Holy shit, he actually said this, lol. He couldn’t come up with some “patriotic,” free-market something-something line of “principled” bullshit rather than just outright saying members should be allowed to make money (and insider trade) on the side because Congress’s pay rate isn’t enough?

Christ. At least he didn’t say he wasn’t necessarily opposed but was concerned that a ban on trading a slippery slope into other, more rigorous constraints on members and their family members too, which was probably what he’s thinking. Way to Pelosify your speakership, Mike.

But to his point about pay: National Zero’s official editorial position remains that members of Congress should in fact be paid substantially more, that even a tenfold increase of the current $174,000/year would be reasonable so long as it’s paired with the most draconian, colonoscopy-level scrutiny of their finances on par with that of CIA officers or sequestered jurors, bans on holding a stake in so much as a fucking tractor dealership in rural Indiana, prohibiting having extramarital affairs or any other sorts of potentially compromising personal conduct susceptible to blackmail, and that pay be subject to docking if they fail to collectively meet certain productivity benchmarks like letting the government shut down or failing to take up a bill that passed the other chamber.

Wonder what Johnson’s excuse for opposing that sort of radical overhaul of Congress would be.

CORRECTION 5/14/2025 1:13 PM EDT: Johnson actually is in favor of the ban but did not commit to bringing any bills banning it to a vote. This clip was late and taken out of context. Headline updated to reflect this though the text of the article remains otherwise intact for posterity.

A Virginia federal judge on Wednesday ordered the the immediate release of Indian-born Georgetown fellow and green card holder Dr Badar Khan Suri from ICE detention after finding that the Trump Regime was full of shit about he and his citizen wife’s ties to Hamas, CBS’s Jake Rosen reports, adding the judge placed no conditions on Suri’s release nor imposed a bond.

“President Trump’s approval rating has increased to 44 percent, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. While it is a small tick up from the 42 percent approval rating he measured in the prior survey by Reuters/Ipsos last month, it does run in time with some good news for the president,” The Hill reports in a Wednesday article celebrating a margin-of-error shift in their god’s standing.

And yeah, it’s been a while since the last time National Zero checked in with them. There you stood, everybody watched you play, I just turned and walked away, I had nothing left to say ’cause you’re still the same. Baby, baby, you’re still the same. You’re still the same, still the same. Baby, baby, you’re still the same. Moving game to game, still the same. Baby, baby, you’re still the same.

Drug overdose deaths in the United States dropped to pre-pandemic levels last year, Axios reports citing CDC estimates putting the number at 80,391 down 26.9 percent from the 110,037 estimated in 2023 and among those, opioid deaths dropped even more: 34 percent at 54,743 from 83,140.

So yeah, any minute now some Republican member of Congress or Fox News head or some other MAGA chode’s going to do the same thing they do with 2020 but in reverse: Claim Trump was president during the year this pretty impressive decrease in deaths from drugs was notched.

In reality Axios doesn’t mention Joe Biden’s policies but credits Narcan being made available over-the-counter in 2023 and being added to standard issue first aid kits for paramedics and other first responders, as well as the wide availability of test strips that allow users to check if fentanyl has been laced in with the cocaine they think they’re snorting. The article does however mention that the progress is endangered by convicted felon President Trump and minions’ spending plans, sur-fucking-prise. “A group of medical doctors and academic experts on addiction warned lawmakers in a letter this week that ‘drastic’ cuts to federal health agencies and their grant recipients could set back efforts to address overdoses, substance use disorder and mental health,” Axios writes.

“To everyone complaining about this gift: How about the Resolute Desk aka Hayes Desk that was gifted to President Hayes from Queen Victoria in 1880? What about the Statue of Liberty which was gifted from France in 1886? Be truthful, it is ONLY because it is President Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump that you are spewing your idiocy! The plane is NOT President Trumps!!! It is a gift to AMERICA and the DOD 🇺🇸 Get over it!” writes Truth Social user Roberta Abbey Wallace, aka @FLPatriot2627, in a reply to convicted felon former President Trump’s Tuesday night post in which he claimed that Qatar Force One is a gift to the United States and not him personally.

