Honestly, I don’t know how we at National Zero missed this world-changing event, but Fox Nation, the on-line upsell from Fox News, has debuted its very first original holiday movie, “Christmas in the Rockies,” a fun-for-the-whole-family flick from the network that brought you one of the worst television shows of all time.  (I’m referring to the “Half Hour News Hour,” not “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”)

https://youtu.be/Jl12dVFOJes

It’s an issue Trump campaigned on, and for some, it was the most memorable issue he brought up in his 2016 run for president.  No other candidate even had a position on it.  But no one can say that Donald J. Trump–with just 36 days left in office–didn’t get it done.

Trump today signed a roll-back on shower head water flow standards, CNN reports.

Yes, that’s right:  the issue that every American family has been discussing around the dinner table for eons… that cursed the Bathing Class for years… that echoed against the shower tiles of bathrooms from sea to shining sea (except, maybe, West Virginia), has finally been addressed.

AFP: “A lovesick Scottish man who bought a jet-ski so he could evade lockdown measures to visit his girlfriend in the Isle of Man has been jailed for breaching coronavirus restrictions, reports said. Dale McLaughlan from Ayrshire in southern Scotland met his girlfriend while working as a roofer on the island in the Irish Sea in September, the BBC reported Tuesday. Coronavirus restrictions on the tax haven mean non-residents currently require special permission to land on the island.”

“But after returning to Scotland when his contract ended, McLaughlan was denied permission to re-enter the island, the BBC said. Undeterred, the 28-year-old bought a jet-ski and set off last Friday to make the 25 mile sea-crossing by stealth. He had never ridden a jet-ski before and expected the journey to take around 40 minutes, prosecutors told a court in Douglas, the island’s main town, according to the BBC. But the journey across the choppy waters – which have an average December temperature of around 46 degrees, according to Ireland’s meteorological service – took over four hours. He then had to walk 15 miles to his girlfriend’s home. On Sunday he was arrested by police after they found out he had arrived illegally and visited nightclubs with his girlfriend.”

The Presidential Inauguration Committee, responsible for producing the official inaugural events for the swearing-in of President-elect Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States on January 20th, urged Americans not to travel to the nation’s capital for the inauguration in light of the coronavirus pandemic, CNN reports.

“Our goal is to create an inauguration that keeps people safe, honors the grand traditions of the Presidency, and showcases the Biden-Harris Administration’s renewed American vision for an inclusive, equitable, and unified citizenry,” committee CEO Tony Allen said in a statement.

While previous inaugurations have taken place on the steps of the Capitol, typically with large crowds of people crammed into bleachers and along the National Mall.  (The Trump inauguration had a smaller than typical crowd.)

And remember: The MAGA buttholes only believe that Protocols of The Elders of Zion bullshit because they’re jealous. They wish the conspiracies about them were half as cool. There’s nothing all that interesting about Trump laundering money for the Russian mafia when you compare it to a whole sinister network of unrivaled media and financial power.

!חג חנוכה שמח ול’חיים

National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien returned to Washington, DC from a taxpayer-funded jaunt around Europe and Israel to address the breach of multiple Cabinet Departments by Russian government-backed hackers, Politico reports.

Axios reported yesterday, O’Brien took his wife, Lo-Mari, to London, Paris, Rome and Tel Aviv for a holiday getaway which was supposed to extend into next week as many nations have barred travel into their countries by Americans because of the continued spread of the coronavirus in the US.

On his way back to Washington, O’Brien spent a little time doing work by visiting French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the hack of systems.

The residents around lame duck president Donald Trump have sent a petition to the City of Palm Beach and the US Secret Service noting that Trump has violated a zoning agreement with the city by having a permanent residence there, the Washington Post reports.

The message is clear:  they don’t want him in the neighborhood.

The issue revolves around an agreement Trump signed after taking over the property in the 1990s, turning the property, which is on the National Historic Trust, from a private residence into a private club.  The demand letter notes that the agreement prevented the property from being used as a permanent residence, with no club member able to spend more than 21 nights a year or seven consecutive days on property. 

