AP: “A diverse crowd gathered Saturday near the Georgia state Capitol to demand justice for the victims of recent shootings at massage businesses and to denounce racism, xenophobia and misogyny. Hundreds of people of all ages and varied racial and ethnic backgrounds gathered in Liberty Plaza in Atlanta, and in similar rallies across the country, waving signs and chanting slogans. In Atlanta, they cheered U.S. Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American to serve in the Georgia House. ‘I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, we see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,’ Warnock said to loud cheers as passing drivers honked car horns in support.”

“Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, is accused of killing four people inside two Atlanta spas and four others at a massage business about 30 miles (50 kilometers) away in suburban Cherokee County. Six of the eight people killed Tuesday were women of Asian descent. Another person was shot but survived. Investigators have said Long confessed to the slayings but said they weren’t racially motivated. He claimed to have a sex addiction, which caused him to lash out at what he saw as sources of temptation, according to authorities. Police have said they’re still working to establish a motive, including looking into whether the attacks can be classified as hate crimes. Georgia lawmakers last year passed a hate crimes law allowing additional penalties for certain offenses when motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender or disability. A hate crime is not a standalone crime under Georgia law, but can be used to add time to a sentence of someone convicted of another crime.”

https://youtu.be/h8FIC9WY02o

Fox host and office lush Jeanine Pirro doesn’t want to hear from her guest, immigration lawyer David Leopold, who apparently surprised her by outlining the successes of President Joe Biden’s policies, particularly in vaccine distribution.  Pirro cuts him off, saying Biden is inviting the pandemic to come across the southern border, apparently unaware the pandemic is already here.

Saying that the sudden influx of people were more than his city can handle, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber declared a state of emergency in the city, closing its entertainment district at 8 p.m. and shutting down incoming traffic at 9 p.m., CNN reports.

“Too many are coming, really, without the intention of following the rules, and the result has been a level of chaos and disorder that is just something more than we can endure,” Gelber told CNN’s Ana Cabrera.

The curfew will be in place for the next three days, Gelber declared.  Only local traffic will be allowed into the city through its main causeways after 9 p.m.

“Charlotte’s Northlake Mall was evacuated after a report of a shooting on Saturday afternoon.  Officers “located evidence of a shooting” but haven’t found anyone who was shot, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said on Twitter.  Medic took two people to the hospital by ambulance but not for gunshot wounds, police said.

“’Officers have secured the area and are continuing to work and locate any potential victims or suspects,’ police said on Twitter at about 5 p.m.  Police said they have established a family reunification area at the lower level of the Belk parking lot.” —Charlotte Observer

Demonstrating outside the residence of the prime minister, thousands of Israelis took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu in the run up to the March 23 elections, Reuters reports.

While Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party is expected to get a plurality of seats in the parliament, it will likely not win a clear majority, forcing Likud to join with other parties to get a majority of seats to keep the prime ministership, as happened in the last three elections.  It’s possible such a coalition could force Likud to name a new leader other than Netanyahu.

More than 20,000 people protesting Netanyahu filled the streets, which police closed off to traffic.  Dissatisfaction with Netanyahu stems from a variety of issues, from charges of corruption brought against him and his wife, as well as mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic.

Rising Pennsylvania Republican firebrand Doug Mastriano was awarded a Ph.D. for a his research into location in France of the legendary battle where Sgt. Alvin York nearly single-handedly captured 132 German soldiers during World War I.

It turns all his conclusions are wrong, according to a report by the Associated Press.  He missed the mark by a half mile.

Still, Pennsylvania state senator Mastriano refuses to accept the findings of dozens of historians, researchers and archeologists, claiming that there’s nothing incorrect about their findings and he’s completely right–even though researchers have found relics from York’s unit at the competing location.

Elected to his first term in the state senate riding the wave of Trumpism in 2019, Mastriano has made a habit of dismissing facts.  He was a major force in pushing the Pennsylvania Senate to dismiss the results of the 2020 presidential election, and he spoke at Trump’s January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally claiming that there was widespread voter fraud.  Reportedly, he’s considering a run for governor in 2022.

Coming right off the heels of the first season of ‘WandaVision’, Marvel’s second Disney+ series ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’ premiered Friday, with the first episode finding Sam ‘Falcon’ Wilson and Bucky ‘Winter Soldier’ Barnes (played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, respectively) separately trying to find purpose in their lives in the aftermath of the apocalyptic events of ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and ‘Avengers: Endgame’. You would need to stream approximately 13 hours of Marvel Cinematic Universe films to understand what’s going on here in this series. You would then need to stream pretty much all of the rest of them to understand those 11 hours.

