After falling short in his presidential campaign, Republican Florida Governor and boy whose dream of being a jockey died at 5’4″ Ron DeSantis continues his culture war agenda on the poor people of Florida, who now must deal with a new law banning anyone 16 and under from social media platforms that just passed the state legislature and is waiting on DeSantis’s desk for his signature.

As the Sarasota Herald-Tribune notes, however:  Hours before the bill was delivered to DeSantis’s desk, Ron himself dissed the bill saying the legislation wasn’t “there yet,” meaning that it wasn’t what he wanted to see.

“Parents need to have a role in this,” DeSantis said, ready to let a marauding band of undereducated, conspiracy-minded parents determine laws again, like he did with book banning. “I do think parents are concerned about social media and what goes on there, and I do think they think it’s a problem. But I also think that for people that are in high school, it’s not as simple.”

Odysseus, the lunar mission by Intuitive Machines, attempts to be the first US-made device to make a controlled landing on the Moon in more than 50 years on Thursday, with the craft scheduled to touch down on the surface in crater Malapert A at about 6:24 p.m. ET.  If successful, it would be the first landing on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Records from the Alexandria City (Virginia) Courthouse indicate a widespread investigation into CPAC relating to accusations that the organization’s involvement and potential cover-up of multiple sexual harassment by the group’s chair, Matt Schlapp, the Daily Beast reports.

Officials at CPAC, including one who reportedly oversaw the destruction of official documents related to at least two complaints male staffers filed with the organization’s leadership complaining about groping and sexual advances by Schlapp, who has made a career and gets $600,000 per year to incite anger about conservative culture wars they make up, like openly gay men corrupting others.

Lynne Rassmussen, CPAC’s manager of strategic initiatives, received a subpoena after staffers said she directed interns to shred documents after CPAC staffer Carlton Huffman detailed an attack by Schlapp and provided emails and text messages supporting his claim.  The shedding reportedly happened after CPAC and Schlapp were both advised that a legal case was pending, making the destruction of potential evidence charges in play.

Republican political consultant/Russian disinformation propagator Alex Smirnov was taken into federal custody again on Thursday on a warrant from the Central District of California. A federal magistrate in Nevada had released the asshole but Hunterghazi special counsel David Weiss had petitioned a judge on Wednesday to revoke the bail citing flight risk. It’s not clear if this new arrest warrant was definitely pursuant to Weiss’s motion though it would seem likely.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 39,000 for the first time ever on Thursday because Trump’s poll numbers and investors think he’s going to win something something.

BREAKING: @America1stLegal sued the Fulton County DA https://t.co/pRxyaXHQRN

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) February 22, 2024

President Joe Biden will meet with murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s widow Julia and daughter Dasha Navalnya in California on Thursday afternoon, NBC News reports. Biden should probably ask Yulia and Dasha if they agree that Robert Hur’s report and the James Comer-Jim Jordan impeachment inquiry, are just as bad as what Putin and his goons did to Alexei.

No he fucking shouldn’t but we’d like to think just casually throwing Biden’s political problems in there was a good way of illustrating how meekly the media’s been covering the other guy.

Republicans on Georgia’s state Senate Ethics Committee on Thursday voted to advance a bill switching automatic voter registration from opt-out on driver’s license applications to opt-in, the AP reports on a natural response to too many people voting in elections over the last few years.

“The intent is certainly not to reduce voter registration, the intent is to clarify and make voter registration more accurate,” said committee chair Max Burns. Majority Leader Steve Gooch echoed that line of bullshit with a rhetorical question. “Are we just trying to get a lot of people on the rolls and two or three years later we’re purging all of them because 90% never went to vote anyway?”

Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron responded to disgraced former President Trump’s lawyer’s futile pleas to stay his $450 million verdict against Donald’s corrupt business empire quite succinctly and mercilessly on Thursday, writing simply “You have failed to explain, much less justify, any basis for a stay. I am confident that the Appellate Division will protect your appellate rights.”