KTRK: “A former Houston Police Department Captain was arrested and charged for running a man off the road and pointing a gun at his head in an attempt to prove claims of a massive voter fraud scheme in Harris County, according to a news release from the Harris County’s DA’s office. Mark Anthony Aguirre, 63, was arrested by Houston police Tuesday and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. According to court documents, Aguirre told police that he was part of a group of private citizens called the ‘Liberty Center,’ who were conducting a civilian investigation into the alleged ballot scheme. According to Aguirre, he had been conducting surveillance for four days on a man who was allegedly the mastermind of a giant voter fraud scheme. Aguirre told authorities the man was hiding 750,000 fraudulent ballots in a truck he was driving. Instead, the victim turned out to be an innocent air conditioner repairman, court documents said. Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of the truck to get the technician to stop and get out, according to court documents.”

“When the technician got out of the truck, Aguirre pointed a handgun at the technician, forced him to the ground and put his knee on the man’s back until police came, the court document said. Aguirre allegedly directed police to a parking lot nearby where another suspect, who has not been identified, took the truck. According to court documents, there were no ballots in the truck. The truck was filled with air conditioning parts and tools. Aguirre allegedly never told police that he had been paid a total of $266,400 by the Houston-based Liberty Center for God and Country, with $211,400 of that amount being deposited into his account the day after the incident.”

“In his final weeks in office before Joe Biden’s inauguration, President Donald Trump is weighing granting clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the founder and former administrator of the world’s most famous darknet drug market, Silk Road. According to three people familiar with the matter, the White House counsel’s office has had documents related to Ulbricht’s case under review, and Trump was recently made aware of the situation and the pleas of the Silk Road founder’s allies. Two of these sources say the president has at times privately expressed some sympathy for Ulbricht’s situation and has been considering his name, among others, for his next round of commutations and pardons before the Jan. 20 inauguration of his 2020 Democratic opponent.”

“It is unclear if Trump has arrived at a final decision yet, but Ulbricht has gained some influential backers in the president’s political and social orbit. Behind the scenes, he has the support of some presidential advisers, as well as criminal justice reform advocates with close ties to the administration and Trump family, including Alice Johnson, according to people with knowledge of the matter. ‘I’ve had documents forwarded to my contacts in the White House as early as February,’ activist Weldon Angelos, a former music producer and ex-federal inmate, said in a brief interview on Tuesday evening. ‘In the beginning of the year, [Ulbricht’s] family had reached out to us for our support, and my organization and I have endorsed his full commutation, and I am hopeful that President Trump will commute his sentence in its entirety. This case has perhaps more support than I’ve seen in any case of this kind'” – the Daily Beast.

Orlando Sentinel: “A good Samaritan kept a child’s head above water after his family’s car flipped into a retention pond last week, helping keep the child alive until emergency personnel arrived, records show. Jose Díaz, 48, was driving behind the family’s car Thursday about 7:30 when he noticed the vehicle repeatedly trying to brake, but eventually losing control, driving across traffic then flipping into a retention pond, he told police. Díaz said he immediately stopped and called 911, then went to assist the family. ‘I took my flashlight on my backpack and I jump[ed] into the water,’ Díaz said Monday in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel.”

“He said he tried to enter the car through the trunk, but wasn’t able to get the seats down to access the child in the back seat. He was later able to get the side door open, but said the 4-year-old remained stuck in his car seat, so he just tried to keep the child’s head above water until more help came. It was dark and cold, but Díaz said he didn’t hesitate to assist the family. ‘I didn’t think about that at the moment, just take action,’ said Díaz, who is a father himself. ‘That was the main worry, … you try to save the life of the kids.’ Once the rescue team arrived, he said officers and firefighters worked about another five minutes to try to free the baby.”

The city of Detroit is seeking sanctions against Sidney Powell and her jerkoff clients, asking a federal judge for relief including “Imposing monetary sanctions against Plaintiffs and their counsel in an amount sufficient to deter future misconduct” and “Barring Plaintiffs’ counsel from practicing law in the Eastern District of Michigan”. Read more here.

Daily Beast: “Despite betting money on President Donald Trump’s re-election, Helen was unfazed when Joe Biden was declared the victor. She watched press conferences by Trump surrogates who claimed the election was a fraud. She watched a pro-Trump web show that alleged the same. Then, using the online gambling service Betfair, she wagered even more money on a Trump victory after Election Day. ‘To be honest, the more likely it looked like fraud, the more I bet’ Helen, an Amsterdam-based British woman who declined to give her last name, told The Daily Beast.”