Since I’ve seen pretty much all of them, from my perspective this first episode was pretty good. Aside from a scene or two where the studio pretty obviously skimped on hiring extras to fill out a crowd, the production value is pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic universe, unlike ‘Jessica Jones’ and the other earlier Netflix Marvel series (which were supposed to be connected but Disney didn’t give a shit about continuity errors and then completely abandoned them after a few years). Hell, Don Cheadle even shows up. If I had to come up with one complaint about ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’ it would be the name. It’s pretty clunky. But I can’t come up with anything I think is better and I don’t think the producers could either.

Anyway, check out ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’ on Disney+ if you’re a Marvel fan and haven’t seen it yet. You’ll like it. Way more than DC Comics fans would like “Zack Snyder’s Justice League”, which also premiered this week. I don’t want to talk about that.

KBOI: “Scott Bedke, Speaker of the Idaho House, held a press conference Friday to announce a recess in the Legislature after a COVID-19 outbreak. Both the House and the Senate will return on April 6 after six positive cases were found among lawmakers. This news comes as the Legislature is debating a bill that would ban local governments from requiring that people wear masks.”

“Bedke is hopeful the two-week hiatus will give lawmakers time to work out kinks in bills that are taking longer than anticipated. The Speaker responded to a question saying the move is not motivated by politics. Bedke was pressed about relooking at safety protocols due to the pause in legislation and said he would elevate the issue, but won’t go so far as to tell lawmakers what to do.”

Melania wishes Barron Trump a happy birthday with two balloons straight out of the HR Giger collection. pic.twitter.com/cqWlv3kDD4

— Mike Rothschild (no relation) (@rothschildmd) March 20, 2021

We at National Zero are sincerely wishing you all the best. Hope you grow up normal and decent like your cousin Mary. You could learn a thing or two from her about dealing with having complete miscreants for family members. Maybe you should also consider forming a support group with Claudia Conway and Mitch McConnell’s liberal daughter. Just don’t end up like your older brothers.

“The White House Easter Egg Roll has been canceled for the second year in a row due to the coronavirus pandemic. The White House Historical Association announced the event will instead take place virtually. The celebration is organized by the first lady and typically draws crowds of 30,000 people. The White House also plans to send thousands of commemorative 2021 Easter Egg Roll eggs to vaccination sites and hospitals in the days ahead, said Michael LaRosa, a spokesman for first lady Jill Biden. The decision comes after President Biden said that if people continued to follow coronavirus guidelines, small gatherings could take place starting on July 4” – Axios.

“On an invitation-only call last week, Sen. Ted Cruz huddled with Republican state lawmakers to call them to battle on the issue of voting rights. Democrats are trying to expand voting rights to ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘child molesters,’ he claimed, and Republicans must do all they can to stop them. If they push through far-reaching election legislation now before the Senate, the GOP won’t win elections again for generations, he said. Asked if there was room to compromise, Cruz was blunt: ‘No.’ ‘H.R. 1′s only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century,’ Cruz said told the group organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed, conservative group” the AP reports.

“Cruz’s statements, recorded by a person on the call and obtained by The Associated Press, capture the building intensity behind Republicans’ nationwide campaign to restrict access to the ballot. From statehouses to Washington, the fight over who can vote and how – often cast as ‘voting integrity’ – has galvanized a Republican Party in search of unifying mission in the post-Trump era. For a powerful network of conservatives, voting restrictions are now viewed as a political life-or-death debate, and the fight has all-but eclipsed traditional Republican issues like abortion, gun rights and tax cuts as an organizing tool. That potency is drawing influential figures and money from across the right, ensuring that the clash over the legislation in Washington will be partisan and expensive. ‘It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high,’ said Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, an influential conservative advocacy group in Washington. ‘We’ve had a bit of a battle cry from the grassroots, urging us to pick this fight.'”

The Atlantic: “The GOP drive for stricter voting laws, and in particular to make voting by mail more difficult, is rooted in three incorrect assumptions. The first, and most widely debunked, is that the 2020 election was tainted by significant fraud. The second is that the historically large turnout was responsible for Trump’s defeat. As the CNN data analyst Harry Enten recently wrote, ‘Trump lost because he was an unusually unpopular president, and he likely would have been defeated if turnout looked like it did in 2016.’ The third is that mail voting swung the election toward Democrats. A Stanford University report released this month concludes that ‘no-excuse absentee voting mobilized relatively few voters and had at most a muted partisan effect despite the historic pandemic. Voter interest appears to be far more important in driving turnout.'”

“If these laws pass, they are likely to make it harder for Democratic-leaning minority voters to cast ballots. Randy Perez, who until this month was the democracy director at the progressive organization Living United for Change in Arizona, calculated that the purge bill would kick about 50,000 Latinos off the permanent early-voting list, or about 7 percent of the state’s Latino voters – almost five times Biden’s margin of victory. Torey Dolan, who works on voting issues at Arizona State University’s Indian Legal Clinic, listed a range of ways that proposed bills would hurt Native American voters: Many don’t have utilities or pay property taxes or have access to copiers, making it challenging to provide documentation; street addresses on reservations aren’t always standard; and mail delivery is slow, so shorter voting periods would be a particular burden. But just as Trump’s claims of fraud were not backed by evidence, Republicans don’t seem to have carefully thought through all the ways their bills might affect state’s the entire electorate. Whereas past efforts at voter suppression around the country seemed to target Democratic demographics ‘with almost surgical precision’ (as a federal judge wrote of North Carolina’s 2013 voter-ID law), some of the laws currently under consideration in Arizona and nationwide look like blunt instruments that could end up making it harder for Republicans to vote too.”

