A public relations agency that worked with Purdue Pharmaceutical to promote the use of oxycontin and other opioids agreed to pay a $350 million fine to settle a lawsuit brought by the Attorneys General from all US states and territories as well as the District of Columbia.

Publicis Heath will make the payment in the second quarter of 2024, and the money will be applied to state-run drug treatment and patient assistance programs.  Separately, Massachusetts announced a separate $150 million settlement of a different opioid case brought by states against Hikma, a manufacturer of generic opioids.  The Hikma settlement will include $35 million in opioid addition medications.

“No settlement can bring back the lives lost or reverse the devastating pain caused by the opioid crisis. At the California Department of Justice, we are committed to holding accountable those who fueled this crisis through their greed and willful misconduct,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “Today’s settlement with Publicis builds on that commitment in our continued fight for justice and relief for Californians. I am proud of the work put in by my team and by our partners across the nation in making this settlement possible.”

https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1753162516794843456

Give him a hand for not deleting the tweet after a shit ton of people pointed out how stupid it made him look (examine the righthand pic closely). And the original message was true too: that Republican victory in 2024 depends on their ability to generate AI images of Black men wearing clothing covered in text that sort of resembles actual known human forms of text-based communication.

White House sources tell Politico Playbook that President Biden gets National Zero-level profane in private when talking about fat former President Trump, calling him a “sick fuck” and “a fucking asshole” in reaction to Donald’s delights over terroristic violence and fascist rhetoric.

Asked for comment, Trump campaign advisor Chris LaCivita acted like a total cunt, telling Playbook that “It’s a shame that Crooked Joe Biden disrespects the presidency both publicly and privately. But then again, it’s no surprise he disrespects the 45th president the same way he disrespects the American people with his failed policies.” Bricks and pots and glass houses and kettles as usual.

Speaking of Trump campaign comments to Politico, earlier on Thursday the fat bastard posted a screenshot of his irritable, large-headed spokesman Steven Cheung’s statement to the website over that British judge tossing Donald’s lawsuit against former UK spy Christopher Steele, and the spin was pretty lame. “The High Court in London has found that there was not even an attempt by Christopher Steele, or his group, to justify or try to prove, which they absolutely cannot, their false and defamatory allegations in the fake ‘dossier.’ The High Court also found that there was processing, utilization, of those false statements. President Trump will continue to fight for the truth and against falsehoods such as ones promulgated by Steele and his cohorts,” Cheung said, as if it was incumbent upon Steele to defend the intel when the case got tossed before a trial.

Former Trump Org CFO Allen Weaselberg will plead guilty to perjury charges stemming from his false testimony on the stand during the trial in the lawsuit over New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $370 million lawsuit against the corrupt business empire, the New York Times reports.

In very much related news, a New York court official tells the Guardian that the verdict from Judge Arthur Engoron may be delayed to as late as mid-month after court-appointed monitor Barbara Jones said the fat former president may have evaded taxes by inventing a $48 million loan.

Non-Correction: The current version of this article and headline misspelled Allen Weisselberg’s last name as ‘Weaselberg.’ National Zero does not regret the error and will not be correcting it.

“The Supreme Court of Texas is committed to an independent judiciary. The Court follows standard procedures in all cases, and its decisions are based on the requirements of the law,” says Texas Supreme Court spokeswoman Amy Starnes in a statement responding to questions about why they stayed Picasso-faced Attorney General Ken Paxton’s deposition just hours after fat former President Trump demanded they halt it in a Truth Social post. Well at least they know how it looked.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday tossed InfoWars host Owen Shroyer’s appeal of his 60 day jail sentence on Capitol riot charges. Their reason: The asshole waived his right to an appeal when he pleaded guilty to the two misdemeanor charges last year, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

BREAKING: The PeoplesVoice.tv reports a troubling allegation that global superstar Taylor Swift murdered a fan in a “Satanic blood ritual” in order to join the Illuminati, according to an insider.

Well there you have it libs. She’s tainted goods now. Biden’s never going to want her endorsement or votes from the “Swifties.” The MAGA media have exposed the evil forces behind Taylor Swift.

Gee whiz, Saskatchewan Party MLA Ryan Domotor just dodged a big one as the Crown let him stay a charge for hookering – which in plain English is he was having relations with a lady of the night in exchange for money – and maybe now he can get right aboot back to the good graces of caucus leadership in the Assembly who went and kicked him out for the hookering, CTV News reports.

