A Florida woman faces a charge of threats to conduct a mass shooting or act of terrorism after she ended a call with a Blue Cross-Blue Shield customer service agent who had just denied her health insurance claim by saying “delay, deny, depose – you people are next,” ABC News reports.

Briana Boston, a 42-year-old registered Dem living in Lakeland, Florida was cuffed at some point after the Tuesday call in which she echoed the “deny,” “depose,” “defend” scratched into the bullet casings left at the scene of Luigi Mangione’s assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, themselves a slight bastardized version of the title of a 2010 book by Rutgers Law Prof Jay Feinman titled “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why insurance companies don’t pay claims and what you can do about it” (which was apparently more about home and auto than health insurance).

Would like to write that hitting a woman fucked over by her health insurance company with a non-specific threat like this – Boston didn’t say she was going to come kill them – but we wouldn’t let the same ambiguity get in the way if this were some MAGA terrorist saying something similar to a Dem politician. That said, this is the second time in two days Blue Cross Blue Shield’s denial of a claim is in the news here and a company (entire industry) confident in its position doesn’t start acting so publicly fearfully in response to the every day people suffering needlessly due to their policies.

They’re afraid and people are catching on. Time to leverage that fear against them.

“While traveling with a bipartisan Congressional delegation in Luxembourg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi sustained an injury during an official engagement and was admitted to the hospital for evaluation. Speaker Emerita Pelosi is currently receiving excellent treatment from doctors and medical professionals. She continues to work and regrets that she is unable to attend the remainder of the CODEL engagements to honor the courage of our service members during one of the greatest acts of American heroism in our nation’s history. Speaker Emerita Pelosi conveys her thanks and praise to our veterans and gratitude to people of Luxembourg and Bastogne for their service in World War II and their role in bringing peace to Europe. Speaker Emerita Pelosi was personally and officially honored to travel with the distinguished delegation, many of whom had family who fought in World War II including her uncle, Johnny. She looks forward to returning home to the US soon,” says Pelosi’s office in a statement

“While Donald Trump publicly campaigned for the presidency on a platform of raising tariffs on Mexico in order to force companies to move to the US, his company was quietly doing business in Mexico, applying for a trademark for a Trump Tower in the country. The trademark application, filed on September 9, 2024 and recently unearthed by CREW, would cover the phrase Trump Tower for real estate and financial matters. It is currently pending,” says a CREW press release.

“The threatened tariffs, which could ‘cripple trade’ with Mexico, are reportedly seen as part of a larger negotiation tactic between Trump and America’s southern neighbor. As Trump now has a vested interest in the Mexican government approving his trademark request and future permits for a hypothetical Trump Tower in the country, any policy negotiations his administration has with regards to Mexico must be viewed through the lens of how it could give his business leverage. During his first term, the Trump administration held off on enacting tariffs on Argentina while it considered his trademark applications, only placing them after they had been approved. A potential Trump Tower in Mexico would signal a further international expansion of Trump’s business empire. Since leaving office, Trump’s business has signed agreements to develop properties in Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Just this week, Eric Trump announced a new Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia.”

It’s not clear if CNN’s conservative diversity hire Scott Jennings actually believes the shit that comes out of his mouth. He probably doesn’t and it’s just a play for clout, maybe some ambassadorship in the Trump Administration or a future career in Congress. Whether or not he’s angling for a spot at Fox News we don’t know, but at least from our perspective, unless it came with an insane pay raise he couldn’t refuse, that would be a stupid move. Just like a MAGA troll who realizes there’s no fun being in an echo chamber in the ongoing lib exodus from Twitter and creates a Blue Sky account, Jennings would, for at least another few years, do well to stay on CNN where the friction is.

That doesn’t mean he’s actually good at this, as on Thursday night he just looked like a fucking worm while hilariously trying to sell the rest of the panel on the idea that Americans – who just rejected a competent leader from a professionally-run administration because the cost of eggs – will put up with more inflation and accept convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s admission that he can’t actually do much if anything to bring them back down after promising that repeatedly on the campaign trail. “I think there may be some elasticity in the American people on accepting certain short term economic issues if it means” the “open borders” circlejerk will be fixed, Jennings said.

