Vice President Harris: President Biden has been in front of it all. Leading. Directing. The way that his demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts. It was clearly politically motivated, gratuitous. We should expect a higher level of integrity pic.twitter.com/eFMe7ME1wg

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 9, 2024

With about 97 percent of the vote counted so far in Nevada’s Thursday GOP caucus, disgraced former President Trump’s 59,545 vote win over his only opponent Ryan Binkley, who received 536 votes, is impressive for the “incumbent” campaign he acts like he’s running. By that standard however he’s still a pretty distant second to the actual incumbent, President Joe Biden, who received 112,611 votes in Nevada’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday.

If turnout in a nominating contest is a measure of enthusiasm in the general election – and Trump’s campaign themselves are harping on his getting the most votes ever in a Nevada caucus – then pretty plainly Biden has the enthusiasm edge in the Silver State, and a very large one a that.

Now we sort of fucked up earlier this week when we described the Nevada GOP-run caucus as the first ever while the state’s always had a primary system. We got that backward because on Tuesday was the first primary after decades of party-run caucuses. The very MAGA Nevada GOP wanted no part of the new state government-conducted primary system, which is why Trump and Binkley ran in the caucus and Nikki Haley ran in the Republican primary on Tuesday.

Where she still lost to “None of these candidates,” a non-candidate option that NBC elections egghead Steve Kornacki said was “generally assumed to be a proxy for Trump.” Not sure if we buy that given the very obvious question of then why the fuck didn’t the Trump fans just vote in the caucus on Thursday instead? Setting aside the whole can of worms that a shit ton of them may have simply (and unlawfully) voted in both the GOP primary and caucus, Biden still received a few thousand more votes total as “None of these candidates” scored 47,134 in the Republican primary.

Republican former Maryland Gov Larry Hogan will on Friday file to run for the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Dem Senator Ben Cardin, Politico reports in a tweet that doesn’t link to an article.

In 2022 Hogan turned down Mitch McConnell’s pleas to run against incumbent Dem Chris Van Hollen, which in retrospect might’ve been more of a “Fuck, I’ll probably lose” than a “No, I don’t want to serve in Congress, especially with you, Mitch.” His likely Dem opponent will be Congressman David Trone of the 6th District. Could end up being a close race given Hogan’s profile.

As expected, far right asshole Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale on Friday filed to run for the US Senate in the Big Sky State, setting up a rematch with incumbent Dem Senator Jon Tester – if he can get past Mitch McConnell’s preferred candidate Tim Sheehy in the primary.

The frenzied circlejerk of the MSM-right wing media’s “Biden too old” may be spinning furiously right now with headlines like “Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024,” “For President Biden, the special counsel’s report was a legal exoneration – and a political nightmare,” “Read five takeaways from the special counsel’s report,” and “As her husband faces heightened questions, Jill Biden has been a protective force,” all four of them literally the top stories on the New York Times’s homepage at this very moment. The horserace twats and the Trump fanboys would do well to cherish it, for they are a mere 24 to 48 hours removed from what some might consider to be like the “Super Bowl of psy-ops” as Taylor Swift rushes from a show in Tokyo to cheer on her boyfriend in a really important professional football game in Las Vegas.

Amid an event associated with gambling in kicking off in a city associated with gambling the safest bet of all is that this pending collision of the two news cycles will elicit howls of “Not a coincidence!” to the point where some will say Biden documents fuckup special counsel Robert Hur was somehow in on the Deep State’s plot to minimize the president’s verbal gaffes and memory lapses. The dregs of the MAGA internet will likely turn on their momentary hero, timing the report’s release to the days before the big gambling football game to prompt that collision of news cycles.

True Conservatives stand with JR! https://t.co/JFHJ5WgCBg

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) February 9, 2024

Jasper, Alabama’s WJLX 101.5 FM/1240 AM reports their 200 ft tall transmission tower has gone missing like it was a case of vinyls that someone carelessly left outside the headquarters. The theft was discovered last week when a crew arrived to clear brush from the tower site.

“I’ve been trying all weekend to make sense of it, but I just can’t. I’ve been involved in the radio business my whole life, and I’ve never heard of anything like this. I thought I had seen it all,” said general manager Brett Elmore, who is asking for the public’s help to rebuild, setting a GoFundMe goal of $60,000, which has raised $416 in the first 17 hours of its campaign.