“Had Trump won re-election, Helen would have won nearly €2.7 million euros, according to screenshots of her Betfair account. But Betfair and other gambling sites closed the books on their 2020 presidential betting on Monday, after the Electoral College certified Biden’s victory. Now Helen, who says she’s lost approximately €140,000 and believes the election results will be overturned, is joining other bettors in accusing gambling sites of wrongly calling the election for Biden. Some of those Trump bettors are turning to conspiracy theories about election fraud – and threats to visit the homes of gambling company employees. Americans (with a few exceptions) cannot legally bet on elections, but gamblers in Europe and Asia poured millions into the 2020 presidential race. Some of those bettors, like a Brit who wagered about $1 million on Biden, became significantly richer when betting sites began paying out after Biden’s Electoral College win on Monday. Others were not so lucky. Some of these European bettors have become deeply invested in U.S. election fraud conspiracy theories, which they (still, despite everything) say will result in an overturned election and the return of their money. Jordan Lea, a U.K. man, told The Daily Beast he had ‘around £50,000 riding on Trump winning.’ He and others say they are appealing to Betfair to undo its payouts, ostensibly because Trump could still win (he can’t).”

John Poulos, the CEO of Dominion Voting Systems, testified before the Michigan State Senate, saying the ongoing spread of false claims about his company and its activities in the last election is a “dangerous and reckless disinformation campaign,” the Detroit Free Press reports.

“These people making baseless claims surely know that they are lies,” and are intent on “sowing doubt and confusion over the 2020 presidential election,” said Poulos, who testified under oath remotely.

Dominion has been at the center of myriad false claims by supporters of lame duck president Donald Trump, who claim that Dominion is a foreign-owned company that off-shored counting the votes and which has imbedded software designed to switch votes remotely.

Jayson Boebert, the husband of Republican Congresswoman-elect and infamous QAnon supporter Lauren Boebert, was arrested in 2004 for exposing his genitals to two women at a bowling alley snack bar, when one of the women was just 17-years-old.

The two women were standing at the snack bar at Fireside Lanes in Rifle, Colorado having a discussion about their tattoos when Boebert intruded into the conversation.  He claimed that he had a tattoo of his penis and proceeded to unzip his pants and pull out his flaccid penis, covering the head with his hand.

The two women reported the incident to the management of the bowling alley, who called police.  Officers arrested Boebert and charged him with indecent exposure.  No resolution of the case is not available.

Boebert claimed that he was playing a practical joke on the women and only pretended to pull his penis out.  He claimed that he used his thumb to simulate his penis as a sort of joke, demonstrating his shortcomings.

The Sandals vacation resort on the island of Grenada has been linked to an outbreak of 26 coronavirus cases on the island nation, forcing the government to institute a partial shutdown of the entire population, Washington Post reports.

Grenada, known to most Americans as the target of a US invasion during the Reagan Administration just three days after hundreds of Marines will killed in the bombing of the Beirut barracks in Lebanon in October 1983, had recorded just 45 confirmed cases since March.  The population of the island is 111,000, with tourism being the biggest economic driver.

“[The cases] include guests and employees, as well as their contacts,” the Health Ministry statement said. “The discovery was made following proactive testing of employees and guests on Friday and Saturday, as part of the Ministry’s continuous testing of front-line staff in sectors directly related to tourism, travel and health.”

The privately-held company headed by lame duck president Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, is attempting to invoke attorney-client privilege to keep records from being transferred to the New York State Attorney General as required by subpoenas, ABC News reports.

The state AG is reportedly looking into a number of legal issues regarding Trump and his enterprises, including the alleged manipulation of the stated value of properties to take advantage of tax programs or tax credits.

One issue is a $21 million tax credit the Trumps receive for the 230-acre Seven Springs estate, which the Trump Org has claimed at various times to be a retreat for the Trump family, a potential real estate development site, or a land preserve. 

“Many of the crucial decisions that prevented the Trump strategy from working were made by local officials who are Republicans, but who refused to sacrifice the integrity of the system for temporary partisan advantage. Many of the rulings that tossed Trump’s spurious claims out of the courts were made by judges appointed by Republican presidents. These people are Republicans – or were Republicans. Will they remain so? Will they still even be welcome in the party?”

“I ask because these officials represent the pre-Trump Republican party. The judges were appointed in the two Bush presidencies, and the local election officials rose to their positions within the party either before Trump was in office, or before his influence had extended down to the details of local politics. They did not act like Trump loyalists, because they were selected before loyalty to Trump became the party’s central, defining issue. That increasingly looks like the party’s past, not its future. And that’s what the current tussling over the election is really about. It’s not about overturning this election. It’s about preparing the ground for the next one” – The Bulwark.