A former top official with Russia’s Ministry of Defense was sentenced to 19 years in the gulag Friday on charges of doing something – whatever it was is not clear – to piss off dictator Vladimir Putin who then ordered him prosecuted over what had to be previously permitted graft, Reuters reports.

Former Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Popov’s paper crime was embezzling funds meant for “Patriot Park” – an exposition center that in 2024 the AP described as Russia’s “military Disneyland,” and a pet project of former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to showcase USSR and Russian Federation history and weaponry – and spending it on renovations for his homes in and around Moscow. Not exactly the most mind-blowing of scams in a country where the government officials who aren’t regularly embezzling from public funds are the ones who you need to treat with suspicion.

Thus leaving us with a gap to fill on what “crime” Popov was really guilty of. Maybe he had a bit too much vodka and ogled one of Vlad’s mistresses’ cleavage at a party or something. The boss is petty.

“The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.9 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in March, after rising 0.3 percent in February, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.3 percent before seasonal adjustment. The index for energy rose 10.9 percent in March, led by a 21.2-percent increase in the index for gasoline which accounted for nearly three quarters of the monthly all items increase.”

“The shelter index also increased in March, rising 0.3 percent. The index for food was unchanged over the month as the index for food away from home rose 0.2 percent, while the index for food at home fell 0.2 percent,” says the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s monthly MAGAflation report.

Just going to throw this out there: Maybe sending this weirdo onto Fox News the next morning to continue what many suspect to have been Melania getting out ahead of something really bad might not actually be the smartest strategic move. The grating circularity of this rant is just a bonus.

“Our latest Quantus Insights survey of likely registered voters in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District, conducted April 6 and April 7, shows Thomas Massie leading Ed Gallrein 46.8 percent to 37.7 percent, with 14 percent undecided and 1.5 percent saying they would not vote. For an incumbent, being under 50 percent is not ideal. But a near 10-point lead in a two-man race is still a strong position, especially when the underlying numbers suggest Massie retains the advantages that usually matter most in a primary: a known name, an established base, and a political identity that fits the district better than some in Washington may assume,” says Quantus Insights’ intro to the polling.

Who actually knows how solid this is. Primary polls in a single district are, to say the least, not known to be terribly reliable. Still, if it’d been the other way around the right wing media would’ve been SCREAMING with joy about how fucked Massie is against whatever that butthole’s name is and it will be mighty entertaining should the challenger fail in his duty to the Orange God Emperor.

Fascist Texas Lt Governor Dannie Scott Goeb, better known as “Dan Patrick,” expressed on Wednesday a fear that the currently 88 to 62 Republican-majority state House could flip to Democrats this November, the Texas Tribune reports on some opaque alarmism.

“We’re going to have a tough time holding the Texas House,” said Goeb as he spoke at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual conference in Austin. Goeb also pleaded with the eventual loser of the heated shitshow of a Senate primary to endorse to the winner as mission-critical to holding onto the US Senate. “Get over it and come together as one,” said Goeb to the right wing assembly.

It’s not clear how much of this was actual sincere fear of a flip versus just bullshit to whip up the crowd into donating and campaigning smarter ahead of an expected tough year for the GOP.

JUST IN: The NFL’s streaming play just got flagged — and the feds are reportedly stepping onto the field.

The Justice Department is apparently zeroing in on whether the league boxed out fans by using anticompetitive tactics while airing their games.

And now revising the rules… pic.twitter.com/LeVwbExS4p

— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) April 9, 2026

“Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” posted a saggy crone with awful hair on Thursday.

Mostly verbatim from MS Now’s Jacqueline Alemany: “Just got off a quick call with President Trump who said he didn’t ‘know anything about’ Third Lady Melania’s statement prior to her on camera appearance Thursday, but that he was in a meeting about the war and couldn’t speak further. ‘She didn’t know him,’ Trump added before hanging up, referring to Epstein.” Sounds pretty guilty.

National Zero will follow up on this story that of course fucking happened during the matinee of the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which actually wasn’t awful if one keeps expectations low.

In an ongoing imposition estimated to cost the city’s economy at least $355 million in lost productivity – not to mention $44.36 for tickets to a matinee of the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which reviewers say sucks – New York’s public school system remains closed on Thursday, will also be closed on Friday, and normal weekday output by the city’s homebound workers and bloggers will not resume until Monday, even though the rest of the world doesn’t just fucking stop irrespective of whether there’s a big presentation to win a contract to design a huge resort in Utah, which is SO much more important than cranking out sarcastic blog posts calling the president a criminal tyrant…

National Zero will resume a more typical volume production schedule next week. It’s not clear when there will be sufficient time and bandwidth to print the next article on Thursday afternoon.

There’s nothing like American steel: It has won world wars, bridged turbulent waterways, fed the bottomless appetites of the auto and railroad industries, and formed the backbones of the towers of commerce that loom over its great cities, all forged in the nation’s efficient and productive foundries.