Although the tower was strictly AM, the station is currently off the air on FM too, apparently due to some FCC rule that we don’t really have the time or desire to try to understand. “The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has denied our request to remain on the air on 101.5 FM. Today, we shut down our transmitter and our programming will be streamed via internet and our apps only until we can restore our 1240 AM frequency,” the station wrote on their website Thursday.

Former South Carolina Governor and second place finisher in the US Virgin Islands 2024 Republican Presidential caucus Nikki “Birdbrain” Haley tells the Wall Street Journal she doesn’t care how much damage she does to fat former President Trump ahead of his coronation for the GOP nomination.

“I’m weakening Trump because of who Trump is. Telling the truth in a primary is very important, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m strengthening the party because I bring more people into the Republican Party, instead of pushing people away like Trump,” Haley said, channeling Bernie 2016. “The fact that we would have a coronation after two months is absurd. The country needs to pay attention to those 70 percent of Americans and not the media, who are trying to say this is going to be Trump and Biden.” Since National Zero is technically part of “the media” we guess we’re guilty as charged.

“I’ve never let anyone bully me, and I’ve never let anyone intimidate me. The more they do it, the more it motivates me,” Haley continued, making it clear this is getting personal for her.

How much damage Haley could actually wreak on Trump is no doubt going to be pretty low relative to what Bernie did to Hillary in 2016, especially if she offers anything more than the most tepid of endorsements when she does drop out. It’d be pretty stupid to expect her not to endorse at all.

“The Villages MAGA Club,” whose website purports itself to be “One Of The Top Trump Clubs In The Villages,” could really use a better graphic designer for its regular event flyers. Like you’d think with so important a MAGA personality gracing them with his presence they would maybe hire one of the members’ troubled live-in grandchildren to teach them the basics of proportion in the photographs and leading in between blocks of text. Even just how to horizontally and vertically align the blue stars filling the empty spaces. Not to mention they’re charging $50 a head ($125 for VIP) to meet with this guy so they should definitely be able to pay someone to unfuck this flyer.

Not to add to the anxiety of an unfavorable Supreme Court hearing, but…  The Wisconsin Election Commission has approved a slot on the November ballot for an unspecified Green Party presidential candidate, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Just what we need this election, right?  TRIGGER WARNING:  Discussion of Jill Stein ahead.

In 2016, Jill Stein received 31,000 votes in Wisconsin; Hillary Clinton lost the state by just 23,000 votes.  But to be accurate, in Wisconsin in 2016, more than 184,000 people voted for various “third party” candidates, including 106,000 for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate.

As expected, Donald Trump was declared the winner of the Nevada–not Ne-VAH-duh–caucus that no one of note was competing in, per the Associated Press.  Trump will be awarded the state’s 26 delegates and the honor of not saying he lost to “none of the above” like Nikki Haley did in the state’s Tuesday primary.  It wasn’t like the outcome had been pre-ordained or anything, given that Trump was given every advantage by state Party leaders and Haley opted not to put up a fight against Big Orange, surrendering the state.

“Sit, y’know, for trial, y’know, so we’re supposed to be okay with him to be our President but, y’know, not only that but, y’know, this comes out, and what does he do?” Texas Republican Congressman and former head of the (alleged) West Wing drug cartel Ronny Jackson gets through.  Y’know?

The National Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Hotline in the United States is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 1-800-662-4357 or through the national 988 mental health helpline. Please call or text if you need to talk to someone.

Wrapping up a 12-year lawsuit, Michael Mann, an early climate change theorist best known for developing the “hockey stick” graph, received a million-dollar defamation award against two conservative bloggers who compared him to infamous child molester Jerry Sandusky, the Associated Press reports.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data,” Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote on the organization’s blog.  At the time of the blog post, Mann worked at Penn State, where Sandusky had coached.  Calling Mann’s research “fraudulent,” Mark Steyn quoted the blog’s claim in his National Review column.

After a DC Superior Court found the pair acted with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,” Simberg was ordered to pay one dollar in compensatory damages and $1,000 in punitive damages.  Representing himself at the trial, Steyn was ordered to pay one dollar in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages.

