“The PGA of America will strip Donald Trump of the 2022 PGA Championship, which is scheduled to be held at Trump National Bedminster golf club in New Jersey. In a blistering column that says the golf world must sever all ties with Trump, Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch said the PGA has been debating for two years the need to move the major championship and, once Trump is out of office, will announce the tournament will be played elsewhere” – NJ.com.

Washington Post: “Whether President Trump is forced from office or serves out the remaining days of his term, he is now destined to slink out of the White House considerably diminished from the strapping, fearsome force he and his advisers imagined he would be in his post-presidency. In the wake of the mob attack on the Capitol that Trump incited, some allies have abandoned him, many in the business community have shunned him and Twitter took away his social media megaphone.”

“Many Republicans also hold him responsible for losing their Senate majority with last week’s twin defeats in Georgia, not to mention their House majority two years ago. Trump had planned to retreat from Washington to plot a comeback that could return him to the White House in four years, but now he will have to contend with a possible second impeachment or perhaps even criminal charges. With 10 days remaining in his presidency, Trump has become the political equivalent of a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade flying high down New York’s Sixth Avenue, only to be punctured, twist in the wind and deflate as it rounds the corner to the parade’s endpoint at Herald Square. ‘The way he handled himself in the last 60 days has tarnished his reputation and his ability to be a future leader – and by botching the Georgia Senate races, his entire economic agenda is about to get overturned by the Senate,’ longtime Republican strategist Scott Reed said. ‘He’s really gone backwards like no one ever would have imagined.'”

ABC News: “A major technical fault in Pakistan’s power generation and distribution system caused a massive power outage that plunged the country into darkness overnight, the energy minister said. Hours after the late Saturday outage, Energy Minister Omar Ayub said on Twitter that power was being restored in phases, starting with Islamabad. He said later Sunday that power had been restored to much of the country. The blackout was initially reported on social media by residents of major urban centers, including Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Multan. The minister and his spokesman then took to Twitter to update the country. Ayub urged people to be patient. He said the cause of the power outage was being investigated and work was being done to fire up Pakistan’s main Tarbela power station in the northwest, which would lead to a restoration of power in the rest of the country in phases.”

“After he lost his reelection bid in November, Donald Trump immediately told allies he planned to run for president again in 2024, preparing to announce as soon as Inauguration Day. He began backing off the idea after learning that running would require him to release a new round of financial documents that would make him vulnerable to his ongoing criminal and civil investigations and lawsuits, according to two Republicans close to Trump.”

“Then came last week. A growing number of Republicans hold Trump responsible for inciting the deadly riots inside the U.S. Capitol Wednesday. The clashes came hours after they blamed Trump for a pair of losses in Georgia that will leave the Senate in Democratic control. In interviews, more than half a dozen Republicans who had supported or worked for Trump say the president isn’t likely to run again, though he may tease it. If Trump changes his mind again and chooses to run, some said they would urge him not to, while others hope he’d be talked out of it. ‘I think nothing is going to happen,’ said a Trump friend. ‘He won’t be around in 2024. He’s not going to run. He’s going to fuck around and say he’s going to run. … He’ll tease. I don’t think he’s ever going to say ‘I won’t run.’ He just won’t run'” – Politico.

Daily Beast: “Russian President Vladimir Putin was practically glowing while leaving a Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve service this Wednesday. Speaking to state TV reporters, he gushed about ‘the anticipation of a miracle’ that can get a person through any rough patch in their life. Putin wasn’t talking about the United States, of course, but he might as well have been: America’s outgoing president had just delivered the biggest Christmas present to the Kremlin imaginable by inciting a violent insurrection. Hundreds of Trump supporters descended upon the Capitol, launching a brazen attack that defiled the most precious symbol of U.S. democracy and attempting to overturn the outcome of an election in favor of their conspiracy-peddling idol.”