The reply would’ve otherwise gone un-“reported” here, if not for the fact that it was among several user responses to his post that Trump “retruthed,” with the fat fuck again contradicting a condition of the gift, as reported by ABC News, in which the luxury 747 would not after January 2029 remain in the possession of the people of the United States of America, but Trump’s presidential library.

Americans would not be able to take a ferry to the island in New York Harbor where the plane sits and future President Stephen A Smith would not be flying on Qatar Force One to go accept a bribe from the Sultan of Brunei. It would remain in the possession of Trump’s family and free for their use, long after he’s hopefully partially paralyzed by a stroke and confined to a wheelchair for a few years before expiring from a bedsore or painful infection caused by a flawed catheter insertion.

Another reply Trump “retruthed” depicts a sign reading “Gift from a foreign nation” photoshopped as being hung around the neck of the Statue of Liberty. The final one in his string of blessing an elite few of his worshippers precious clout on his shitty social media network was a meme of a sign that says “WARNING! TRUMP HATERS ARE IN A PANIC EVERYWHERE! STAY CALM. SIT BACK.”

There are quite a few Congressional hearings this Wednesday morning, yet this Homeland Security Committee matinee on ICE just might be the one to watch after all the shit going on lately.

In an inside account of convicted felon President Trump’s partial capitulation to China in the stupid fucking trade war that he started, the Washington Post reports that his minions were able to talk him down when truckers, longshoremen, and others whom he counts on for support – whom he also claimed would easily handle some “temporary pain” and “the price that must be paid” among other canned bullshit lines – could not in fact withstand it economically, thus neither could he politically.

“The key argument was that this was beginning to hurt Trump’s supporters – Trump’s people,” one anonymous minion told the Post, adding that gave Chief of Staff Susan Wiles “a key window” to get the fat bastard to wave the white flag and largely give up on his quest to get children to do with fewer toys, onshore terrible low-paying jobs manufacturing them, collect “trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt,” get the ChiComs to buy more American products to reduce the trade deficit from which Trump claimed they stole “$1 trillion” from the US during the Biden Administration, and some shit about fentanyl. Yeah, all that’s mostly gone now that Trump reduced the tariff on imports down to 30 percent from 158 percent or whatever it was.

Trump bitched out of most of the “pain,” got pretty much nothing out of it, and for the foreseeable future, Americans will pay a regressive 30 percent tax on all Chinese-manufactured imports, and the egg-price voters have themselves to blame for that, even as all of us shoulder that cost.

“In a paper published in Physical Review Journals, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Transforming the base metal lead into the precious metal gold was a dream of medieval alchemists. This long-standing quest, known as chrysopoeia, may have been motivated by the observation that dull grey, relatively abundant lead is of a similar density to gold, which has long been coveted for its beautiful colour and rarity. It was only much later that it became clear that lead and gold are distinct chemical elements and that chemical methods are powerless to transmute one into the other.”

“With the dawn of nuclear physics in the 20th century, it was discovered that heavy elements could transform into others, either naturally, by radioactive decay, or in the laboratory, under a bombardment of neutrons or protons. Though gold has been artificially produced in this way before, the ALICE collaboration has now measured the transmutation of lead into gold by a new mechanism involving near-miss collisions between lead nuclei at the LHC,” says a press release from the maniacs at CERN in Switzerland, lording their hubristic defiance of God and nature.

Supposedly the fat bastard is arriving at this luxury hotel in Doha within the next 10 minutes, per Roll Call’s schedule, but who knows when he’ll show up since he’s always running late.

Republicans in both Texas and DC are increasingly dismayed as they stare down primary fight between Picasso-faced corrupt shitbag Attorney General Ken Paxton and incumbent “RINO” Senator John Cornhole Cornyn that Politico speculates could end up being “the GOP trainwreck of the 2026 election cycle, a cash-burning demolition derby that threatens to fracture the party, force the White House to intervene and perhaps even put an otherwise safe seat at risk in November.”

