A panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the latest Congressional district map for Louisiana, saying that an extremely gerrymandered new district designed by the Republican legislature to get a Black majority was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered.  The state’s original Congressional map had five majority-white Congressional districts and one majority Black, even though more than 40% of the state is non-white.  It’s unclear what this decision, which saw two Trump appointed judges outvoting a Clinton appointee, will have on the 2024 election where individual seats could be the margin between Majority and Minority Party in the House.

“Mr Clark did not explain his actions to the Hearing Committee, instead invoking the Fifth Amendment. Certainly, he can defend himself here however he chooses. But that does not relieve him ‘from recognizing the seriousness of the misconduct that led to’ this proceeding.”

“Indeed, lawyers can both mount a vigorous defense while acknowledging mistakes and pledging to do things differently if given the opportunity. From the outset of these proceedings, Mr Clark has refused to engage with the facts and the actual allegations against him but has instead treated the process as though it were a totalitarian show trial. His Answer addressed none of the salient facts alleged in the Specification of Charges. Instead, it raised 54 affirmative defenses, including ‘ODC’s Prosecution Here is Political in Nature,’ ‘ODC’s Collusion with Congress Violates the Separation of Power,’ ‘ODC May Not Violate the Confidentiality of the Investigative Stage of the Disciplinary Process or Try Its Case in the Press,’ ‘ODC’s Filing of Charges Occurred at Least in Part to Penalize Respondent for Exercising His Constitutional Rights, a Course of Conduct that Violates Due Process and the First Amendment,’ and ‘Res Judicata/Preclusion’ [based on President Trump’s acquittal at his second impeachment trial]. Needless to say, no evidence was ever adduced to support any of these claims,” writes the DC Bar Association’s Disciplinary Counsel team in their conclusion on Trump toady former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark’s misconduct proceedings, adding they request that “the Hearing Committee adopt these proposed findings of fact, conclude that Mr Clark violated the Rules as charged, and recommend that he be disbarred.” Womp womp.

MSNBC correspondent Lisa Rubin, who spent Tuesday in the Manhattan courtroom where Donald Trump’s trial is ongoing, reports that Trump has frequently been seen sleeping during the trial, missing long chucks of testimony. Rubin lists some of the way Trump’s lawyer’s are trying to keep him awake, including giving him papers to scan through and keeping an aide nearby to jostle him if his head droops. Rubin notes Trump’s apparent “exhaustion” as he just sits at the table.

Fat former President Trump really lost his shit over being found in contempt of court on Tuesday, writing “This is a total Witch Hunt. Hours of sitting down and listening to nothing except EXONERATION AND LIES. The Trial is going like a speeding bullet, because the Judge is working hard to make all of his friends happy. Merchan is Rigged, Crooked and above all, and without question, CONFLICTED. It’s a disgrace to our Country – They’ve taken away my Right to Free Speech. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!” in a Truth Social post following the rough go of it.

The “nothing except EXONERATION AND LIES” is kind of self-contradictory, as was his earlier rant outside the courtroom in which he screamed that Judge Merchan is “rushing this case through,” but also that “somebody just told me they never sat for such a long period of time in a courthouse before. It’s ridiculous.” And yeah it is ridiculous to say that because defendants, lawyers, plaintiffs, judges, bailiffs, and others sit in that courthouse for lengthy trials all the time. Every day, really.

This is Joe Biden’s America.

This is Joe Biden’s campus chaos. pic.twitter.com/rh9dntZVIj

— GOP (@GOP) April 30, 2024

The woke college campuses populated by spoiled elitist brats who have no goddamned idea what it’s like to have to get up in the morning and put in a hard day’s work like real Americans do every day have now been overrun by ultra leftist spoiled elitist brats cosplaying as pro-Palestinian anarchists with no idea what it’s like to have to worry about the price of eggs and gas like regular everyday working families outside their insular Ivory Tower world. This is Joe Biden’s America.

That’s right libs. All those politically correct pussy administrators and professors who hid behind moronic buzzwords like “microaggressions” and “pronouns” to disrespect the free speech rights of those who disagree are now being terrorized by the maniacs who disrupt campus life and refuse to respect the authority of the hardworking administrators and professors who run the place.

Joe Biden should do something to protect all of those Jewish students being harassed by the pro-Hamas leftist freaks. Also the Jews who go to Ivy League and other elite colleges are Democrat-voting dumbasses who hate Israel and their religion. But he won’t because he’s weak and doesn’t care about the regular Americans concerned about what’s happening on the campuses of elite colleges filled with woke Marxist students and snobby globalist professors who indoctrinate them.

In conclusion, this never would have happened if Biden had just called in the National Guard to shoot these protestors in the kneecaps. We need peace through strength to protect higher learning.

National Zero will resume our regular coverage now that we’ve conducted this detailed analysis of the official Republican Party response to the ongoing chaos at America’s elite universities.

