Birds of a feather….  Promotions for Donald Trump’s just completed roundtable in Detroit included the announcement of a new local endorsement:  former Democratic Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the Detroit News reports.  Kilpatrick owes Trump:  after his failed coup attempt, Trump commuted Kilpatrick’s 28-year prison sentence, imposed after Kilpatrick was convicted in 2013 on 24 federal counts including wire fraud and racketeering.

“I can never thank President Trump enough for what he’s done for me and my family by giving me freedom,” Kilpatrick said. “But I believe this election and the issues involved are personal to every family and every person in America.”

Trump’s campaign is making overt attempts to endear Trump to the Black community by touting his criminal record, claiming that it makes Black people relate to him more.  There’s no evidence that is true, and it’s likely less true when the individual you’re touting as an endorser was convicted of public corruption

Fat former President Trump has a double-header of appearances scheduled for Saturday, one a “roundtable” with Black MAGAchurch pastors and just a regular rally for his fans. Should be awful.

US military officials are thinking that purported ISIS global leader Abdulqadir Mumin might not be okay after a May 31 airstrike on suspected militants in Somalia, NBC News reports.

They know they definitely turned at least three ISIS guys into applesauce during the strike, they just aren’t sure yet if Mumin was mixed in with the applesauce. They are more sure however that the Somalian ISIS leader Mumin is (probably was) also the global leader of ISIS as the terrorist pseudo-state. Intel indicated that within the last year ISIS decided to move to Africa after one too many of their Iraq and Syria-based leaders got turned into applesauce by American hardware over the years.

From CNN’s outline of their rules for the June 27th Biden/Trump debate:

🇺🇸 “The 90-minute debate will include two commercial breaks, according to the network, and campaign staff may not interact with their candidate during that time.” Fair enough, we guess.

🇺🇸 “Both candidates agreed to appear at a uniform podium, and their podium positions will be determined by a coin flip.” Why the positions of the podiums is important was not made clear. Shouldn’t it just be Biden-left, Trump-right corresponding with their respective “wings” in politics?

🇺🇸 “Microphones will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak. While no props or pre-written notes will be allowed on the stage, candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water.” Would be better if they were allowed to (within reasonable limits) read verbatim from each other’s public statements, but whatever.

It’s not clear why CNN couldn’t just post the rules themselves. They also kind of got scooped by the New York Times, who earlier on Saturday morning provided additional details like “President Biden and former President Donald J Trump will each have two minutes to answer questions – followed by one-minute rebuttals and responses to the rebuttals. Red lights visible to the candidates will flash when they have five seconds left, and turn solid red when time has expired.”

“Both men will be rusty. Neither has debated since their last clash in 2020,” the Times writes, of course failing to mention that Trump had at least seven opportunities to shake off said rust and deliberately chose not to. They do however note that Trump is not undergoing any formal debate preparations with someone standing in for Biden like Chris Christie did in 2020 (his performance reportedly seriously fucking pissed off Trump by bringing up Jared and Ivanka’s graft from the White House). This in contrast with Biden, who has been prepping with former Chief of Staff Ron Klain.

Brainwormed candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign is on “life support” financially and would be in a hole if not for $10 million kicked in by unhinged gold digger running mate Nicole Shanahan as fundraising with gimmicks like raffle tickets has dried up, Politico reports.

“There have been a lot of people who have told me at a very high level – donors, who can really make donations that are meaningful,” said pro-Kennedy PAC co-founder Tony Lyons, adding that what few donors he’s been in touch with “have been very clear that they want to see that Bobby is going to be on the ballot in most or all states, and they want to see polling numbers that are higher.”

Jill Stein’s 2012 campaign manager Ben Manski was less sugar-coaty about the situation. “I’ll explain it this way: I have certainly never heard of a Green Party presidential campaign slowing down in terms of fundraising at this point, or at any point. They tend to start small and build up.”

Kind of weird, right? We were to understand that polling shows Brainworms is destined to be a major factor in the 2024 election by sheer strength of the Kennedy name but here we are with no actual money going into his campaign to match the “enthusiasm” behind him. It’s almost like his 10 percent or whatever he’s getting in polls is coming from respondents who are unlikely to even vote.

