Fat hillbilly former Congressman Billy Long, who was confirmed to lead the IRS just two months ago, is now out from the federal tax agency and being shuffled into some ambassadorship, the New York Times reports. Treasury Suckretary Scott Bessent will take over as acting commissioner.

Convicted felon President Trump’s regime is planning to issue an executive order clarifying that imports of gold bars are exempt from tariffs, Axios reports on the Orange God Emperor looking out for the little corrupt politician who would’ve gotten screwed and had to pay the government a percentage on gifts received from Gulf royals, West African military dictators, and similar characters.

FIRST ON FOX: Attorney General Bondi has authorized a special prosecutor, Ed Martin, to investigate allegations of mortgage fraud involving Sen. Adam Schiff and Letitia James, @pdoocy reports pic.twitter.com/EHYp8JEluR

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 8, 2025

“Sheriff Steven W Tompkins, who serves as the Sheriff for the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, has been charged with extortion involving the purchase of an equity interest in a Boston-based cannabis company. Tompkins, 67, of Boston, Mass, was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of Extortion Under Color of Official Right. He was taken into custody this morning in the Southern District of Florida and will have an initial appearance at 11:00 am He will appear in federal court in Boston at a later date,” says a Friday Justice Department press release.

The release goes on for quite some length with the details of the accusations and receipts of wire transfers, making it clear that the feds probably have a pretty good case against him. The questionable element to the charges surfaces in the Gateway Pundit’s coverage of the indictment, right in their clickbait-y headline “BREAKING: Boston’s Sanctuary Sheriff Arrested on Federal Extortion Charges” and its lede “Boston’s sanctuary Sheriff Steve Tompkins was arrested on federal extortion charges on Friday. Recall that Sheriff Tompkins kicked ICE out of his jails back in 2019.”

After that is when they finally let on that this has nothing to do with ICE cooperation or illegal immigration… At least as far as the charges go. The decision to go ahead and seek an indictment against him? There’s no reason whatsoever to believe the MAGA Reich is prosecuting Tompkins solely because he’s credibly alleged to have committed a major federal felony. The already told us this with Eric Adams. Let ICE do whatever they want and you can do whatever you want.

“Tariffs are having a huge positive impact on the Stock Market. Almost every day, new records are set. In addition, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars are pouring into our Country’s coffers. If a Radical Left Court ruled against us at this late date, in an attempt to bring down or disturb the largest amount of money, wealth creation and influence the USA has ever seen, it would be impossible to ever recover, or pay back, these massive sums of money and honor. It would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION! If they were going to rule against the wealth, strength, and power of America, they should have done so LONG AGO, at the beginning of the case, where our entire Country, while never having a chance at this kind of GREATNESS again, would not have been put in 1929 style jeopardy. There is no way America could recover from such a judicial tragedy, but I know our Court System better than anyone, there is no one in history that has gone through the trials, tribulations and uncertainties such as I, and absolutely terrible, but also amazingly beautiful, things can happen. Our Country deserves SUCCESS AND GREATNESS, NOT TURMOIL, FAILURE, AND DISGRACE. GOD BLESS AMERICA!” posted convicted felon President Trump on Friday, pretty obviously his pretext to defy a court ruling if and when one ends his taxation of all imported goods.

The Fayette County Record, a very obscure local Texas weekly whose marketing is apparently about on par with National Zero’s – meaning effectively non-existent – 29 days ago reported that Roland Beainy, the managing partner of the Trump Burger chain in the Houston area, was facing a litany of legal issues, including civil disputes with his partners over money and the landlord at one of the locations who has reportedly “commandeered” the business and rechristened it as “MAGA Burger.”

Those are just the regular, day-to-day shitshows of the dregs of the service industry. The real problems for Beainy are a one-two from the Orange God Emperor himself, the president who Beainy told Fox Business News in January is a “gentleman that makes peace, even before he took office, he made peace in the Middle East already between Lebanon and Israel”: A cease-and-desist from the Trump Organization for trademark infringement and, per an ICE statement to the Houston Chronicle on Thursday, that “Despite false claims to the contrary, Roland Mehrez Beainy does not have any immigration benefits that prevented his arrest or removal from the United States. Beainy is a 28-year-old illegal alien from Lebanon who entered the United States in 2019 as a non-immigrant visitor, but he failed to depart by Feb 12, 2024, as required under the terms of his admission. ICE officers arrested him on May 16, 2025, and he was placed into immigration proceedings. On June 13, an immigration judge granted his request for bond while he undergoes his proceedings.”

A South African court on Friday ordered former Zambian President Edward Lungu shipped back home after months of legal wrangling with his successor Hakainde Hichilema, the BBC reports.

Lungu, 68, a longtime bitter rival of Hichilema, has been dead since early June and the last time National Zero checked in Hichilema’s administration had been close to an agreement with the departed autocrat’s family to have his remains repatriated and a state funeral held, an agreement that later collapsed for who the hell knows what reason. A useful analogy would be if John McCain had flown to Canada in his final days to get treatment for the brain tumor he’d been suffering from, was unsuccessful, instructed his family that convicted felon President Trump was on no uncertain terms unwelcome at his funeral, but Trump insisted that he preside over a state funeral anyway.

