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.

The DNC on Friday already has 10 billboards rented in Milwaukee to remind locals that convicted felon former President Trump called their city “horrible” on Thursday, Politico Playbook reports.

This is the second time in a week that Trump has suggested increasing legal immigration.

Sounds like Trump’s second term will be great for corporations, immigrants, and Israel… pretty much exactly like his first term. https://t.co/qq3aJZPNrq

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) June 13, 2024

Okay, we kind of lied in the headline. Niger’s top court, recently established by the ruling junta following last year’s coup is actually called the “State Court,” not the “Supreme Court.”

But the rest of it is accurate, as the AP reports that the Nigerien State Court on Friday ruled former President Mohamed Bazoum can face trial for high treason and undermining national security, the same alleged offenses for which he was deposed and later arrested when he tried to flee the turbulent West African country. Outsiders such as Human Rights Watch have decried that the proceedings so far have been marred by serious irregularities and that Bazoum is being screwed by lack of access to counsel, ability to present evidence, and to be heard before an independent court.

The West African regional bloc ECOWAS’s highest court last year also called for Bazoum to be released and restored to office, which might kind of indicate that this really is a miscarriage of justice – whether or not Bazoum is a good guy or was a decent enough leader – and that the soldiers who overthrew him were a bunch of fucking punks and probably traitors themselves. The country was a front and Bazoum a security partner in the West’s fight against ISIS – the only one in the region, per the AP. Since the coup however all US and French troops have been expelled.

Convicted felon former President Trump’s team of scumbag lawyers this week bitched mightily at President Joe Biden, former lawyer Michael Cohen, and pornstar Stormy Daniels in a little-noticed filing citing more bullshit reasons why the gag order still in place after the Manhattan 2016 election interference trial should be lifted ahead of Donald’s sentencing next month, ABC News reports.

“On May 31, following carefully scripted remarks about the verdict at a press conference, President Biden offered a disturbing grin to the gathered media cameras when asked whether President Trump is his ‘political prisoner,'” the lawyers wrote in the filing, once again acting as if the gag order prohibits Trump from campaigning against his opponent. Crying about those whom the order actually prevents Donald from shitposting about, the filing also mentions how Stormy Daniels told the Daily Mail that Melania Trump should leave her unfaithful slob of a husband and less specifically bemoaned Michael Cohen’s constant podcasting and other media appearances since the verdict.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin’s 4th Congressional District–which includes parts of Milwaukee County–highlights the irony of Donald Trump complaining about crime in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention will be held in July, after Trump is sentenced after his conviction in his election interference hush money trial.

“Again, I don’t know many people in Milwaukee who have 34 felony counts against him,” Moore comments.  “So our crime rate is sure gonna go up when he joins us in Milwaukee this July.”

Hunter Biden dropped a computer fraud and data theft lawsuit against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Robert Costello he filed after Giuliani started distributing a hard drive of data allegedly taken from a laptop at a Wilmington computer repair shop, NBC News reports.

Biden’s lawsuit contended that Giuliani and Costello illegally obtained, manipulated and distributed data from Biden’s “devices or storage platforms.”  Biden withdrew the lawsuit because Giuliani is in bankruptcy court, and nothing could be decided until that process finishes.  “As Giuliani is in bankruptcy and agreed to have the case waiting for when he is done, it made no sense to continue it in a non-bankruptcy court until that happens,” a source close to Biden said.

While Biden has never acknowledged ownership of the computer found at the Wilmington repair shop owned by a legally-blind tam fancier, officials have confirmed some of the documents being distributed are authentic but no agency has authenticated the “laptop” nor have they authenticated all the documents claiming to be from the laptop.

“Democrats are also hitting you on this comment you made about Milwaukee, the host city for the RNC for the convention and they seem to believe that you said it was a horrible city,” the Fox stenographer says plaintively as she tries to give Donald Trump a huge opportunity to walk back his insults of the Wisconsin city on national television.  “Can you just nip this in the bud and clarify what you meant?” she begs, obviously trying to give him an opportunity to please, say something nice about Milwaukee.

“Well, I think it was very clear what I meant,” Trump responds, buttering up his size 9-narrow loafer before inserting it in his mouth and not praising the host city.  “I said we’re very concerned with crime.”

A new study found 43% of American gun owners keep their firearms loaded and half of the people who keep their guns loaded do not keep the loaded weapons stored securely, an extreme danger particularly that leads to children’s deaths, ABC News reports. The leading cause of death in children under the age of 19 is weapons, with accidental shootings and suicides as two of the largest subsegments.

In the Center for Disease Control and Prevention study, households in eight states were questioned for the study:  Alaska, California, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Oklahoma.  Safe storage practices varied across the country, but households in North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Nevada had the highest rates of unsafe gun storage.