Santa Fe’s Walmart was Santa fun for 53 year-old Rodolpho Florencio Mendiola on Christmas Eve as the funny little adventurer hid inside a clothing rack at closing time and then proceeded to dash down the aisles, and fill up his shopping carts with $20,000 in merry merch, drink from bottles of alcoholic cheer, eat delicious packaged treats, damage several tablets on display, and just party down solo like a plucky 8 year-old boy accidentally left home alone in a suburban Chicago mansion after his insufferable asshole family flew to Paris without him, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports.

Run Run Rodolpho’s festive fun was foiled around 3:45 PM on Wednesday when a store manager stopped by the shuttered megastore to pick up some personal items from the office and noticed the Christmas-crazed kid in a homeless adult’s body wandering around the sporting goods section where he had armed himself with a large hunting knife. Police quickly responded and ascertained that Mendiola had “staged” three carts filled with $20,000 worth of shit he had intended to drag to his campsite nearby, the price tag total putting the holiday hijinks well within felony territory.

Mendiola told cops “he knew he was going to prison for this incident,” according to a Santa Fe Police Department release. It’s not Mendiola first rodeo either as the man was previously caught shoplifting from the same Walmart at least twice within the last few years and also faces counts of criminal trespass and larceny for shoplifting incident at a Santa Fe Dollar Tree store in October, per SFPD.

Mexican officials are trying “to learn whether” convicted felon President-Elect Trump “is serious or merely blustering to gain leverage in talks about shutting down the pipeline of migrants and drugs heading into the US,” the Wall Street Journal reports without knowing much either.

No better voice to help Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy call off the MAGA dogs chasing them over importing tech workers than Mr Rodent Slayer himself, former NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

Two Florida women are in stable condition Thursday after spending all night Christmas in the bottom of a 50-foot deep pit dug into the Black Diamond Ranch’s Quarry Course in the town of Lecanto, about 80 miles north of Tampa, Golfweek reports, citing a Citrus County Fire Rescue statement.

“The incident occurred on Christmas Day but went undiscovered until this morning. Despite adverse weather preventing air support, our dedicated crews, with the assistance of Black Diamond Ranch maintenance personnel, executed a successful low-angle rescue. Both patients were stabilized and transported to a local trauma hospital,” said the department in a Facebook post following the rescue.

Further details about how both women managed to fall down the “cliff” (which looks much more like a steep, densely wooded ravine and not a “quarry” in the photos on Facebook) and ended up stuck down there all night were not available, but it probably somehow involves a shanked ball.

Tweets are, for better or worse, still a major source of content here at National Zero. Better – and to little or no chagrin from our readers – is when a politician tweets and it’s newsworthy and/or a target of derision one reason or another. The worse? Yeah, there have been times when readers were, in retrospect, understandably annoyed with propagation of bullshit whose relevance to the wider world of politics was at best questionable, even if others could at least see the entertainment value in it.

We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender – and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline.

We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy. https://t.co/hgCZTJ0ba9

— Former Congressman Matt Gaetz (@FmrRepMattGaetz) December 26, 2024

Still, would rather apologize than ask for permission on this, because something is up in the MAGAverse and they are losing their shit over what appears to be Elon Musk saying that the next Trump Reich should go balls to the wall with the H1-B program and open the door to millions of foreign tech workers, which obviously is a no-go for the America First crowd. What exactly was posted and by whom to set this off is unclear because it’s buried deep in a whole mess of shitposting between a Twitter engineer and MAGA influencers and Musk got involved at some point.

If convicted felon President-Elect Trump posting some dipshit’s Newsmax editorial titled “Boris Epshteyn Has Proven Loyalty to Trump, Nation” in the middle of a Thursday Truth Social binge is any sign, it appears that the sexual assaulting, crypto scamming, accused felon longtime MAGA lawyer is out of the doghouse after a perilous stretch last month in which Epshteyn was nearly knifed by rival supplicant Elon Musk and under some laughable “internal investigation” for simply doing what Trump’s crew does best and engage in corruption by charging fees for access to Donald.

Good for Boris, that unlovable bald scamp, him. Seemed pretty touch and go there for a bit.

Especially given that Trump waited almost the whole goddamned month to share the op-ed written by New York Young Republicans Chair Gavin Wax – a cultist whose fanaticism would make the Ayatollah roll his eyes – which says “detractors have come out of the woodwork to snipe at Epshteyn. Perhaps they do not appreciate his tough, direct style. Perhaps they underestimated him and his proximity to President Trump,” after Boris took heat from others at Mar-a-Lago for charging Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent and one or two other would-be future reichsministers $100,000 a month to get to the front of the lines for audiences with the Orange God Emperor.