And then two months later a Canadian court decided they’d had enough of the drama and sent McCain’s body back home to let Trump do whatever he wanted as far as a funeral went.

The delta between MAGAmerica’s bloodlust for arrests of convicted felon President Trump’s enemies and his regime’s actual ability to fulfill the expectations they created is growing so large that even Politico has to acknowledge it – and connect it to “MAGA loyalists’ dissatisfaction over the Jeffrey Epstein saga,” writing that Thursday’s fap-fest over the FBI vaguely informing Texas Senator John Cornhole Cornyn that they were going to do something about the fugitive Dem state legislators currently holed up in Illinois to break quorum without saying what they can do.

“They voted for that and now they realize they can’t have retribution because it’s not legally sound,” said former Justice Department lawyer Gene Rossi about the latest empty promise. Former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb was even less charitable to the regime. “There isn’t really a plan and [Trump] doesn’t see, look for or care about a bigger picture. Courts will disrupt or halt many of these nascent efforts as they mature but that is fine with him too as it helps further discredit the courts in the eyes of his followers and weakens democracy even more. It is all such a waste.”

On Sunday some readers were, fairly understandably, skeptical of a certain assertion made toward the end of a very freaking long piece titled “The History of the Decline and Fall of the MAGA Conspiracy Empire.” The assertion in question, the somewhat nebulously supported idea that what I understood by an anonymous White House source to be an admission to a Rolling Stone reporter that the latest “Obamagate” offensive from the Trump Regime really is the desperate distraction op from the Epstein shitshow everyone already fucking knows it to be. And that the admission represented a pivotal moment signaling the inevitable end of the “MAGA conspiracy empire.”

JOHN SOLOMON: If we don't see action on the Russia collusion hoax, if we don't punish the behavior that we now know exists,

You are going to handicap the future of this country and destine it to be a banana republic because the Democrats got away with it.@jsolomonReports pic.twitter.com/awKXehkbTW

— Bannon’s WarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) August 4, 2025

The truth is I had worked on the piece for the better part of five hours across two days and I was getting rushed out the door to go to a picnic in freaking Jersey City when I hit publish. Really could’ve used maybe another 30 minutes of work on refining and fortifying that main point.

Which I still stand by. If anything I actually feel even more confident in it two days after the New York Times, though backgrounded still without an actual direct quote from a source, printed this: “It is not clear whether Mr Trump, who is marking his first six months in office, would have pushed quite so forcefully for the [DOJ] to act against his perceived foes if the Epstein case was not still smoldering political fire. But it has certainly added to the urgency, administration officials said,” emphasis added on that last bit to emphasize that this is what their sources in the White House are telling them.

“While everyone knows the age-old question ‘is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?’ recently, thousands have started asking, ‘if tomatoes are a fruit, is ketchup a smoothie?’ Today, the global leader in ketchup, HEINZ, teams up with the world’s largest smoothie brand, Smoothie King, to go all in and settle the debate. Introducing: The HEINZ Tomato Ketchup Smoothie, the first-ever ketchup-based smoothie, which blends real fruits with HEINZ Simply Tomato Ketchup to create a delicious and refreshing summer sip. Launching during peak tomato harvest season, when HEINZ tomatoes are the ripest, the limited-edition smoothie is now available exclusively at select Smoothie King locations nationwide, while supplies last,” says a press release from Smoothie King on what sure feels like a sign of a decline of human civilization both irreversible and steadily accelerating.

No, a silly novelty product from a mall food court smoothie chain made with “sweet Acai sorbet, crisp apple juice, juicy strawberries, and tart raspberries with the unmistakable taste of HEINZ Simply Ketchup” isn’t in and of itself on the level of a genetically engineered virus that turns the infected into mindless cannibals or a massive, unexpected meteor shower but the meteors are slowing down as they enter Earth’s atmosphere as if they have reverse thrusters. Plus they all appear to be the same size and shape. And heading toward major cities and strategic military sites.

It’s nothing like that. The ketchup smoothie’s more of a vibe than a flashing klaxon. A sign that something’s really, seriously off even if one can’t fully elucidate it. Those disturbed by this collab may find a modicum of solace in the new Reese’s x Oreo mashups, hitting stores this month.

In what’s quite possibly an idea that was brainstormed at her Wednesday night White House crisis meeting with other top-ranking Trump Regime officials on finding ways out of the Jeffrey Epstein clusterfuck, dipshit Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday announced the Justice Department was doubling its reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.

Rewards are a useful incentive for law enforcement when nobody actually knows where a fugitive from justice or, for the military, a terrorist leader is hiding. Surely plenty of people in Afghanistan and elsewhere got paid and very well to inform on there whereabouts of top Al-Qaeda assholes. With Maduro it’s more like there are probably at least a few thousand people in the CIA who could walk into Bondi’s office, slap some colorfully-annotated satellite images of government buildings in Caracas on her desk and say “Here he is, go arrest him. Now give me my $50 million, you blonde idiot.” Nobody here or in Venezuela has been fucking holding out for her to double the bounty.