Lol. In the next segment, which actually took up more of the above clip, Jennings explained to his fellow panelists that conservatives are justified in being angry over white rookie WNBA star Caitlin Clark acknowledging that the league was built by Black women because the league lost $40 million last year, thus it’s clear Clark has been captured by the “woke mob.” Great stuff on CNN primetime.

Cops in West Virginia on Thursday arrested state Delegate Joseph DeSoto for threatening to murder Republican state House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, and state Delegates Michael Hite, Pat McGeehan, Chuck Horst, Bill Ridenour, Wayne Clark, and Joe Funkhouser following what WV Metro News describes as “a confrontation over whether DeSoto had misrepresented key aspects of his biography and after delegates questioned his fitness to serve in the upcoming legislative session.”

DeSoto, a 61 year-old freshman sworn in on December 1st and now currently being held on $300,000 bond for a single count of threatening terrorist acts, is basically the George Santos of West Virginia, with people openly questioning whether he ever actually served in the military, went to medical school, and is licensed to practice as a physician as he claims, lol. Per the criminal complaint against the Republican who abruptly changed his registration to Democrat just prior to his arrest, DeSoto wrote in an email to an unspecified person that the lawmakers “play stupid games they are getting stupid awards… I am upset only with the eastern panhandle delegates. I have only begun….and won’t stop, I had a vision to destroy them from the angel of Moroni… Hite, Funkhouser, Horst and Wayne Clark… they can all go to hell, I will send them there as commanded.”

The state cop who wrote the complaint also included a text message exchange in which someone wrote to DeSoto to stop saying he’s going to kill people, to which the “Democrat” responded “I did say I am going to kill people… I said I am going what is necessary to put them from office.”

You can totally tell this guy’s a stealth liberal from the “vision of the Angel Moroni” part.

Chickenshit former Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad told basically no one he and his family were giving up the ghost and fleeing to Moscow on Saturday night as rebels flooded into the capital city of Damascus, buying him time to escape to safety since the news would have traveled fast, but also getting an unknown number of them killed after they were left behind, Reuters reports.

Assad didn’t even tell his younger brother, Maher, commander of the Styrian Army’s elite 4th Armored Division, about his exit plan, aides told Reuters. Maher flew a helicopter to Iraq and then to Russia. Assad’s cousins Ehab and Eyad Makhlouf weren’t so lucky, as sources told the wire service the two were shot dead in their car as they tried to flee to Lebanon, hours after Assad flew to a Russian military base on the Mediterranean and then to Moscow aboard one of their planes.

Now-former Prime Minister Mohammed Jalali, who apparently escaped the country as well, told Saudi state media “In our last call, I told [Assad] how difficult the situation was and that there was huge displacement (of people) from Homs toward Latakia… that there was panic and horror in the streets. He replied: ‘Tomorrow, we will see… Tomorrow, tomorrow’, was the last thing he told me.”

Wisconsin man Ryan Borgwardt, who faked his death by leaving his kayak in the middle of a particularly deep lake, then biked to Madison, boarded a bus to Detroit, walked into Canada, flew to Uzbekistan to shack up with a woman he met online, then for whatever reason decided to admit it was all a sham to get out of his marriage, will soon be out of his marriage as wife Emily Borgwardt filed for a legal separation from him, claiming the marriage is “irretrievably broken,” the AP reports.

“The document doesn’t elaborate,” the AP writes as if readers can’t fill in the blanks on why Emily might not be so thrilled to have Ryan back in her life since he arrived in Wisconsin on Tuesday. Ryan faces a charge of obstructing a search for his body. He made bail, but told the judge he would be representing himself because he only had $20 left in his wallet. Maybe that was the reason he came home, that the Uzbekistani chick ripped him off. And the food probably kind of sucked too.

Journalists and editors in the mainstream media, who suffered numerous instances of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris refusing to make themselves available for interviews and press conferences during the last four years, will face a similar tumult during the next administration in the form of criminal subpoenas, investigations, and prosecutions from federal law enforcement if President-Elect Trump takes exception to the content of their stories, Rolling Stone reports.

“Oh, it’ll be brutal. Gloves off. We’ve learned our lessons from the first time and one lesson is you have got to be even more aggressive,” says a conservative lawyer close to the president-elect’s team, which will be a huge challenge to a press already reeling from when Harris ignored a Fox News reporter’s question about immigration policy while she was walking on an airport tarmac.