Heinrich Himmler v2/Trump Reich “Border Czar” Tom Homan said in an interview Thursday that his plans to detain US-born citizen children of illegal immigrants won’t be “inhumane” because the government “can’t lose the faith of the American people,” the New York Post reports.

But the “anchor babies” will not be spared. “Here’s the issue. You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position” of being detained indefinitely in an internment camp being run by a private prison company, said Homan.

A not really explosive plagiarism scandal has not rocked the extremely specialized world of naming contests for publicly owned snowplows as the Massachusetts State Department of Transportation has announced that one of the winners of this year’s contest: “Control-Salt-Delete,” submitted from a kindergarten class in New Salem, was stolen from “CTRL-Salt-Delete” the name of one of the winning entries of Chicago’s second annual snow plow naming contest, announced in January 2024.

Wait, whoever made that Chicago submission stole it from the Michigan State Department of Transportation who have had one such plow on the roads since at least early 2022.

It’s unlikely however that Chicago’s top winner from the 2023, which objectively is the greatest of all time, “Mrs O’Leary’s Plow,” was stolen from elsewhere, knowingly or otherwise. It’s too localized.

The pile of national reporting on “pregretful” Trump voters from the last two months like that MAGA Latino dipshit who thinks Trump somehow won’t order “family-oriented” illegal immigrants to be deported, the farming lobbyists terrified their workforce is about to be deported, the Trump-loving workers at that corn syrup mill slowly realizing that Bobby Brainworms is coming for their jobs, and so on continues to grow as a dirt poor 55 year-old single mom in Pennsylvania tells the Washington Post she’s worried that the convicted felon president-elect she voted for might end up cutting the $1,200 a month in food stamps and Social Security she and her son rely upon to survive.

“He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” said Lori Mosura, 55, who told the Post she rides a bicycle to go buy groceries to save on gas for her Ford pickup truck and often has decide between buying milk or toilet paper for herself and her 17 year-old son. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”

“We helped get you in office; please take care of us,” Mosura said, addressing Trump himself as if he’s going to read the Post’s article. “Please don’t cut the things that help the most vulnerable.” Well that’s kind of a switch from “I think Trump is going to do more to help us,” right?

Montana MAGA Congressman Ryan Zinke on Thursday called convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s deranged threats to Panama a negotiating tactic that will somehow end with the US controlling the Canal Zone again in a few months. It’s not even clear if Zinke knows that Trump actually wants out of Panama or would be happy with as a “settlement” from the country.

“A violinist who used to perform with Shen Yun Performing Arts and has been featured as a critical voice against the company in several New York Times articles, has come forward to set the record straight,” says the lede to a story in the Epoch Times, the other propaganda arm of the Chinese dissident Falun Gong cult, printed on Tuesday more than a month after the New York Times quoted former Shen Yun violinist Eugene Liu, as saying he was never paid more than $300 a month while performing about 200 shows between 2015 and 2017, starting when he was 15 years old.

“It seems like it’s perfectly reasonable,” Liu told the New York Times in the November story. “But if you then consider the fact that these are all people with no ability to negotiate any kind of labor, wage situation, then I don’t know how this stands up.” It’s the only direct quote from Liu in the article, which does not mention his citizenship situation and where he’s currently living now, as in whether he’s an American citizen of Chinese ethnicity or hails from Taiwan or another nearby east Asian country with a significant Chinese minority such as Malaysia or the Philippines. Former dancer Chang Chun-Ko who was born in Taiwan and now lives in the New York City area after spending 11 years touring with Shen Yun, filed a federal lawsuit against the culty circus act last month and seeks to add other plaintiffs to a class action against them for operating as a “forced labor enterprise.”

Less uncertain is the origin of another musician quoted in the Times piece, percussionist Even Glickman, now who told the New York Times he quit Shen Yun in 2016 due to lousy pay – $35,000 a year – and exhaustion from the touring schedule – like a 17 hour bus ride from Michigan to Texas during a nine-day stretch of shows. “The students did everything,” said Glickman. “That place would not run if they had to pay real musicians, like every other organization in the country does.”

American colleges and universities are warning international students to come back before January 20th, whether or not the spring semester has already started, to make sure that convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s new administration – namely Stephen “Baby Goebbels” Miller – does not block them from resuming their studies with another bullshit travel ban, CNN reports.

“A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell University warned students late last month. “The ban is likely to include citizens of the countries targeted in the first Trump administration: Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. New countries could be added, particularly China and India.”

Former Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je, who took third place at 25 percent of the vote in Taiwan’s presidential election in January, was hit with corruption charges in September for accepting a $500,000 bribe in some real estate scam, BBC News reports on the case that is becoming public just now due to whatever vagaries of the Taiwanese political/justice system. The BBC describes Ko as a “gaffe machine” who starred in a rap video during his 2018 reelection bid. Ughhhh.