The trouble for Domotor, who was elected to represent folks up in Cutknife-Turtleford, started aboot a few months back when the fella got himself arrested by Regina Police on the charge of “communicating to obtain sexual services” which was aboot all the Crown could prove. It still was a bit of shame on Regina, especially since the way Saskies pronounce it makes it rhyme with a word for lady private parts. Folks here in the province sure didn’t want that reputation and then they get Yanks crossing the border to hire cheap lady private parts. That’s what Montreal is for.

Heck that would be a big shame for Regina and Saskatchewan as a whole, which is why Saskies should feel blessed one of their elected officials isn’t going on trial for hookering in Regina.

The only part of the headline we made up is the “Antipope” part… It’s just that this new Michigan state GOP chairman, former Congressman Pete Hoekstra, who’s supposed to be taking over now that the QAnon freak Kristina Karamo was supposedly ousted is now in Fox News’s crosshairs because he once invested $500,000 in a company specializing in disposal of aborted fetal remains.

Chart by Scott Bessant, some MAGA billionaire asshole who set out to back up fat former President Trump’s batshit “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN” theory he keeps using to explain why the Dow and other indexes are at record highs these days. We saw this because the Gateway Pundit had retweeted some chode’s post of it, writing that “stocks are up 35.2% when Trump leads Biden versus 3.4% when Biden leads,” but Bloomberg also ran a story on this assclown on Thursday.

Interestingly enough, per Bloomberg, Bessent used to work for George Soros before striking out on his own and obviously becoming a total Trump ballsucker. “Markets are now anchoring on the potential market-friendly policies of a Trump victory on Nov 5,” Bessent wrote in a Wednesday memo to investors which also downplayed all the fascism shit by saying Trump would liklier “seek rejuvenation/redemption” if he returns. Bessent predicted a Trump win would bring a period like the “roaring twenties” of the last century. Does this fucking idiot know how the 1920s ended?

Bessent also preemptively cried about the Fed’s expected rate cuts shitting all over the theory in his comic-sans chart. “While we don’t think the Fed is an explicitly political institution, we think nearly all of Washington, DC is united in wanting to prevent the return of Donald Trump,” he wrote.

Responding to a report from Axios that the Biden Administration is preparing an executive order sanctioning the violent asshole Jewish settlers constantly starting shit with locals in the West Bank, Israeli dictator Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime on Thursday told Axios’s guy Barak Ravid that “The vast majority of settlers are law-abiding citizens… Israel is taking action against people who break the law everywhere and therefore there is no place for unusual measures in this regard.”

Well that ought to do it. Those settlers, particularly the influential ones, will totally understand that Netanyahu tried to stick up for them and won’t take it out on him politically when his coalition is hanging on by a thread and it’s only a matter of time before it collapses and triggers an election.

The Oregon state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the Secretary of State’s ruling that, as mandated by a 2022 ballot measure approved by voters, all 10 Republican state senators are ineligible to run for reelection after they repeatedly and willfully fucked off from work in order to deprive Dems of the quorums necessary to pass legislation, the Oregon Capital Chronicle reports.

“Because the text is capable of supporting the secretary’s interpretation, and considering the clear import of the ballot title and explanatory statement in this case, we agree with the secretary that voters would have understood the amendment to mean that a legislator with 10 or more unexcused absences during a legislative session would be disqualified from holding legislative office during the immediate next term, rather than the term after that,” the justices wrote in the opinion, dooming fully a third of the state Senate’s current members to unemployment over the next few years.

The bad news is that the quorum is 23 out of 30, so now that every single Republican has no reason to show up the chamber can be brought to a complete standstill until the next session.

pic.twitter.com/xbPmtZTaE9

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) February 1, 2024

This is true, Haley did call Trump’s Muslim ban “un-American” in March 2017. What’s also true is that she was at that time serving as the US Ambassador to the United Nations and he could have just fired her for that. He didn’t, which is why he sucks and his fans don’t even realize it.

In very related news, the Guardian reports that the Trump Campaign is still posting shit like the above tweet is because the fat bastard and his minions are “frustrated” with Haley’s refusal to drop out and submit to his Orange Holiness so he can focus on the inevitable matchup with Joe Biden.

“In recent days, it has become clear to Trump that he may need to take multiple trips to South Carolina to battle the Haley campaign, which he appears to view as a waste of time given that internal and public polling shows almost no path for Haley to beat out Trump. The more time and resources Trump has to spend fighting Haley, his team has suggested, the more they cannot focus on pivoting to the general election to target Biden and respond to his political attacks,” the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell writes blithely without noticing the unintended admission that Trump doesn’t actually enjoy campaigning and performing for his fanatic cultists in a deep red state.