“Among committed Trumpists close to the president-elect, there has also been discussion of potentially creating new offices in the FBI or DOJ to focus exclusively on hunting for leaks and plugging the deluge of media leaks,” Rolling Stone writes, which echoes when Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer wrote in March that the New York Times and other top outlets hold “Trump and Biden to two different standards and are often too worried about seeming balanced to truly articulate the danger of Trump. Many online Democrats are too hard on the Times… The problems with the New York Times are endemic to most traditional political media. They have not figured out how to adjust their models and culture to cover someone like Trump,” an attack that Times editor Joe Kahn took very personally, telling Semafor that it’s not their job to help preserve a free press.

“I have a warning for any media outlet that says I wrongly, falsely accused this guy of physically accosting me, of assaulting me. That is defamation. So I would be walking on eggshells if I were you,” warned deeply unstable Congresswoman Nancy Mace on Thursday, already obviously kind of feeling the heat from blatantly fucking lying about being “assaulted” on Tuesday night.

Mustachioed Minnesota bedding entrepreneur Mike Lindell borrowed $1.6 million at a 409 percent annual rate from a lender in order to try to save his surprisingly still existent company, Business Insider reports citing a lawsuit in which Lindell accuses Cobalt Funding Solutions of “taking advantage” of “a cash-strapped business that needed funds quickly,” at a “usurious” interest rate.

The chances that Lindell first contacted Cobalt simply because he remembered them from when their commercials – back when Lindell could afford TV ads – would run during the same breaks on Newsmax, Fox News, and OANN are somewhere between 100 and 409 percent, by our estimates.

On a marginally more serious note here, how many blue collar employees of Lindell’s have lost their jobs since 2021 due to financial difficulties solely and singularly attributable to his obsession with the 2020 election? Has to be in the dozens, maybe hundreds, if he needs $1.6 million at 409 percent for a company that once had its own private jet to stay afloat. The pillows were made in the USA, in Minnesota, and Americans are (or were) stuffing and packaging the pillows and other products.

“At Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City (Blue KC), we are committed to the health and wellness of our members. Two of our primary responsibilities are to safeguard our members’ health information and protect their privacy. Because of this, we cannot talk about the specifics of this, or any other, case. In general, Blue KC offers multiple insurance plans at various price points, allowing members to choose what works best for their circumstances and budgets. Differences in plans can include things such as smaller or larger provider networks (how many medical providers are in network for the plan), prescription drug coverage (some plans only include coverage for generic medications), and higher or lower copays and/or deductibles” and blah blah blah, says Blue Cross and Blue Shield in a statement responding to a request for comment from Fox 4 Kansas City.

Funny that, because the subject of Fox 4’s article, 23 year-old University of Kansas first year medical student Kaitlin Sy, was more than willing to share the details of the life-threatening internal bleeding disorder she suffers from and the topic of the article was how “Blue KC” told her “lol, no” when she put in a claim for medication that costing her $8,000/month out of pocket. So really Fox 4 wasn’t asking the folks at “Blue KC” anything whatsoever about her personal health situation, they were asking them why the fuck they would let a 23 year-old future physician die for being too poor.

Forget even the context of Luigi Mangione getting famous – which, rest assured, is mentioned in the story – and the fact that this article would be far less likely to have been printed and picked up by us if not for him (admittedly), who the fuck at “Blue KC” made this decision knowing Sy’s current career path? Like wouldn’t it just maaaaaybe be prudent to consider her a loss-leader, that if she had a positive experience with them despite not having the diamond plan that it might pay off for them a few years down the road, that they could have a woman on the inside? For a bunch of avaricious nihilists they sure seem pretty fucking incompetent at being forwardly avaricious and nihilistic.

Openly gay former Soros lieutenant Scott Bessent breezed past other potential nominees for Treasury Secretary all the way back in February when he published a chart purportedly showing a correlation between convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s poll numbers and stock market gains, the fat bastard told CNBC’s Jim Cramer after ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. Trump lies a lot, but it’s probably safe to take him at his word here.

Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI source that fed the agency a load of bullshit about President Joe Biden accepting bribes from who the fuck knows what Eastern European scumbag, the Republicans couldn’t even get their story straight, and who MAGA Congressman Brad Wenstrup claimed was the victim of a “two tiered justice system,” has reached a deal with Hunterghazi special counsel David Weiss and will plead guilty to causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation – as in that FD-1023 form the dipshits hailed as a “smoking gun” of the “Biden Crime Family” atrocities last year – as well as three counts of tax evasion added in a later indictment.

Think that about does it for Weiss as special counsel as Hunter’s been pardoned and thus case closed. He’s also still the US Attorney for Delaware, nominated by convicted felon President-Elect Trump in 2018 and kept in place by Biden who didn’t want to fire him while he was investigating Hunter, but it’s proooobably a safe bet Weiss won’t be welcomed back by the new Trump regime given that the fat fuck repeatedly tried to disown the federal prosecutor with a nonsensical “Blue Slip” excuse while Republicans in Congress raged at Weiss for allegedly going too easy on Hunter.

President-Elect Trump may have promoted a falsehood while campaigning, a comparison between a transcript of an August 2024 rally and his December Time Person of the Year interview reveals.

On August 14th, Trump told the crowd assembled in Asheville, North Carolina that “From the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again. We’re going to make it affordable again,” and “Prices will come down. You just watch. They’ll come down and they’ll come down fast. Not only with insurance, with everything,” among other pledges to tackle affordability issues affecting American households in the economic policy speech.

However during an interview this month with reporters from Time Magazine, Trump was asked “If the prices of groceries don’t come down, will your presidency be a failure?” to which he responded “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down. I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down. You know, the supply chain is still broken. It’s broken. You see it. You go out to the docks and you see all these containers and I own property in California, in Palos Verdes. They’re very nice. And I passed the docks, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, for 17 years, I saw containers and, you know, they’d come off and they’d be taken away – big areas, you know, you know, in that area, you know, where they have the big, the big ships coming in – big, the port. And I’d see this for years as I was out there inspecting property and things, because they own a lot in California.”

Emphasis added to the part where Trump said “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard,” as if to temper expectations of lower prices created by his campaign speech.

“We are not here to celebrate violence, but we do believe in the constitutional right of fair legal representation,” say whatever group organized the crowdfund on “Christian”-themed GoFundMe clone GiveSendGo for the very credibly accused killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Maybe “group” is even a stretch here. For all we know it could just be a single individual planning to abscond with the $45,000+ raised so far. But whatever happens, you can’t say they don’t have an eye for ironic trolling given the friggin name of the “movement” supporting Luigi Mangione, which is about as subtle as a bullet in its reference to similar January 6th-themed MAGA groups.

Then there’s the site they used: A few times in National Zero’s history we noted that, due to YouTube’s content algorithms squashing our videos and sometimes even hitting us with suspensions falsely accusing us of promoting violence, COVID conspiracy shit, 2020 election denialism, and so on, we began to post certain riskier clips on the lower-quality MAGA-centric video platform Rumble for our embeds here, the irony being that the mainstream platform was too restrictive for a left-leaning operation. Just as Rumble was purpose-built for right wing propagandists to have a space free of the “oppressive censorship” of YouTube, GiveSendGo was built to allow Red Staters, some of them straight up terrorists and/or Neo-Nazis, access to donations GoFundMe long ago prohibited, a similar horseshoe-ing of non-MAGA politics into MAGA-centric spaces (Even if Mangione’s idiosyncratic personal politics appear to be more Trump fandom-adjacent than not, it’s still an extremely safe bet that the person(s) who launched this campaign – if it isn’t a scam – are leftists).

GiveSendGo campaigns accept “prayers” too, as you can see in the above. Mangione is managing a far better cash-to-prayer ratio than Capitol rioter Jenna “Private Jet Karen” Ryan did in 2021.

“Today, President Biden announced that he is granting clemency to nearly 1,500 Americans – the most ever in a single day – who have shown successful rehabilitation and a strong commitment to making their communities safer. The President is commuting the sentences of close to 1,500 individuals who were placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and who have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities. He is also pardoning 39 individuals who were convicted of non-violent crimes. These actions represent the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history,” says the White House in a statement Thursday.