Just Security’s Adam Klasfeld reports Engoron then docketed the judgment after writing that email in response to Trump’s lawyer Cliff Robert pleading for a do-over of the trial on Wednesday.

“Former US Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn announced a slate of high-profile endorsements from Democratic Congressional leaders in his campaign for Congress in Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District. The endorsements, from Rep Adam Schiff, Rep Bennie Thompson, Rep Eric Swalwell, and Rep Jasmine Crockett, signal Dunn’s momentum and growing support in his bid for Congress.”

“Representative Adam Schiff (CA-30) said: ‘Harry Dunn defended my life on January 6th, and I’m proud to stand beside him and endorse him in his race to represent Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District. We need fighters like Harry in Congress, where he will continue to stand his ground, fight for accountability, and protect our democracy.’ Representative Bennie Thompson (MS-02) said: ‘When violent insurrectionists attacked our Capitol on January 6th, 2021, Harry did his job and defended my colleagues regardless of their party affiliation. As Chairman of the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, I was honored to welcome Harry to testify about what he experienced and fight for accountability. He’s a man of honor and integrity and will take those values to Congress, where they are much needed right now. Communities all across Maryland would benefit from having such a bold leader representing them in Congress, and I’m proud to endorse his campaign today,'” says former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn’s campaign in a statement.

No point in doing clip after clip after clip of asshattery at Comic-Con for white nationalists, let’s just run the whole thing in its entirety! It’s CPAC 2024, live from National Harbor, Maryland!

Michigan state House Freedom Caucasians chairman Steve Carra “is currently on day two of a one man ‘sit in’ outside the House Speaker’s office to protest what he terms the ‘obviously racist’ anti-white spending items in the state budget,” the Gateway Pundit reports on an aggrieved white man appropriating the 1960s American Civil Rights movement’s signature to challenge a line item appropriating $10 million to help minority-owned businesses with establishment and growth.

Worth mentioning that Speaker Joe Tate is Black, the first ever African-American to hold a leadership position in either chamber of the Michigan state legislature. “It’s racist against white people. Can you imagine if the Speaker was white and proposed a program for ‘white-owned businesses’ and no one else could qualify and blacks need not apply? Legislators need to call this out for how it looks: it would be called racist and they’d be shamed to take it out,” said Carra.

NASA press release: “As part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, Intuitive Machines is targeting no earlier than 5:30 pm EST Thursday, Feb 22, to land their Odysseus lunar lander near Malapert A in the South Pole region of the Moon. Live landing coverage will air on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. NASA TV can be streamed on a variety of platforms, including social media. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates beginning at 4 pm, as the landing milestones occur. Upon successful landing, Intuitive Machines and NASA will host a news conference to discuss the mission and science opportunities that lie ahead as the company begins lunar surface operations. In May 2019, the agency awarded a task order for scientific payload delivery to Intuitive Machines. Odysseus launched at 1:05 am, Feb 15, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.”

“NASA is working with several US companies to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface through the agency’s CLPS initiative. This pool of companies may bid on task orders for end-to-end delivery services, which includes payload integration and operations, launching from Earth, and landing on the surface of the Moon. NASA’s CLPS contracts are indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with a cumulative maximum contract value of $2.6 billion through 2028.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled a subpoena for voter records issued by MAGA state Senators in the 2021-2022 legislative session could not be enforced because it’s fucking 2024 and thus expired at the end of that session, NBC News reports on a no-brainer.

Republican state Senator Cris Dush (lol) whose committee had voted to issue the subpoena in September 2021, said at the time that it was justified because Pennsylvanians were “experiencing a crisis of confidence in our elections,” and that an “election integrity investigation” would be “uncover information which is necessary for the legislature to potentially take future legislative action.”

BREAKING: @RedCross official tells undercover journalist they DO NOT SEPARATE donated blood based on COVID-19 vaccination status; ADMITS unvaccinated recipients can UNWITTINGLY RECEIVE blood from vaccinated donors

THIS. IS. INSANE. pic.twitter.com/ZqNTZQXFWQ

— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) February 21, 2024

Kremlin spokesworm Dmitry Peskov on Thursday told Reuters that President Joe Biden calling Russian dictator Vladimir Putin a “crazy son of a bitch” was somehow unbecoming of a leader.