“This is way late for him and they never call these last-minute press conferences and it shows.  He was angry, he was too emotional,” Fox bro Jesse Watters says to the telephonic Dana Perino as he wraps up a long rant questioning President Joe Biden’s competence, suggesting he shouldn’t have made his statement about the Special Counsel report so late at night.  “Get a good night’s sleep, sleep on it. Come together, have a nice breakfast.  Have a cuppa coffee the next morning.  And then you’re on your game.  Dana, thank you so much and I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow.

“South Carolina Governor Kristi Noem joins us now….” Watters says as he segues to an interview the Republican Governor of South Dakora.

There’s a lot of news to ingest here:  While at a county Tea Party meeting, a Republican former Texas legislator running to rejoin the state house decried the legislature for ousting a Republican representative last year after he allegedly had sex with a 19-year-old intern he got drunk.  Got it?

First:  There’s still a Tea Party?  That’s, like, soooo three iterations of the Freedom Caucus ago.  Second:  ewww.  As told by the Texas Tribune, Texas Republican Kyle Biedermann stood before a meeting of the Kendall County Tea Party and spoke in support of Bryan Slaton, an “Independent Texas” advocate who his peers ousted for his morally-corrupt act.

But Biedermann doesn’t think the act merited the punishment.  “Was he convicted? What was his crime? Is it a crime to have sex with a 19-year-old woman?  In your house, not at the Capitol,” said Biedermann in a video.  Contacted later by the Tribune, Biedermann said his rant was referring to the selective punishment meted out by Republicans in Austin, who ignore affairs and other misdeeds of GOP leadership.  Uh huh.

The commander of the Syrian Democratic forces warns that ISIS forces, which Donald Trump claims to have eliminated, are resurging in the country as global attention shifts to Gaza and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, CBS News reports.

“We’re seeing that ISIS is taking the benefit from all these attacks, and we have seen a spike in movements of ISIS,” the head of Syrian Democratic forces Gen. Mazloum Abdi Kobane, noting that withdrawing US troops from the area as some Republicans want would lead to chaos in the region.  Currently the US has more than 3,500 troops split between Iraq, Jordan and Syria to serve as a check to the terrorist organization that is more definitely not destroyed.

The White House notified networks that President Biden will make remarks to the nation Thursday night at 7:45 p.m. ET.  The topic of the address is unknown, but given recent events, it could have anything to do with the Supreme Court, the war in Gaza, the Houthi attacks, the Special Counsel report, or a statement that he accepts Donald Trump’s argument of absolute presidential immunity and he’s order the bombing of Mar-a-Lago to start.

Donald Trump won the 2024 Virgin Islands caucus, collecting a YOOG four delegates, NBC News reports.  Trump took 74% of the 246 votes, versus 64 votes (or 26%) for Nikki Haley, the only other GOP candidate left in the race.

The global temperature has risen by 1.5º Celsius since the beginning of industrial times, a level cited by the 2016 Paris Climate Accords as a critical benchmark in the fight against the damage caused by climate change, the Washington Post reports.

The pre-industrial temperature, determined from an average calculated temperature on Earth between 1850 and 1900, was exceeded in 2023 up 1.52º C, or 2.74º F, partly driven by the El Niño pattern.  Scientists say if temperatures increase 2º C, damage to coral reefs, reduction of Arctic ice formations, and increased extreme heat waves will be irreparable; the goal of the 2016 Paris Accords was to try to curb the global temperature increase to a maximum of 1.5º C to minimize damage.  We’ve failed at that goal.

While the increase in 2023 was a one-year spike due to El Niño, climatologists say the globe is destined to surpass that increase with current pollution output.  The Post ran 1,200 separate models to see if the increase was unavoidable; only four showed temperatures leveling or dropping using feasible technology.

Tucker asks Putin about jailed WSJ journalist pic.twitter.com/SjPMutFJBP

— Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork) February 8, 2024

Give it to a complete asshole like Tucker Carlson for perfunctorily remembering to ask, as the final question in his interview platforming murderous dictator Vladimir Putin, for the Kremlin to release jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to Tucker to bring him home. Of course there’s no real pushback on all Putin’s lies about the kid being a spy, no mention that Gershkovich was arrested just hours after the Journal printed his story headlined “Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone” last March. Can’t really blame Tucker for not pushing it though, as it’s not like Tucker took the long flight to Moscow only to take a much shorter flight out of his hotel room window.

You can watch the whole interview with Vladdy Daddy here on Twitter. It was paywalled on Tucker’s website for approximately 25 minutes before he dropped all 127 minutes of it for free.