President Biden kisses First Lady Jill Biden before boarding Marine One to visit wounded troops at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Friday, Jan. 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) pic.twitter.com/Gw3eY8lKIY

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 29, 2021

“The Arizona Republican Party is rebuffing demands from some of its activists to audit the procedures and results of its own election for chair and other positions, according to an email sent Thursday night to party members. During a radio interview Friday with KFYI’s ‘The Conservative Circus With James T. Harris,’ Kelli Ward, who was reelected party chair Saturday at a state party meeting, said the Arizona GOP lacked the ‘structure’ to perform an audit, but said she welcomed input to improve elections. Ward praised the party’s election process, saying ‘we had no complaints from anyone, from any state committeeman’ or those carrying proxy votes. The party used paper ballots and machines from Gila County to run the race. ‘Everything was above board,’ she said” reports The Arizona Republic. Meanwhile…

In today's update, Chairwoman Kelli Ward provides an update on the status of the full forensic audit of the 2020 election and thanks Arizona's Senate Republicans who are poised to deliver for Arizona's voters. Be sure to thank your state senators! @AZSenateGOP @kelliwardaz pic.twitter.com/TUMgmUORFo

— Republican Party of Arizona (@AZGOP) January 29, 2021

That’s funny right? When a Republican says one thing and then does another, or says the rules apply to Democrats, but not themselves because this situation is totally different. Hilarious.

An Austrian Jewish man who fled the Nazis with his family in 1943 died this past Christmas, but never forgot the people who helped save them, leaving them two million euros in his will, CBS News reports.

Eric Schwam was 12-years old when he and his family left their home in Austria to seek shelter in Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village in the Haute-Loire department of France.  A village of 2,500 people, Chambon-sur-Lignon gave refuge to more than 2,500 Jews fleeing Nazis.  Schwam and his family were housed in a school for the duration of the war, and they settled in the town after it for five years.

For their help and bravery, the villagers were named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center.  Schwam asked that the money be used for educational and youth initiatives, in particular scholarships.

I cannot think of a better way to turn the upcoming impeachment trial into a complete circus than to call the QAnon Shaman as a witness on anything.
https://t.co/0CJ1PfuvlA

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 29, 2021

Times of Israel: “The Republican Jewish Coalition said the latest revelation about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories embraced by Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene are ‘indefensible and unacceptable.’ In 2018 Greene speculated that the Rothschild family may have used a laser beam from space to start a devastating California forest fire, as a means to profit from it. ‘We rightly opposed Marjorie Taylor Greene in her primary election for Congress and proudly supported her GOP opponent, Dr. John Cowan,’ RJC director Matt Brooks said Friday. At the time that the RJC backed her opponent, Greene was already controversial because of her apparent embrace of the QAnon movement, which peddles wild conspiracy theories, some with anti-Semitic themes.”

“Brooks said it was too early to say whether the RJC would once again back a primary against Greene, because no one has yet declared whether they would run against her. Greene is popular in her district. Brooks also would not say whether the group would advocate for Greene’s removal from US House of Representatives committees. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California named Greene to the Education Committee this week, spurring outrage from Democrats, in part because she has in the past embraced theories that some school shootings were staged.”

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— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) January 29, 2021

“The Donald Trump supporter who wore a coyote-skin headdress into the Senate chamber and called himself the ‘QAnon Shaman’ pleaded not guilty to a series of charges stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Jacob Chansley entered his plea Friday at an arraignment Friday in federal court in Washington. He is facing charges including violent entry, disorderly conduct and obstruction of an official proceeding. His lawyer, Albert Watkins, has sought to portray Chansley as non-violent and truly spiritual. In court on Friday, Watkins called his client ‘a man of faith in shamanism, a longstanding faith.’ U.S. Judge Royce Lamberth seemed genuinely curious about Chansley’s spiritual convictions. ‘Tell me a little more about the religion,” the judge asked Watkins at one point. ‘I don’t know a thing about it.’ Watkins also asked Lamberth to help ensure that Chansley receives organic food in jail as he awaits trial” – Bloomberg.