“Together, these actions build on the President’s record of criminal justice reform to help reunite families, strengthen communities, and reintegrate individuals back into society. The President has issued more sentence commutations at this point in his presidency than any of his recent predecessors at the same point in their first terms. He is also the first President ever to issue categorical pardons to individuals convicted of simple use and possession of marijuana, and to former LGBTQI+ service members convicted of private conduct because of their sexual orientation. In the coming weeks, the President will take additional steps to provide meaningful second chances and continue to review additional pardons and commutations.”

Convicted felon President-Elect Trump has invited Chinese communist dictator Xi Jingping to attend his inauguration ceremony next month, CBS News reports on a total America First move.

The city of Bonnieville, Kentucky officially ceased to exist on Sunday, the result of the consent of its governed revoked by a 67 to 60 margin last month, the polity breaking up with each other and turning over its assets to Hart county, the sense of community and belonging fluttered into the aether like particulate motes of ash drifting off a Virginia Slim, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports.

Maybe there could be a movement to encourage states to disband similarly. Like if there were a campaign to get, say, Missouri and Alabama to pass referenda to dissolve and become unincorporated territories of the United States directly administered by the federal government wouldn’t that be kind of a win-win? The people would pay considerably less in taxes and the rest of us wouldn’t have to deal with stupid hicks like Tommy Tuberville in Congress. Plus, much like the people of Bonneville nothing about their mailing address changes. It still says “Bonnieville, KY” on their Medicaid ID cards, just like it would still say “Missouri sector” and “Alabama sector” on their unincorporated residential-homesteader permits issued by the US Department of the Interior.

And the Missourians and Alabamans who still want to participate in democracy will be allowed to set up their own systems to elect their own citizen representatives to send to Congress to lobby real states’ lawmakers on Department of the Interior policy changes like improved hiring standards for the Blackwater mercenaries that replaced their sheriff’s departments and politely asking the US Marines to limit their use of what’s left of the former state capitols for artillery training exercises.

“The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice. I just don’t know what happened to him. We will now restore the Rule of Law for all Americans. Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America. They have used their vast powers to threaten and destroy many innocent Americans, some of which will never be able to recover from what has been done to them,” posted convicted felon President-Elect Trump on Wednesday, going on for considerably longer hailing Kash Patel as the answer to all his self-inflicted problems, but fuck him and his persecution complex.

Also, not like we need to point this out, but the FBI had nothing to do with his impeachments.

“Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and James E Dennehy, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (‘FBI’), and Jessica S Tisch, Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, announced the return today of a three-count Indictment charging ALON ALEXANDER, OREN ALEXANDER, and TAL ALEXANDER (the ‘ALEXANDER BROTHERS’), with sex trafficking offenses. The defendants were arrested this morning in the Southern District of Florida and will be presented in federal court in Miami, Florida,” says a Justice Department press release.

The release states that from “at least in or about 2010, up to and including at least in or about 2021, the ALEXANDER BROTHERS worked together and with others to engage in sex trafficking, including by repeatedly drugging, sexually assaulting, and raping dozens of female victims. The ALEXANDER BROTHERS, who reside primarily in New York and Miami, Florida, have considerable social and financial connections, including through OREN ALEXANDER and TAL ALEXANDER’s positions as prominent real estate agents focused on ultra-luxury markets. The ALEXANDER BROTHERS used their wealth and prominent positions in real estate to create and facilitate opportunities to sexually assault women. To carry out and facilitate their sex trafficking scheme, the ALEXANDER BROTHERS used deception, fraud, and coercion to cause victims to travel with them or meet them in private locations for various trips and events. The ALEXANDER BROTHERS and others identified women to invite to these events through, among other things, social media, dating applications, in person encounters, or through the use of party promoters who would recruit women for these events.”

Further down there’s mentions of copious supplying of date rape drugs and other narcotics to the victims to either knock them out or get them high as shit so the brothers – two-thirds of whom are listed as registered Republicans (the other one’s “unaffiliated“) – could more easily overpower them.

And they’re not the “Property Brothers” from the douchey reality show on HGTV or whatever the hell stupid cable channel it is. Here it’s a generic term that we don’t mind confusing our readers with.