“I hate to see that kind of internecine warfare in my party,” said Texas Republican Congressman Mike McCaul, adding “It’ll be an ugly one,” summing up the discomfit in the Lone Star State GOP after a McConnell-Thune establishment PAC’s internal poll found Pax crushing Cornyn in a primary.

“You’re going to replace a guy who votes with Trump all the time for another guy who will vote with Trump all the time,” said one anonymous Republican consultant operating under the assumption that Paxton will win the primary and the general. The problem for the national GOP, per Politico and really anyone with a cursory understanding of how elections work these days, is that Pax is a deeply flawed general election candidate who, if he doesn’t jeopardize the seat, will require far more money that could be spent elsewhere – like Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, etc – that Cornyn would not.

And yet, for the very same reasons that he’s a general election liability, he might run away with this primary as Politico writes Paxton “has the ultimate credential of MAGA authenticity. Like Trump, Paxton has been subject to his own FBI raid and his own impeachment trial.” They don’t elaborate much further on that point and why should they? It says pretty much everything you need to know about the Trump cult’s mindset in this stupid era of corruption and unaccountability in the GOP.

Convicted felon President Trump on Wednesday told reporters on Air Force One that his meeting with Syrian warlord-turned-President Ahmed al-Sharaa aka Abu Mohammad al-Julani went “great,” adding he’s a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter… I think he’s got the potential to do – he’s a real leader. He led a charge and he’s pretty amazing.”

It’s not clear if Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard agrees with Trump’s assessment of the questionable figure who nonetheless led the rebellion that finally ousted her patron, Bashar Al-Assad last December. Probably depends on if Sharaa is paying her a similar amount for lobbying.

The parents of a Tennessee three year-old tell People Magazine that their daughter has become unhealthily fixated on and fearful of John Wilkes Booth ever since a November trip to Washington, DC where the family’s stops included the museum at Ford’s Theater and the Lincoln Memorial.

Cassie Litton tells the lifestyle publication – which bills the article as an “exclusive” – that while daughter Lainey’s mentions of Booth are not “an everyday occurrence,” it does “tend to find its way into just our day-to-day conversations,” adding that on a recent Sunday the family were attending church services “and the preacher was talking about how Jesus loves us. She looked at me and she said ‘Mommy, I love Jesus.’ I said ‘That’s awesome. I’m glad you do.’ She said, ‘Jesus loves us.’ I said, ‘That’s right.’ She said, ‘You know who we don’t love? I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘John Wilkes Booth.’”

The small girl’s obsession with Booth has found its way into her bedtime as Cassie says occasionally she has to reassure Lainey that the pro-Confederate actor is not “in her room” or “under her bed” at night. “She was afraid to lie in her bed one night. I said, ‘It’s okay. You’re safe. You’re in your room, nobody can bother you in your own house.’ She said, ‘Yeah, but what if John Wilkes Booth is under my bed? Like, what if he’s hiding?’ She said, ‘What if he comes to take my stuffed animals away?’”

The Democratic National Committee plans to fly plane dragging a banner reading “Qatar-a-Lago” over convicted felon President Trump’s southern Florida redoubt on Wednesday, chair Ken Martin tells ABC News. “Donald Trump is using the presidency to personally enrich himself while he bankrupts working families. His corruption is a slap in the face to the millions of Americans who are struggling to get by and put food on the table,” said Martin in a statement to the network.

Can’t say it isn’t catchy and clever but, you know. He isn’t at Mar-a-Lago currently. There’s probably a better and more effective way to propagate the meme than a goddamned airplane banner.

Sitting in the apparently soon-to-be-former Air Force One with dipshit Fox News propagandist Sean Hannity for an interview recorded at some point in the last 24 hours, convicted felon President Trump directly contradicted the Truth Social post in the previous article by making it clear the Qatari royal family were indeed offerng a personal gift to the fat bastard with their fancy 747.