Cambodian Army spokesman Major General Mao Phalla told media on Tuesday that some doofus improperly handling ammunition must have been the futz up that caused that huge, loud blowup that really bombed out on 20 soldiers over the weekend, the Associated Press reports on a total bummer.

Phalla said the doinker, who was probably nicknamed “Private Pinhead” by his squadmates before he bonked everything up for them permanently, was probably unloading a truck and stacked the crates on the ground, which is such a Pinhead move. Our theory however is that their famously cranky Sergeant “Hayseed” Hupaeng screamed “PRIVATE PINHEAD! What is with these goddamned filthy Thai porno magazines you got in yer bunk after I ordered you to remove all contraband readin’ materials?!? Drop and give me 50 naw!!!” and then he immediately dropped the crates causing the first of the many explosions in the chain reaction that leveled the entire Kampong Speu post.

“Earthquake activity increased sharply just after midnight on April 27 beneath the upper East Rift Zone (between Puhimau Crater and Hilina Pali road) and beneath Kīlauea caldera south of Halemaʻumaʻu. Earthquakes are occurring at depths of 1.5-2.5 km (1-1.5 miles) beneath the surface. Activity intensified yesterday and there have been over 360 earthquakes in the past 24 hours compared to 250 earthquakes in the previous 24 hours mostly beneath the upper East Rift Zone with fewer in the caldera south of Halemaʻumaʻu. In addition, the intensity of activity increased just after 11 p.m. on April 28, when several strong earthquakes including a magnitude 3.3 set off a swarm of earthquakes beneath the upper East Rift Zone that lasted for about 45 minutes. Activity returned to frequent small earthquakes less than magnitude 2 punctuated by occasional larger earthquakes with magnitudes between 2 and 3. The deeper earthquakes that were occurring 5-10 km (3-6 miles) directly beneath Kīlauea caldera over the past few weeks have ceased,” says a new bulletin from the US Geological Survey on seismic activity caused by mole people under Hawaii.

Upon closer inspection of the bulletin it doesn’t actually say “mole people.” In fact it seems to attribute the seismicity to movements of magma underneath an active volcano. Still it doesn’t definitely rule out new burrows being constructed by mole people either. And even if the quakes are being caused by magma there’s nothing that says that such an environment might be suitable for mole people as the lava could be a source for nutrients metabolized by the vast subterranean fields of lichens and fungi that their civilization subsides upon. So we’re comfortable with the headline.

Obviously complying with the lawsuit threat they got on Monday, Fox News began removing defamatory content such as “The Trial of Hunter Biden,” a six-part “mock trial” series presided over by reality TV Judge Joe Brown, from its “Fox Nation” streaming service, the Daily Beast reports.

The best part is that Fox tried to present themselves in a “bring it”-type show of defiance on Tuesday in a statement reading “Hunter Biden’s lawyers have belatedly chosen to publicly attack Fox News’ constitutionally protected coverage regarding their client. Mr Biden is a public figure who has been the subject of investigations by both the Department of Justice and Congress, has been indicted by two different US Attorney’s Offices in California and Delaware, and has admitted to multiple incidents of wrongdoing,” only to just quietly delete this stupid bullshit.

Non-lawyer Jesse Watters on Tuesday qualified his opinion on legal matters with a little self deprecation “but I play one on TV” before getting serious with a non-legal scenario in which the Loch Ness Monster was selected as a juror in New York City as a means of claiming it’s a violation of the Constitution for fat former President Trump to be prohibited from intimidating jurors.

Far right Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Tuesday denied a bid from the ACLU to stay Texas’s law requiring age verification to access pornographic websites. And yeah the headline’s lazy, because it’s not Texas that blocked PornHub but rather PornHub that blocked itself from Texas rather than have to force masturbators to upload an image of their drivers’ license to verify their age.

Millions of Americans dependent on the Affordable Connection Program for access to sites like National Zero, 4chan, Pornhub, Twitter (or “X” for douchebags), Rumble, Truth Social, M&Ms World, and other important resources for human knowledge could lose their connection in like hours if Congress doesn’t authorize a renewal immediately, Popular.Info’s Judd Legum reports.

Everyday, I fight the Democrat agenda destroying America and I fight for an America First Republican agenda.

Mike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House. Here is their official endorsement of his Speakership.

What slimy back room deal did Johnson make for the… pic.twitter.com/HGDyDzvJQH

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 30, 2024

Who the fuck actually knows with this racist conspiracy theory-loving maniac, but maybe the part in this stupid, too-long tweet that where she says “If the Democrats want to elect him Speaker (and some Republicans want to support the Democrats’ chosen Speaker), I’ll give them the chance to do it,” means she’s finally going to do this for real after more than a month of nothing but shit-talk.

“At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of Pro-Putin Republican obstruction. We will vote to table Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed,” says House Dem leadership in a statement, officially closing the door on decapitating Speaker Mike Johnson.