“The use of such language against the head of another state by the president of the United States is unlikely to infringe on our president, President Putin,” said Pesky. “But it debases those who use such vocabulary,” he added, saying Biden’s remarks at a fundraiser were “probably some kind of attempt to look like a Hollywood cowboy. But honestly I don’t think it’s possible.”

“Has Mr Putin ever used one crude word to address you? This has never happened. Therefore, I think that such vocabulary debases America itself,” Peskov continued, clearly still upset at Biden.

“I’ve been a senator since ’72. I’ve served with real racists. I’ve served with Strom Thurmond. I’ve served with all these guys that have set terrible records on race. But guess what? These guys are worse. These guys do not believe in basic democratic principles,” said President Joe Biden on Wednesday to the crowd at a fundraiser about the Republicans currently in Congress.

Unrelated but related is a tweet by Republican Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, who is his previous job as Attorney General had (successfully) sued the Biden Administration to halt its student loan forgiveness plan, howling with butthurt Wednesday over Biden’s executive orders chipping away at student debt. “The student loan bullshit today is just another example of Imperial Biden doing whatever the hell he wants no matter what the law says. It’s also an insult to those who never took out student loans or those who paid them back and to taxpayers in general.

“When I was Missouri AG I filed the case that beat back Biden’s previous illegal effort at the Supreme Court. We won but he’s back at it. The Biden Admission is totally out of control and lawless. There is nothing they won’t do to maintain power. Illegal act after illegal act. That’s your real Threat to Democracy™️. Time to take this country back,” Scmitt wrote, proving Biden’s point.

Asked if paying Donald Trump’s legal bills is in the best interest of Republicans, national committee co-chair designee Lara Trump responds the only way I know how:  “Absolutely, it’s why you saw the GoFundMe get started.  That’s why people are furious right now when they see the attacks against him, they feel like it’s an attack not just on Donald Trump, but on this country.”

“This country” didn’t lie to enrich itself by half a billion dollars.  And “this country” doesn’t view the prosecution of Donald Trump for his alleged criminal acts as an attack on the country; in fact, the country sees it as a reaffirmation of the United States Constitution.

We here at National Zero understand that listening to Republicans on Fox “News”–and they earned those quotation marks–is an unsettling experience.  It’s why we try to provide transcripts when we can.  This time, however, we strongly encourage you to watch and listen to the clip.  We didn’t alter it.  Oversight chair James Comer’s voice really is speeding up and his pitch elevating as he tries to desperately explain why he and his compatriots aren’t to blame for the fiasco of promoting the accusations of a now-indicted felon.  No, he says in his Barney Fife voice, it’s the darn FBI’s fault, Andy!

As you listen to Comer ramble on about how they were following leads about alleged “Biden bribes” that the committees led by the Three Stooges “found in Bulgaria and China,” which is… nothing.  They found nothing.  Not a damn thing.  So the leads from Bulgaria and China are as legit as the lead from Alexander Smirnov.

Bulking up his resume to be in line to be the GOP’s next witness against Hunter Biden, 60-year-old Japanese Yakuza boss Takeshi Ebisawa was indicted by federal prosecutors who say he tried to arrange a deal to ship uranium and plutonium that he believed would be sent to Iran, ABC News reports.

Already in a Brooklyn prison while awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges, Ebisawa told an undercover FBI agent that he had access to nuclear material and could arrange a sale.  The agent later told Ebisawa that he had a buyer, an Iranian, telling Ebisawa, “They don’t need it for energy, Iranian government need it for nuclear weapons,” to which Ebisawa replied, “I think so and I hope so.”

According to the superseding indictment, unnamed co-conspirators with Ebisawa told the agents that they could get “2,000 kilograms of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of uranium” and use a processing center in Burma to turn that into “as much as five tons of nuclear material.”