“They just can’t stop poking the bear”

– The current top comment on the Breitbart article “Michael Cohen on NYC Trump Probe: You Are Going to See ‘Indictments Start Flying’” posted Friday night.

AP: “Spectators from abroad will be barred from the Tokyo Olympics when they open in four months, the IOC and local organizers said Saturday. The decision was announced after an online meeting of the International Olympic Committee, the Japanese government, the Tokyo government, the International Paralympic Committee, and local organizers. The move was expected and rumored for several months. Officials said the risk was too great to admit ticket holders from overseas during a pandemic, an idea strongly opposed by the Japanese public. Japan has attributed about 8,800 deaths to COVID-19 and has controlled the virus better than most countries.”

James Stavridis, a retired US Navy three-star admiral who retired in 2013, said on The 11th Hour with Brian Williams that the United States is in a new Cold War with China, noting mounting tensions between the two world powers.

Asked by Williams where China ranks “among foreign policy challenges to this nation,” Stavridis responded, “Number one, by a factor of 300%.  There’s nothing else that is the looming tower of China’s rise.”

Stavridis noted the recent gathering between Chinese and American diplomats in Alaska, the first meeting between the two nations of the Biden era, saying that the 20-minute “gripe session” between the two nations demonstrating the “deep, deep animosity.”

“I hate to say it, but we are in a Cold War with China,” Stavridis said.  “Let’s hope it doesn’t turn hot.”

One of its engines is missing parts.  The other is wrapped in plastic.  It’s sitting on a runway at an airport 65 miles north of the Trump Tower in Manhattan, which is in similar shambles.  It hasn’t been flown since Election Day 2017.  Trump’s abandoned it like his first two wives.

The Trump-branded Boeing 757, its gold toilet untouched by an orange tush for more than four years, would cost into the high six-figures to get back into operating condition, as well as $15,000 and $18,000 per hour to fly.

When Trump flew around the country in the plane with his name emblazoned on the side during the 2016 campaign, it was a symbol of his supposed wealth and intelligence.  It now seems to be out of Trump’s view, according to CNN. 

• Biden in 58 days:  100 million doses administered.  Trump in the 50 days after the first vaccine’s approval until he left office: 16 million doses administered.  It’s all the more impressive given that we didn’t hit 100 million cumulative coronavirus TESTS until September 17th, 204 days after the first US fatalities and 248 days after the first confirmed case.
• The word “awkward” does not do justice to describe the handoffs between Hannity and Ingraham.
• Georgia companies like Coca-Cola, Salesforce and Home Depot standing up for citizens in the state and against the draconian voter regulations proposed by state Republicans demonstrates that some companies can use their economic power effectively.  They’ve done more to uphold the Constitution than the GOP.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume XI”

With the first meeting of Biden Administration officials and representatives from the Chinese government wrapped up, the initial two interactions with the key two US international adversaries have demonstrated the strong backbone Biden will deal with foreign foes.

Per a Washington Post article, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken squared off with his Chinese counterparts, telling them in no uncertain terms that the US views China as a threat to “global stability” for their human rights and trade practices, as well as their aggression toward Taiwan.

Earlier this week, Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “killer” with “no soul,” a statement that Putin took so personally he lashed out at Biden, calling for a live debate he wanted to happen Friday night.  Putin was so flustered he ended up using a playground retort to respond.

“A volcano has started erupting on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, which is around 19 miles (30 kilometers) from the country’s capital. The eruption, the first on the peninsula in almost 800 years, isn’t expected to be life-threatening or cause damage to inhabited areas. It began around 9:40 p.m. GMT (5:40 p.m. in New York) and was confirmed by webcam and satellite pictures, the Icelandic Met office said on its website. The activity was expected following weeks of seismic unrest in the area. Lava is expected to flow as a liquid along the surface of the earth for less than a month, according to geophysicist Freysteinn Sigmundsson. Minor explosive activity can be anticipated. Unlike an incident in 2010, air traffic was unlikely to be affected” Bloomberg reports.

See if this were a Prilosec commercial, some dude would be in a gastroenterologist’s office saying “Uhhhn, it feels like a volcano erupting” and then the doctor would recommend Prilosec, so we turned it around and imagined the volcano saying “Uhn, I feel like a human who ate too many spicy wings” in the headline. That’s pretty funny, right? You guys get it, right? Isn’t it clever?