Folks who deliver for pizzerias and other restaurants deal with a lot of hassles, especially during the holidays when volumes are high and the stress can build up while on the job. As such it’s important to remember to toss them a couple of extra bucks to show your appreciation for their service.

On a related note, a Florida woman is facing attempted murder and home invasion charges after Osceola County Sheriff’s deputies say she stabbed a person repeatedly on Sunday over a bad tip she received when delivering pizza to a motel room earlier that evening, WESH reports.

The OCSO said 22 year-old Briana Alvelo “became upset about the amount of tip she received,” later returned to the victim’s motel room with an unidentified male accomplice who was armed with a gun, forcing their way in. Alvelo then stabbed the person, who was hospitalized in stable condition.

Cops are seeking information on the male accomplice, who remains at large. It’s not clear if he’s a Chinese food delivery guy acting in solidarity with Alvelo out of rage for all the times he was stiffed.

Everything was cool for communist Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in early December 1989.

He’d just come off another reelection campaign against nobody, winning a sixth five-year term in power in a vote at the XIVth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party the previous month, during which state media praised “masterly lecture by comrade Nicolae Ceausescu at the extended plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Romania,” in its November 11th edition.

Global media had reported on something different that day.

It’s not clear how much the average Romanian knew about the rapid developments elsewhere in Eastern Europe during that stretch. Their lives were pretty freaking miserable, even by the low standards of the Communist bloc. Ceausescu almost certainly knew about what had happened in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square six months earlier and probably felt some degree of confidence that he could crush any uprising with the same relative ease that Deng’s Chicom regime did.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed into law a bill formally declaring the American bald eagle the official bird of the United States, something that until now had carried no legal weight despite the raptor being associated with the nation for more than 248 years, the Associated Press reports.

It’s not clear what the legal weight of this official declaration now entails however.

In a Christmas miracle that will bring joy to children everywhere, and even to the big kids in all of us, 39 year-old accused pedophile Anthony Wayne Brooks of Riverside, California was found dead in his cell at the county jail on Sunday, KTLA reports, citing a Riverside Sheriff’s Department press release.

“On Sunday, December 22, 2024, deputies from the Robert Presley Detention Center found an unresponsive male inside a housing unit cell. Deputies and jail medical personnel performed life-saving measures until paramedics arrived, but the male was ultimately pronounced deceased.”

“Investigators from the Riverside Sheriff’s Office Corrections Central Investigations Unit responded and assumed the investigation. The inmate was identified as 39-year-old Anthony Wayne Brooks of Riverside. There were no signs of foul play,” said the department. The press release left out that, among other crimes, Brooks was facing five counts of lewd acts on a child under the age of 14.

So maybe there were plenty of signs of “fair play” and Brooks got Epsteined or something.

Florida Highway Patrol is seeking information on the identity of the jolly old saint who WFLA reports blasted away from them on County Road 486 near Tampa at speeds of over 120 miles per hour on Saturday night, adding “Anyone who recognizes this runaway Santa is asked to call *FHP (*347).”

Convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s team plan to immediately withdraw the US from the World Heath Organization next month, reimposing a tantrum move made when the fat fuck was looking for a scapegoat for his failures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic that President Joe Biden then undid in 2021, Reuters reports, citing a tip from a Georgetown professor close to the organization.

Israeli dictator Benjamin Netanyahu’s violent campaigns to keep himself in power perpetually have now, for the second year in a row, forced the cancelation of Christmas festivities in the Little Town of Bethlehem, legendary birthplace of the savior of humanity, Jesus Christ, the AP reports.

“Always the message of Bethlehem is a message of peace and hope, and these days, we are also sending our message to the world: peace and hope, but insisting that the world must work to end our suffering as Palestinian people,” said Mayor Anton Salman. The cancelation itself seems to be kind of a soft, mutual decision, rather than any one single official’s: There’s no Christmas tree, marching bands, crowds of tourists, or any such other elements of the town’s celebrations that marked the birth of Christ in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and then the war.

Yet imagine the city of Chicago nixed a Christmas tree lighting because of gang violence. It doesn’t take a PhD in political science to guess who the MAGA propaganda-industrial complex would be blaming for that. “CHRISTMAS IS CANCELED DUE TO THUGS IN CHICAGO! January 20th can’t come soon enough!” the tweets from Charlie Kirk and the other dickheads would scream in their tweets.

Well actually it wouldn’t be a stretch for them to blame Joe Biden for it being canceled in Bethlehem now in this timeline. After all, they blame him for the war having started in the first place because Hamas would’ve been too scared of Trump and all that unfalsifiable horseshit about Iran and so on.

It’s a convenient out for any MAGA Evangelical who might feel tempted to rage at Netanyahu.