• Had the Baltimore Key Bridge collapse happened under the previous administration, I’m convinced no aid would have been released until the name of the replacement bridge was committed to honor Trump.  
• Yep, Hunter Biden was guilty.  Honestly, we knew he was guilty of the crime he was charged with, but I don’t think he merited prosecution.  He acted out of fear stemming from addiction, not criminal intent, and he’s been sober for years.  See how that works?  We can do seemingly contrary things:  think a verdict is proper, feel a charge is unjust, and not see it as the disintegration of our Constitutional government.  We’ll just work to correct things in the future.
• Since I bought my first home, I have flown a flag–most times, the Stars and Stripes, although allowances given for the occasional team flags and the 2016-2021 display of the Maryland flag–and I would never think to deface it or dishonor it by flying it improperly.  When I fly the American flag, I’m flying our flag, not mine.  But it’s my responsibility to honor it.
• Marge compares him to Christ.  Republicans on the Hill welcome him back to the site of the insurrection like he’s the Prodigal Son returning, complete with a cake.  His supporters say his Manhattan conviction makes him a martyr.  The messiah myth is strong in the cult. 
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CLXXVII”

Federal investigator and Boeing officials are looking into a May Southwest Airlines flight from Phoenix to Oakland when the plane made an unexpected “Dutch roll” where the plane seems to slide side-to-side midflight, an aviation move known as yawing, the Washington Post reports.

The maneuver is rarely dangerous to a commercial airline flight or the passengers in the plane, although the unexpected move can cause some discomfort and panic.  The Southwest pilots were able to quickly regain control of the aircraft after it experienced a few rolls.

The May flight may have experienced heavy winds causing the plane to experience turbulence, but investigators are looking into the possibility that a software glitch caused the plane’s control systems to malfunction.  Aviation engineers note that the 737 Max-8 is equipped with automatic yaw dampeners, devices that could cause yawing if malfunctioning.

We’re not going to give a lot of air to the parole-compliant rallies Donald Trump holds because there’s really nothing new in any of them; it’s not like he’s debuting policies.  But when he discloses his new campaign strategy, it’s worth nothing, and reminder voters they’re in an abusive relationship seems like an interesting move:

“I actually tell our people, ‘We don’t need your vote.  We got so many votes, we don’t need ’em.’  We just don’t want to see votes stolen.  We don’t want to say, ‘Y’know, steal the vote.’ We’re not letting it happen.  We’re not gonna let it happen.  Not happening again.  Our country can’t take it, and we’re not gonna let it happen again.”

Another Republican House member has announced he won’t seek reelection in 2024, with Louisiana’s Garret Graves saying he won’t run for a sixth term rather than face a fellow Republican in a redrawn district, the Washington Post reports.

Graves’ Sixth Congressional District was redrawn after the Supreme Court determined a map giving Black voters a second majority district should be used, meaning Graves would have to run in a district where he would likely lose, or shift to a GOP majority district where he would face a sitting Republican.   He becomes the 30th House Republican this session to either resign or announce they would not run for reelection after this term.

Houston Bankruptcy Court Judge Christopher Lopez spared the conspiracy platform Infowars from liquidation, allowing host Alex Jones to stay on the air even after ordering Jones to liquidate all his assets to pay the Sandy Hook families, the New York Times reported.

The term “Sandy Hook families” actually represents two different groups:  one sued Jones in Texas seeking to drain him of all his resources and get a maximum financial settlement; the other sued in Connecticut wanting to dismantle Jones’s network and get him off the air.  The judge went with the path laid out by the Texas contingent, making Jones get rid of all personal wealth and commit to paying future income to the families, while allowing the network to give him income.

Apparently, George Washington didn’t cut down all the cherry trees he came across.  Archeologists uncovered a previously unknown stash of 35 bottles of preserved cherries in a cellar at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, CBS News reports.

The bottles were buried in the mansion’s basement and unearthed in the course of current renovations, including foundation inspections.  Of the 35 bottles found, around 27 are still intact; the condition of the contents are unknown.

“The bottles and contents are a testament to the knowledge and skill of the enslaved people who managed the food preparations from tree to table, including Doll, the cook brought to Mount Vernon by Martha Washington in 1759 and charged with oversight of the estate’s kitchen,” Mount Vernon officials said in the statement recognizing that the majority of labor done to develop and upkeep the estate was done by slaves.

Ladies, gentlemen and all genteel persons, we come to bury Alex Jones, not to praise him.  The steroid-sauced founder of the Infowars misinformation network will liquidate all his personal assets, including his stake in the media company, to pay down the $1 billion defamation judgment against him held by the Sandy Hook families, CNN reports, after a bankruptcy judge approved the plan.