“The Boeing 747 is being given to the United States Air Force/Department of Defense, NOT TO ME! It is a gift from a Nation, Qatar, that we have successfully defended for many years. It will be used by our Government as a temporary Air Force One, until such time as our new Boeings, which are very late on delivery, arrive. Why should our military, and therefore our taxpayers, be forced to pay hundreds of millions of Dollars when they can get it for FREE from a country that wants to reward us for a job well done. This big savings will be spent, instead, to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

“Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” posted convicted felon President Trump on Tuesday, leaving out the part where Qatar Force One would remain in the possession of his “presidential library” after 2029, since that would kind of contradict his whole story about it being for the “Air Force/Department of Defense.”

Mexican Security Secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch on Tuesday confirmed an independent journalist’s reporting that 17 family members of Sinaloa Cartel leadership had crossed into the United States with their suitcases as part of a deal with the Trump Regime for unclear purposes, the AP reports.

Garcia Harfuch told a radio interviewer “it’s evident” that the family of Sinaloa capo Ovidio Guzman Lopez “is going to the US because of a negotiation or an offer that the Department of Justice is giving” the cartel boss, currently held in federal custody after his 2023 arrest. But that was just an inference as US federal prosecutors have yet to “share information” with Mexican officials. None of Guzman Lopez’s family members are wanted for any crime by authorities in either country, so they were free to go. Last week independent journo Luis Chaparro caught video of the family members walking through the border station at Tijuana, which obviously flew under the media’s radar.

More importantly there’s no reason for the MAGA Reich to have publicized that they were simply letting 17 Mexicans associated with a cartel boss into the country. Plea deal condition or not, that’s not a good look for them after years of “zero tolerance” bullshit rhetoric on drugs and the border.

Another one of these fucking stories out of Massachusetts.

Residents of a Bay Area, California town are confused and upset trying to figure out why at least 50 birds have exploded in recent weeks after landing on a certain stretch of powerline, KABC reports.

While the lede makes it seem at least sort of obvious what’s happening, Pacific Gas and Electric personnel examined the powerline on Bernhard Avenue in Richmond and determined that nothing was wrong with it, issuing a statement saying “We appreciate the concern of our customers in Richmond about the recent series of bird deaths. We have asked the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to evaluate several of the bird corpses. They have shared that the birds show no evidence of electrocution, and that their deaths were caused by trauma, potentially from a pellet or BB gun or a slingshot. PG&E does not believe that there was an issue with our electrical equipment and agrees that these birds were not electrocuted. Neighbors have asked the Contra County Sheriff’s Office to look into this situation. The pole at issue is compliant with avian safe standards, as established by the Avian Powerline Interaction Committee,” despite neighbors’ insistence otherwise.

“I feel like a BB gun doesn’t make a firecracker noise,” said resident Heather Jones. “This sounds exactly like a firecracker.” Mark Hoehner was similarly skeptical of PG&E’s take, saying “It sounded like a firecracker, and a black bird-a starling-just plummeted to the ground. I’ve been under the birds when it happens, and I know where the sound is coming from. It’s coming from up on the pole.”

Sick of their “pro-life” crusade being stymied by courts, Republican lawmakers in Texas have come up with an innovative workaround to get one over the smartasses in robes who would freeze their next attempt to ban abortion drugs: Ban the courts from overturning it and leave them personally liable to up to $100,000 in damages for any ruling on its constitutionality, the Texas Tribune reports.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in any statute of any kind, anywhere,” said Dallas lawyer Charles Siegel, wowed by the legislative ingenuity. “It’s just crazy.” Republican state Senator Bryan Hughes was equally impressed by his own work. “We make the rules. We set the jurisdiction,” said Hughes.

“Could the Legislature now pass a law saying every time you vote for a Republican, it counts twice, and if you vote for a Democratic candidate, it counts once, and then put in these provisions that make it impossible to challenge?” Siegel asked, likely giving Hughes some even cooler new ideas.