Its proud workers are synonymous with the kind of toughness, grit, and resilience that the loafers-wearing, Starbucks-sipping homos in the Democrat Party left behind with their gender studies DEI bullshit that prizes globalism and offshoring over the forgotten people of Trump country. Steelers fans don’t wear $38.99 bright yellow plastic non-OSHA-graded hard-hat-shaped cosplay gear to tailgates because there was a factory in China who fulfilled the order to make them and stamp the team’s logo on the side. The factory in China fulfilled the order from the franchise’s merchandising department because it’s a natural extension of the aesthetics of blue collar grit appropriated by the team’s fanbase which, when you think about it, are actually pretty much meaningless and the team might could just as easily been named the “Pythons” (Hell, it’d go with the Pirates and Penguins).

It’s in that background noise that those very steelworkers, Steelers fans who have a vague understanding of what a foundry looks like based on the climactic scenes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and every other demographic that did their part to spare convicted felon President Trump from dying in prison because eggs were too expensive, that the New York Times reports he’s returning the favor by accepting a donation of $37 million worth of European steel from ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based conglomerate, to build his lavish new White House ballroom. If it gets built, of course, but that’s another story. There’s still an order of $37 million worth of non-Pittsburgh-made girders bound as a gift to him for his exceptional talent at occasionally wearing a hardhat while doing his YMCA circlejerk dance to whip up the nationalist fervor of steelworkers and people who like to think of themselves as kind of like steelworkers through cultural and geographic adjacency.

"The White House on Wednesday touted achieving a ceasefire and said the United States 'exceeded' all military objectives in Iran within the initially projected time frame."https://t.co/5Ti64Ftr6t

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) April 9, 2026

Yup. This is how Karoline Leavitt earns your tax dollars: Posting Breitbart articles that, through careful wordsmithing, move the goalposts backward to a certain yard line so that a touchdown is scored when the team’s actually 4th and 21 and the quarterback is naked from the waist down and screaming at ESPN sideline reporters when he’s supposed to setting the offense up for a snap.

Complete piece of shit Israeli dictator Benjamin Netanyahu must continue facing trial now that there’s a “ceasefire”-ish situation in the fight that he and convicted felon President Trump started with Iran but cannot finish, Reuters reports on something for “Bibi” to look forward to.

“With the lifting of the state of emergency and the return of the judicial system to work, hearings will resume as usual,” a statement from the ​Israeli ​courts said, adding that they would take place ​between Sundays and Wednesdays, just wait until Trump learns the judges’ names.

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered loser MAGA gubernatorial candidate and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to halt his “investigation” into the November 2025 Prop 50 referendum and to preserve all the ballots the asshole seized in his lame attempt to gain convicted felon President Trump’s endorsement – which he ended up losing to douchebag Limey former Fox News host Steve Hilton anyway – the AP reports. Bianco is “hereby ordered to pause the investigation into the November 2025 special election and preserve all seized items,” the order reads.

It’s not clear why this Nazi hell witch seems all kinds of twisted over the Times report from earlier Wednesday, kind of feels like, well, she’s actually all kinds of twisted about it and that rather than ignoring it she needs to react and thus elevate the salience of an account portraying convicted felon President Trump as plainly worked by Israeli hucksters that everyone else in the room saw through.

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” posted the embodiment of American’s fighting spirit on Wednesday, Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Back in the real world it appears the Orange God Emperor’s meeting with Mark Rutte went poorly.

“Nalpac is voluntarily recalling DTF Sexual Chocolate it purchased and resold. The products have been found to contain sildenafil and tadalafil. Nalpac is not the manufacturer of this product.”

“Sildenafil and tadalafil are the active ingredients in the FDA-approved prescription drugs Viagra and Cialis, respectively, used to treat erectile dysfunction. FDA approval of Viagra and Cialis is restricted to use under the supervision of a licensed health care professional. These undeclared ingredients could interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs, such as nitroglycerin, and may lower blood pressure to dangerous levels for those individuals who use prescriptions drugs which contain nitrates. Nalpac has not received any reports of adverse events related to this recall,” says an FDA recall notice posted Tuesday that probably isn’t going to reach the guys who bought male sexual enhancement chocolates. So maybe they gotta just let this one go. Cards gotta fall, fellas.

Honduran-born Army wife Annie Ramos, 22, arrested last week just after she and her husband, 23 year-old Staff Sgt Matthew Blank, had moved into their quarters on Fort Polk in Louisiana, was released from the gulag Tuesday because the Trump Reich cannot take the sustained heat of public scrutiny. This was yet another particularly egregious case as Annie was fucking not even two years old when some shitbag judge had issued a “final order of removal” that obviously she’d had no idea about, they just gotten married last month, and Matthew is to deploy next month.

DHS told the New York Times that Annie had had been arrested “after she attempted to enter a military base. She has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge. This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law,” that last part obviously being a troll of the libs (again). At the same time and just as obvious is that it was not actually that big of a deal if they fucking released her four days later. They pussied out because of the scrutiny.

Keep speaking up when you see someone who did nothing wrong getting interned. It’s that simple.