Russian defector and discredited Biden sexual assault accuser Tara Reade on Wednesday filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Justice Department, claiming “infliction of emotional distress and anxiety” and alleging a federal grand jury had subpoenaed Twitter in June of 2020 for her personal account records, “disruptions” to her bank accounts,” and that the government is responsible for a manuscript of her book went missing from FedEx in November of 2020, Fox News reports.

“The United States should not have a two-tiered justice system,” said Reade’s attorney Jonathan Levy in a statement to Fox News. “If President Trump and Mr Giuliani can be assessed tens of millions in damages for their words – a weaponized FBI that seeks to silence, intimidate and eliminate Joe Biden’s victim, Tara Reade, must also be held accountable – failing to do so means our justice and legal system has become an instrument of political oppression and suppression.”

So weird how nothing about this alleged subpoena came out with that “Twitter Files” circlejerk back in 2022 since that was all about FBI interference in the platform’s operations before Elon Musk bought it. Also weird how the subpoena, which Fox News says was included in the complaint so maybe it was real (but of course Fox News didn’t link the complaint itself and we can’t find it anywhere), was issued during the Trump Administration but her lawyer is bitching about Donald and Rudy getting hosed by juries in their respective defamation trials. Also very weird how Reade defected to Russia and isn’t going to show up in court herself if there’s ever a hearing in this case.

“For now, we are closing the investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding a sex video that was recorded inside the Hart Senate Office Building on the morning of Wednesday, December 13. After consulting with federal and local prosecutors, as well as doing a comprehensive investigation and review of possible charges, it was determined that despite a likely violation of Congressional policy – there is currently no evidence that a crime was committed.”

“Although the hearing room was not open to the public at the time, the Congressional staffer involved had access to the room. The two people of interest were not cooperative, nor were the elements of any of the possible crimes met. The Congressional staffer, who has since resigned from his job, exercised his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and refused to talk to us. Our investigators are willing to review new evidence should any come to light,” says the US Capitol police in a statement about Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the now-former staffer for Dem Senator Ben Cardin filming himself having sex with another dude in the Judiciary Committee’s hearing room.

Well this is going to piss off the fanboys desperate for some kind of vengeance over January 6th.

A British judge on Thursday tossed disgraced former President Trump’s lawsuit against former MI6 spy Christopher Steele and his firm Orbis Intelligence over the infamous 2016 dossier of “raw intel” that alleged, among other shit, that in 2013 then-future failed president had been secretly recorded fondling himself in a Moscow hotel room while hookers sent by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime peed on the bed and there was a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership,” with the aim of destabilizing the US politically.

Which means that, by the standards set by MAGA propagandists and trolls, all of the allegations over Trump’s Kremlin connections have now been proven to be true since a lawsuit alleging they were false was dismissed. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t a factual finding and the case was tossed simply because, as Judge Karen Steyn ruled, Trump had “chosen to allow many years to elapse – without any attempt to vindicate his reputation in this jurisdiction,” since the dossier surfaced in 2017.

Sorry fanboys, we didn’t make the MAGA internet’s rules on burden of proof. You did. If Ray Epps getting no jail time for helping incite the other “tourists” at the Capitol on January 6th means he’s a CIA agent who was working a “psy op” to entrap Trump supporters, then we can apply the same confirmation bias to declare that the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” is actually not a hoax.

In all seriousness though: We don’t know how British civil law procedure works but we would imagine that it’s not all that different from the US. Thus at some point Trump would have had to sit for a deposition if he really wanted to take down Steele for having written a “wholly untrue” oppo report as Trump’s complaint alleged. It is extremely hard to see how Trump going under oath to deny all of the dossier’s allegations would have ended well for him. This judge probably just did him a favor.

Two of fat former President Trump’s PACs spent more than $29 million in legal fees in the second half of 2023, leaving just $5 million in his leadership PAC’s bank, Politico reports on the fun part of all the delays the criminal degenerate has thrown up to avoid facing justice thus far.

The total net spend for the year was about $210 million while the PACs raised roughly $200 million, and the the only reason they’re not in the hole is because of money taken in during prior years.

South Carolina Republican Senator and Trump supporter who wanted him tried in court back in January 2021 Lindsey Graham seems to need a system reset on a couple occasions as he makes a guest spot on Trump advisor Sean Hannity’s Fox show.