“A New York judge ordered former President Trump’s tax firm to turn over documents to NYAG as the office probes Westchester properties” reports Ali Dukakis of ABC News.

Right wing news site “RFAngle” reports “The Black Lives Matter movement has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian MP Petter Eide. Eide stated that the movement has forced countries outside the U.S. to think about racism within their own borders” stating the facts and quotes before dialing up the white boy grievance and butthurt with “Nominations for the prize are accepted from any politician serving at the highest level in their respective country. Essentially anything or anyone could be nominated for the prize. The only requirement to be eligible for the prize is to be nominated by a ‘qualified nominator.'”

RFAngle, owned by and named after Students for Trump founder and Nazi haircut bro Ryan Fournier, was established in October 2020. Had it been around any earlier than that, the site would surely be caught in quite a pickle as far as consistency goes, since – according to the rest of the MAGA media universe – Nobel Peace Prize nominations submitted by Norwegian Politicians no one in the United States has ever heard of are in fact very much legitimate, as former President Trump was nominated for the prize himself by right wing Norwegian MP Christian Tybring-Gjedde in September 2020. Many pro-Trump media figures celebrated it and…

The Left is now calling for an end to the Nobel Peace Prize…

Because President Trump was nominated.

What a bunch of sore losers 🤣

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) September 11, 2020

…oh shit there it is. There goes the premise of this article. Ryan fucking Fournier ladies and gentlemen. He’s only editor in chief of his namesake website. No way he could have known one of his writers would say Nobel nominations from Norway’s parliament are a joke.

“There’s something fishy about Subway’s tuna salad sandwiches and wraps, but the menu items don’t happen to include any actual fish, according to a lawsuit filed against the fast-food chain. What Subway bills as tuna is a ‘mixture of various concoctions that do not constitute tuna, yet have been blended together by defendants to imitate the appearance of tuna,’ according to the complaint. Filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of two California residents, Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin, the lawsuit contends the two ‘were tricked into buying food items that wholly lacked the ingredients they reasonably thought they were purchasing,’ based on its labeling” reports CBS News.

Politico’s Sam Stein weighed in on Twitter: “Look if you were eating Subway tuna fish subs you were already making bad life choices. This merely confirms how horrible those choices were”, to which former Trump Administration Acting Director of National Intelligence and MAGA utility man Richard Grenell replied testily: “Last month they attacked Olive Garden, today it’s Subway. Stop being so condescending and intolerant about people’s restaurant choices.”

Moving offices is a huge and disruptive effort. Honestly it shouldn’t even be Rep. Bush that has to move and endure all this, it should be Greene – she is the one that posing a threat to others around her.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 29, 2021

“Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood will have to convince a doctor he’s of sound mind, or risk losing his law license. The State Bar of Georgia asked Wood to undergo a mental health assessment. And if he fails – or refuses to take the examination – he could lose his credentials. Wood, who got kicked off Twitter for promoting a bonkers array of pro-Trump election theories and unhinged ideas linked to the QAnon conspiracy universe, revealed the inquiry into his mental health on this Telegram channel on Thursday night, while insisting he has not gone insane. ‘My mind is sound,’ he wrote. ‘There is no basis for the bar’s demand.'” – Vice.

David Roberts: “There is obviously lots more that Biden could do – he could keep up this pace every week for two years and not catch up – but this is exactly what I hoped to see: a blitz of concrete, positive changes. Republicans are already whining about it. Fossil fuel companies are already suing. Brain-dead centrist pundits like the ones on the New York Times editorial board are already telling Biden to slow down. His team should view every bit of that resistance as a bull views a red flag. The key to the modern media environment is to always be the actor, the protagonist, not the one reacting. It was Trump’s one true talent. If Biden can keep up the pace, he can be the one acting, the one governing, the one attending to problems and improving things. That should be his goal for the next two years.”