“Russian state media had played its own part in amplifying Donald Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and gleefully predicting that post-election violence would inevitably follow. ‘There will be blood,’ asserted Russian lawmakers and state media talking heads, a prospect they considered to be ‘excellent.’ And indeed, there was blood. Vesti reporter Denis Davydov was embedded in the thick of it all, interviewing sweaty seditionists with bloody knuckles in between their attempts to storm Capitol Hill. ‘The United States never experienced anything like this,’ Davydov noted. In his report for Vesti, U.S. correspondent Valentin Bogdanov asserted that the violence is not over: ‘While the Democrats gained control of Congress and the Senate, that doesn’t mean they can control the minds of the people. January 6, 2021 is forever written into the American political calendar. For some, it’s a dark date they will try to forget. For others, it’s a day to remember – or perhaps to repeat.'”

The Department of Defense has released a memorandum to memorialize its actions during the January 6th insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, which it describes as “First Amendment Protests.”

Written by David Soldow, the Executive Secretary for the DoD, the document details the Washington, DC National Guard’s actions from December 31, 2020 through January 6th’s domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, which left five dead.  It includes a “tick tock” of the discussions between the Pentagon, Capitol Police and the DC government.

The event that led to the attack on the Capitol wasn’t a First Amendment demonstration but a political rally supporting the attempts by Donald t to undermine the Constitutionally-mandated count of Electoral College vote.

While another panelist bemoaned how conservative voices were being squelched on social media platforms because of repeatedly posting messages of violence and hate, one conservative suggested using the US Postal Service to disseminate their message.

https://youtu.be/pK8NAqIj2Tk

Conservative radio host Dave Rubin told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that social media had a coordinated effort to silence conservative voices without noting that those who have been suspended or banned from platforms violated the services’ terms of service. 

Parler will potentially go offline Sunday at midnight Pacific Time due to Amazon informing the the social media platform favored by conservatives, chaos agents and insurrectionists that it will no longer host the app, BuzzFeedNews reports.

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service,” the email from the AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoffreads. “[W]e cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” the email reads. “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59 PM PST.”

Funded by the Mercer family, a clan that supports far-right efforts to undermine federal authority, Parler has been promoted by Donald Trump and his family, as well as other conservatives because it does not moderate comments and allows users to post threats of violence, bigotry and hatred.

“While he was sheltering in that bunker, the President did not call the VP to check on his safety nor that of his family according to a source close to the @VP and they have not spoken since Wednesday. @margbrennan reporting.” —David Begnaud of CBS This Morning

They are placing a desire for vengeance above the best interests of the country. President-elect Joe Biden is right to reject calls to go down this dangerous path which will only further divide the country.

— Kevin Brady (@RepKevinBrady) January 10, 2021

“Parler, a social network that pitches itself as a ‘free speech’ alternative to Twitter and Facebook, is suffering from whiplash. Over the past several months, Parler has become one of the fastest-growing apps in the United States. Millions of President Trump’s supporters have flocked to it as Facebook and Twitter increasingly cracked down on posts that spread misinformation and incited violence, including muzzling Mr. Trump by removing his accounts this past week. By Saturday morning, Apple listed Parler as the No. 1 free app for its iPhones. But hours later, Apple said it had removed Parler from its App Store. Google had made a similar move a day earlier. The companies both said that Parler had not sufficiently policed the conversation on its app, allowing too many posts that encouraged violence and crime” – New York Times.

A pro-Trump rally in San Diego has been an unlawful assembly by local law enforcement when Trump supporters turned violent against a group of counterprotesters, forcing police to form lines separating the two groups, KNSD NBC-7 News reports.

The pro-Trump protest was organized online as a “Patriot March” in the days before pro-Trump domestic terrorists stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC in an attempt to undermine the election.

At 2:30 p.m. PT, the police ordered the crowd to disperse after rocks, bottles and eggs were hurled at law enforcement officers trying to contain the pro-Trump rally. 

Politico: “Let’s say he decides to start a cable channel to vie with CNN, MSNBC and especially with Fox News Channel. Assuming that he can raise the hundreds of millions of dollars to stand up a competitive network – Trump has always preferred using other people’s money in his ventures – what sort of luck might he have in getting AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other major cable companies to carry his new channel? He has no friends at AT&T, whose merger with Time Warner he fought as president, and which now owns CNN. Comcast doesn’t desire a new entry in the news market to go against its MSNBC property. As the Times noted in 2016, not even Oprah Winfrey, the queen of all media, succeeded in turning her personal franchise into a cable powerhouse. Can Trump do something the far-wealthier and much more appealing Winfrey couldn’t?”