In a separate case, the judge overseeing both cases, Judge Christopher Lopez, will determine if the company that owns Infowars, the Jones-controlled Free Speech Systems, must itself be liquidated in its own bankruptcy filing, with the proceeds going to settle the defamation debt.  “This is probably the end of Infowars here very, very soon,” Jones told reporters on Friday, adding, “It’s just the beginning of my fight against tyranny.”

Each of my 7 grandkids is a precious gift from God. But sometimes families need help.

You can count on this grandpa to always protect IVF.

Watch my latest campaign ad👇 pic.twitter.com/UEf5ByrFeo

— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) June 14, 2024

Unsurprisingly, the Department of Justice said it would not prosecute Attorney General Merrick Garland for contempt of Congress for his refusal to turn over the audio tapes of interviews with President Joe Biden for the Special Counsel investigation into a handful of unauthorized government documents found on his private property, the Associated Press reports.

The DOJ had already turned over a complete transcript of the interview, done by Republican Special Counsel Robert Hur, and the White House has claimed executive privilege to deny House Republicans the audio, which they intended to release after editing it, presumably.

As many readers are aware, for most of National Zero’s first year and a half after launch we (mostly Spartan though) copied and pasted from other news sites to rapidly deliver content in a half-assed attempt to duplicate the “wire” or “topic-based community” model seen elsewhere until we ditched it in late 2021, with some limited exceptions. Among those carveouts are government agency press releases like Thursday’s announcement from the Justice Department on the arrest of Texas MAGA terrorist Timothy Muller, who had texted an FBI agent involved with the original investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, sending the threats just hours after Hunter was found guilty Tuesday.

The cursory skimming and copypasta of the release was a mistake, as a closer read of it and, more importantly, Muller’s arrest affidavit reveal where this demented fucking freak and his obviously very steady diet of right wing media, almost certainly centered on Fox News, really shine.

Three of the texts, the word “maggot” standing in for a word it rhymes with and starts with “f”:

We had assumed that (not maggot) was actually “fucker” on Thursday, so silly us for editing the press release without considering the homophobia endemic to the far right. And having missed just how badly these nebulous, meaningless bullshit sound bytes inspired by the “Twitter files” circlejerk from Jim Jordan and Sean Hannity and the rest of the MAGA Cinematic Universe have been internalized in the fanbase with that insane “disenfranchise 75 million Americans” line.

Here’s Tennessee MAGA Congressman Andy Ogles, no stranger himself to being a complete piece of shit, claiming he’s going to be introducing a bill to mandate that Joe Biden be tested for drugs to enhance his “cognitivity,” which is not a valid word in our spellcheck nor in a game of Scrabble.

“Calling all boating Patriots! Dec [sic] out your boats, seadoos [sic] jetskis and anything that floats with Trump flags and head out to Thompson Bay at 11am – let’s support our President for his birthday – Abide by all boating laws… just show up” says a screenshot of an event set for Lake Havasu, Arizona. It may have gone on longer to warn Antifa scuba terrorists to stay away.

In a Daily Beast preview of his memoir On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, hitting stores next week, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Chief Dr Anthony Fauci writes that convicted felon former President Trump began to berate him starting on June 3rd, 2020, when “cell phone rang and the caller – the president – started screaming at me.”

Earlier that day Fauci had told a reporter that the then-still in development vax would require boosters, which is normal considering flu vaccines are the same, which ended up being “wrongly reported on Twitter and in some media outlets as the Covid vaccine protecting people only for a very short time… It was quite a phone call. The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him. He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse.”

“He added that the stock market went up only six hundred points in response to the positive phase 1 vaccine news and it should have gone up a thousand points and so I cost the country ‘one trillion fucking dollars. I have a pretty thick skin, but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.” Trump later had someone else apologize for him, which Fauci knows is going to piss Donald off for saying publicly.

In an interview conducted last week but printed on Friday for some reason, convicted felon former President Trump told Semafor he has “so many Black friends that if I were a racist, they wouldn’t be friends, they would know better than anybody, and fast. They would not be with me for two minutes if they thought I was racist – and I’m not racist!” in reply to reporter Kadia Goba’s question on how he responds to Black voters who call him racist… Since there’s plenty of evidence he is.

The whole context of the interview was his campaign’s not terribly well-executed attempt to appeal to Black voters whom, in many cases genuinely, suffered abuses at the hands of the justice system.