Now maybe there actually is a number that would be enough to get some of Maduro’s top military guys to turn on him, tie a sack on his head, and fly him to Puerto Rico. That number is almost certainly not $50 million. It might not even be $500 million. If Bondi were really serious she’d be working on some backchanneling through the State Department and CIA and so on to start those conversations, not doing a stupid video announcement as if Dog the Bounty Hunter or some asshole who thinks he’s the Mandalorian will go hot on Maduro’s trail and then get immediately gunned down by his security guards outside whatever bunker the Venezuelan dictator sleeps in.

“Dallas ranch realtor” and GOP donor Asher Watkins caught the business end of a Cape Buffalo’s horn on Sunday during a hunt in South Africa’s Limpopo province, the Dallas Express reports.

“It is with deep sadness and heavy hearts that we confirm the tragic death of our client and friend Asher Watkins,” wrote Afrikaner game guide Hans Vermaak of Coenraad Vermaak Safaris in a statement confirming that the 53 year-old hunter had become the hunted. “This is a devastating incident, and our hearts go out to his family and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time… This is a deeply traumatic incident for all involved. The family and our team members who were present at the time are understandably shaken.” Well yeah, it must’ve been pretty freaking gruesome to see.

The Express writes “Watkins was reportedly on a hunting safari in South Africa’s northern Limpopo Province on August 3, with a professional hunter and a tracker from the company. Then, an ‘unwounded’ buffalo he had been tracking turned in a ‘sudden and unprovoked attack’ and gave him injuries that proved fatal. He was tracking a 1.3-ton Cape Buffalo, sometimes known as the ‘Black Death’ for its dangerous reputation,” but it’s unclear if “The Black Death” refers to the species as whole or the specific individual Cape Buffalo, like a beast from a Rudyard Kipling story or the lions from the 1998 Val Kilmer classic The Ghost and the Darkness. That movie’s fucking awesome.

Also unclear is whether it was quick or if Watkins had a few painful Snows of Kilimanjaro-type hours.

Republican Indiana Lt Gov Micah Beckwith’s communications director James Kehoe called in quits on Thursday amid a criminal investigation into Beckwith’s office over a deepfake porn video of a Republican state lawmaker’s wife that had been at the very least viewed by several staffers and possibly even generated by one of them, 24sight.news reports on MAGA being MAGA.

“My wife and I are outraged and saddened that her singing at a charity event for mental health was turned into a pornographic smear of her and our family,” state Rep Craig Haggard, a suburban Indianapolis Republican, said in a statement. “Statehouse leadership, rather than expressing concern for a victim of this criminal act, instead went into full ‘find the leakers’ mode, seeking to cover up any role the Lieutenant Governor’s office may have played in this affront to all women.”

Not sure what to add to that. Might as well be complaining other Republicans are too into guns.

The crisis meeting between neckbearded Vice President JD Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Trump defense lawyer/Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to figure a way out of the self-inflicted Epstein shitshow was indeed held Wednesday night at the White House, MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin reports.

“As many of you are aware, there are national conversations ongoing in other states related to midterm redistricting. Here in Florida, our state supreme court’s recent decision in Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, Inc. v Secretary, Florida Department of State, raises important and distinct questions about the applicability and interpretation of certain provisions of the so-called ‘Fair Districts’ provisions of the Florida Constitution and their intersection with Federal law.”

“Exploring these questions now, at the mid-decade point, would potentially allow us to seek legal guidance from our supreme court without the uncertainty associated with deferring those questions until after the next decennial census and reapportionment. It is important to acknowledge that while this may be an opportunity, it is not an expected one, and we do not have the capacity to engage in the full redistricting process experienced during the 2020-2022 term. Thus, we will focus our inquiry on the Congressional map, which was the subject of the recent Florida Supreme Court case, and any relevant legal questions. To that end, I am creating a Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting,” says a notice from Republican Florida State House Speaker Daniel Perez.

I bet Bibi LOVES IT when you go down on him…. pic.twitter.com/LphebU3uPx

— Jake Angeli-Chansley (@AmericaShaman) August 7, 2025

In a new report headlined “Psychic reveals how to harness the manifesting power of the Lion’s Gate Portal,” New York Post journalist Reda Wigle writes that the Lion’s Gate Portal, a celestial aperture of undefined physical properties is currently peaking “bringing with it the most powerful moment of the year for soul transformation, clarity and calling in all that is good and plentiful.”

A person identified only as “Psychic Solace” is then quoted as saying “The Lion’s Gate Portal opens a rare energetic doorway. 8/8 carries a vibration of spiritual strength, infinite potential, and alignment with your soul’s purpose. This isn’t about chasing material goals. It’s about stepping into who you’re truly meant to be,” with the “8/8” referring to Thursday’s date as the aphelion of this redundantly named constellation or imaginary energy thing in the distant reaches of space.

“Expect old desires to resurface and new clarity to drop in. In 2025, the Lion’s Gate Portal centers less on attracting what you want and more on choosing what genuinely aligns with who you are now,” said Solas, who sounds like a human cancer who shoves scorpios up his portal.