’s office on Friday with first-degree official misconduct and second-degree criminal trespass. Nearman said this week on the Lars Larson Show that he will seek a jury trial. ‘The Oregon State Police spent over four months investigating me. … Do you think these guys have anything better to do?’ Nearman said. Some of the insurgents whom Nearman let into the Capitol were armed with guns and a substance reported to be pepper spray, which they used on state troopers and Salem police trying to keep people out of the Capitol. At least two men alleged to be part of that breach were arrested on related charges. The Republican, who is from the town of Independence near Salem, did not further discuss having COVID-19. On April 20, the Oregon House of Representatives canceled all floor sessions for that week after someone at the Capitol was diagnosed with COVID-19 and may have exposed people in the chamber. It was the third such cancellation in the House this session” – The Oregonian.
In keeping with President Biden’s promise to update Federal Gun Regulations, the Justice Department issued a new rule-making proposal to update regulations on ghost guns. Ghost guns are firearms that are sold as kits online, but do not have serial numbers and must be assembled by the purchaser. They are regularly purchased by anti-government conspiracy theorists, as well as those who cannot legally purchase firearms because they have been convicted of felony DWI, are registered sex offenders or have been convicted of a crime like felony stalking or domestic violence.
https://youtu.be/rrW_sbVB0Es
A Gaetz/Taylor-Greene rally at The Villages in Florida
“Rep. Elise Stefanik is only looking to serve one term in GOP leadership. The New York Republican is telling her GOP colleagues that she intends to finish out the rest of this current cycle as conference chair if she is ultimately elevated to the No. 3 leadership position, according to multiple Republican lawmakers familiar with the conversations. Then she intends to seek the top job on the House Education and Labor Committee, those sources said, a longtime priority for her” – Politico.
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