The FBI has increased the reward for information on the individual who placed at least two pipe bombs at the Democratic and Republican National Committees’ offices as part of the January 6th insurrectionist attack at the Capitol, USA Today reports.

The two devices were discovered on January 6th before they exploded and were neutralized by robots by law enforcement.  Security cameras caught an individual wearing a hoodie, a mask and Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes with a yellow, black, and gray pattern placing the explosives between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. ET on January 5th.

While more than 400 people who participated in the attack on the Capitol have been identified and more than 130 arrested, the identify of this individual is still unknown.  [Photos and FBI contact information is below the fold.]

“Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian. Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to ‘the Cambridge five’, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war. Now 67, Shvets is a key source for ‘American Kompromat’, a new book by journalist Craig Unger. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.”

“‘This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,’ Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia. Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006. Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB” – The Guardian.

AP: “A former FBI lawyer was sentenced to probation for altering a document the DOJ relied on during its surveillance of a Donald Trump aide during the Russia investigation. Kevin Clinesmith apologized for doctoring the email about Carter Page’s relationship with the CIA, saying he was ‘truly ashamed’ of what he had done. ‘This conduct is the only stain on the defendant’s character that I’ve been able to discern,’ U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said in imposing a sentence of 12 months probation rather than the prison sentence that prosecutors had requested.”

There’s a major winter storm forecast for the Northeast next week. Winter Storm Angeli* could release enough sticky white stuff to cover New York City in as much as 18 inches of snow, which would be fun for a few minutes but then be an absolute mess to clean up. Other parts of the country could see anywhere from zero to more than the 18 inches forecast for New York City. National Zero may follow up with additional reporting on non-NYC weather effects of Angeli.

*Like The Weather Channel did of its own initiative for no reason whatsoever, National Zero will now be referring to winter storms by non-canonical names going forward, and in the interest of making things even more confusing and pointless, National Zero’s winter storm names will be different than those of The Weather Channel and will not be assigned in alphabetical order.

Huffington Post: “One of the attorneys on former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial team previously used racial stereotypes to kick Black citizens off a jury, including saying one of them ‘shucked and jived’ in court, HuffPost has learned. The attorney, Greg Harris, is one of four South Carolina attorneys who make up the ‘core’ of Trump’s impeachment team. Harris confirmed his hiring to The Associated Press on Thursday. Harris will defend a former president who regularly appealed to racists and inspired a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob that included a significant contingent of outright white supremacists.”

“Back in 1989, the South Carolina Supreme Court found that Harris had used racial stereotypes to strike two Black jurors during a DUI trial while he served as an assistant solicitor in South Carolina’s 5th Judicial Circuit Solicitor’s Office. The South Carolina Supreme Court ruling doesn’t explicitly name Harris, but HuffPost confirmed he is the prosecutor in question. Philip Mace, the attorney for the Black female defendant in the DUI case, told HuffPost that over the course of two trials, Harris used nine out of 10 of his strikes against Black potential jurors. ‘When I challenged him on it, Greg said he didn’t have a racist or [discriminatory] bone in his body. I remember that,’ Mace said. Harris did not respond to an email or a message left at his law firm. Trump’s team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”

During a town hall meeting Thursday night in Dalton, Georgia, where the media were not permitted to ask questions, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-8chan) joked about executing members of the media for reporting news about her, Brett Kavanaugh and Florida man Donald Trump.

Speaking to an audience of a few dozen people who were not wearing masks at a community center, Taylor Greene falsely claimed that the media was reporting lies about her, even though they were showing videos she posted online.  “And the same fake news is attacking me with the same playbook,” she told her followers, “but it does not define me and it will not stop me no matter what they say and how hard they come against me.”

Her cult followers then rose in a standing ovation.  (Video after the fold.)