For his part Johnson responded to the statement by telling reporters that there were no deals cut and the only conversations he’s had with Dems was about just generally trying to avoid chaos.

A former senior manager at First Republic Bank will take the stand in Manhattan on Tuesday to testify about how former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen creatively accounted for the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels he was fronting for the Orange God Emperor in 2017 and 2018.

Trump says he wants to let states “monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion” pic.twitter.com/q8ICiZ5eRc

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 30, 2024

Good on them for taking their opponent’s own words and then using them against him, even when the transcript is so fucking long and insane and a depressing slog to try to read through.

The headline of this “article” is the entirety of the most recent Truth Social post by the 45th President of the United States, apparently inventing a new legal concept. Well guess we better fire up the live feed to cover the testimony soon and then kind of tail off when it gets boring.

Time Magazine on Tuesday published a full transcript of not one but two interviews with fat former President Trump (which says “83 MINUTE READ” at the top) focused on his plans for a restored regime and goddamn it is so chock-full of just utterly incomprehensible rambling bullshit.

We’re not going to get even close to summarizing the whole thing. Here’s an example of how bad this fucking interview is with his answer when the reporter points out his stupid plan to levy a 10 percent tariff on all imports would increase inflation: “No, I’ve seen. I’ve seen – I don’t believe it’ll be inflation. I think it’ll be lack of loss for our country. Because what will happen and what other countries do very successfully, China being a leader of it. India is very difficult to deal with. India – I get along great with Modi, but they’re very difficult to deal with on trade. France is frankly very difficult on trade. Brazil is very difficult on trade. What they do is they charge you so much to go in.”

That’s like half of a single paragraph. He just keeps going and going and going with this nonsense and it’s impressive that Time’s staff could sit through it twice AND THEN do a write-up.

I was on the phone with President Trump when I learned the Washington ComPost was inventing another fake news story. We had a good laugh at our sudden “rift.” My friendship with the Greatest President in American History has never been stronger!

The same people who called…

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) April 29, 2024

Continued after the cutoff: “The same people who called terrorists austere scholars and invented a Russian collusion hoax are, once again, fabricating a bogus story. Note to MAGA: this isn’t going to stop. The Fake News is going to work OVERTIME to try and divide us. Between now and November 5th, they will slander and attack anyone that is willing to sacrifice for our Nation. BUCKLE UP! Remember: whoever they are attacking, is who you should be supporting. We will not let them divide this Movement & stop us from Making America Great Again.” Take that Washington ComPost!

They’re probably going to stand by their reporting about Trump getting sick of Kari Lake’s bullshit.

Just two weeks into the Manhattan criminal trial that will probably last at least another month or so, disgraced former President Trump is privately starting to lose patience with his lead defense attorney, Todd Blanche, for what the New York Times reports, citing multiple sources, are all the reasons you’d expect: that Blanche “has not been following his instructions closely, and has been insufficiently aggressive. Mr Trump wants him to attack witnesses, attack what the former president sees as a hostile jury pool, and attack the judge, Juan M Merchan.” As in all the shit that a mental child incapable of understanding that someone with a law license and a professional reputation prefers to avoid, even while Blanche has managed to antagonize Merchan repeatedly.

Blanche’s allies tell the Times that – surprise! – the attorney “has an unsolvable client management problem,” as if they somehow expected this time to be different and the fat fuck was going to act responsibly while facing a jury deciding 34 felony counts. Blanche should at least feel fairly confident that he probably won’t end up an accused or convicted felon himself like Sidney “Kraken” Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb, Jeffrey Clark, Michael Cohen, Boris Epshteyn, Stefanie Lambert, John Eastman, Kenny Chesebro, and there are probably at least a half dozen others we didn’t mention here. Plus all the lawyers who came under state and federal criminal investigation, had to testify to grand juries, got sued, hit with bar complaints, so on and so forth. If all Blanche has to worry about is being fired in the middle of a trial then we’d call that a win for him.

The House Freedom Caucasians, a group never all that afraid of making themselves look like incompetent, ineffective assclowns, have decided to switch things up when it comes to Speaker Mike Johnson and aren’t moving forward on vacating him for now at least, Punchbowl News reports.

“I’m not convinced that if we go into a motion to vacate, we come out with a more conservative solution, so I think every person has to evaluate it,” said member Josh Breeshen on Oklahoma, weirdly admitting that they’re actually taking the pointless destructiveness of such an exercise into consideration rather than just jerking themselves off for the MAGA base and leaving everyone else to deal with the mess as usual. “It depends. We’re going to see what’s brewing for the rest of the summer into the fall,” said insurrectionist Scott Perry. “I think it’d be the fair thing to do, but if it looks like it’s headed completely off the rails, it’s going to make people angry.” In the near term the group plans to just continue to be a pain in the ass and try to slow down any actual legislating.