“But let’s say Trump does the unlikely. If you think Fox has been distancing itself from the toddler-in-chief since the Biden victory, you can be assured that it will savage him when he poses a threat to its viewership and revenues. The same goes for the Trump-lovers at NewsMax and OAN. Trump’s better bet would be to buy NewsMax, something Trump allies flirted with in November, or even OAN. But again, doing so would draw the ire of Fox, where the majority of his followers currently park their TV sets. Trump might as well shop for a public access slot.”

Major, one of the Biden’s two German Shepherds, will get his own formal “indoguration” as the first rescue dog to take residence in the White House, CBS News reports.

The ceremony will hosted by the Delaware Humane Society, the organization from which the Bidens adopted Major.  It will be a Zoom event on Sunday, January 17 at 3 p.m. ET as a fundraiser for the Humane Society to encourage others to adopt shelter dogs.

“From shelter pup at the Delaware Humane Association to First Dog at the White House, Major Biden is barking proof that every dog can live the American dream,” the shelter wrote in a newsletter. DHA is asking for a donation of $10 or more to join the event, with all proceeds going to the shelter.

Major and Champ, the Bidens’ other dog, will restart a tradition of the First Family having pets in the White House, a string broken by the Trumps.

Recently there have been several incidents in which I, editor of National Zero, in my capacity as Disqus user Spartan, have been accused of slurring Canadian citizens with derogatory terms such as “Mapleback”, “Canuckitard”, “Caribou-fisting subhumans”, among others. Several Canadian Disqus users expressed dismay at these comments and I feel obligated to issue a clarification.

So I’m here to set the record straight: I have nothing but love for a nation whose national sport is to drink a twelve pack of Molson, put on ice skates, and then knock the other team’s skaters’ teeth out while pretending that anyone actually cares about the puck. They are a great people who have gifted us in the United States with the unparalleled talents of singer Avril Lavigne, multi-platinum hard rock band Nickelback, Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson, and more than two dozen different television series called “Degrassi” – and the actor from it who’s now a really badass gangsta rapper. Personally I have visited their country three times and glimpsed it a fourth time from the American side of binational tourist trap Niagara Falls. Each time I was happy to drive 100 miles per hour on your roads, as that was the number indicated on the speed limit signs. Many local drivers were courteous enough to swerve to the side of the road I approached. That is just one of several, maybe even as many as nine, things that I truly love about Canuckistan… I mean Canadia… Canada.

Donald Trump is reportedly considering having Rudy Giuliani and TheHill contributor Alan Dershowitz to defend him during a potential impeachment trial, CNN reports.

Democrats are expected to bring articles of impeachment against Trump to the House floor as early as Monday, and Democratic Congressional leaders are pushing for the Senate to convene a quick trial.  The charges against Trump reportedly include incitement of insurrection for stoking the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol Wednesday.

Dershowitz declined to comment to CNN, saying, “I don’t talk to CNN, I sue them.”

Dershowitz was a member of the legal team who defended Trump during the Senate impeachment trial in 2020.  The other members of his previous impeachment team, including Constitutional attorney Jay Sekulow, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and attorney Jane Raskin, are not e to participate in Trump’s defense in an upcoming impeachment trial.

Accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse wore a t-shirt declaring “Free As Fuck” and drinking beer during a trip to a Wisconsin bar this weekend, Insider.com reports via Yahoo.

Rittenhouse was accompanied by his over-indulgent mother, allowing him to drink beer in Wisconsin, where someone 18 and over can drink beer in a bar or restaurant as long as they’re accompanied by a parent.  Rittenhouse’s mother drove him to Kenosha, Wisconsin during unrest over the police shooting of unarmed Black man Jacob Blake.

While in Kenosha, Rittenhouse obtained an AR-15 that he bought through a straw purchaser and then shot three people, killing two, while he was supposedly protecting private property.  Rittenhouse is claiming he acted in self defense.