No need to bore you with the details of a Texas 16-year old getting statutorily raped by his 26 year-old teacher and her arrest in this People Magazine article. Not getting into it because we got in a little trouble with readers for being too flippant the one time we picked up a similar story.

It’s in the last few paragraphs their story about the boy’s dad getting cuffed too that are unintentionally hilarious and almost like some dark satire of a 1990s TGIF sitcom’s plot. Verbatim:

“A second witness told investigators that the student’s father had been told by both the Clifton-Carmack and the teen about the relationship, according to a second probable cause statement reviewed by PEOPLE… The teen’s father, whom PEOPLE is not identifying in order to protect the victim’s confidentiality, allegedly told the second witness that he didn’t stop the relationship because he believed they would continue to have the relationship behind his back anyway.”

If only there was something else that he could have done to “stop the relationship” rather than stuff like checking the boy’s phone and making sure he stayed home at night, right? Jesus Christ, lol.

Dystopian megacorporation Google on Tuesday informed National Zero of a pending demonetization via an email notification with “Introducing a new Sensitive Events policy” in its subject line.

“On 9 February 2024, Google will introduce a new Sensitive Events policy into the AdSense Program Policies. A ‘Sensitive Event’ is an unforeseen event or development that creates significant risk to Google’s ability to provide high quality, relevant information and ground truth, and reduce insensitive or exploitative content in prominent and monetized features. During a Sensitive Event, we may take a variety of actions to address these risks. This message is a notification to inform you about an update to our policies. No action is needed from you at this time,” some “policy” asshole at the tech giant wrote in the mass mailer to ad partner sites, the vast majority of whom can safely disregard it as it has no implications for their coverage of pre-school education trends, reviews of golf course maintenance equipment, Japanese video games, commercial real estate finance, Jewish literature, amateur ornithology, and all else in a vast universe of other normal, healthy interests.

Still it was nice of Google to alert National Zero to the coming swift and irrevocable deprivation of its meagre advertising revenue that will come early on the 9th when their algorithm determines that what our readers understand to be mocking of right wing misinformation during this apocalyptic election year is in their understanding the propagation of it. That definitely counts.

Pointing to his client, fat former President Trump, at a Tuesday press briefing following his bad day at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, defense lawyer John Lauro said, in media res, “…in fact Joe Biden could be prosecuted for trying to stop this man from becoming the next President of the United States,” which is quite literally the fucking complete opposite of what Trump’s raspy-voiced appellate lawyer John Sauer had just an hour earlier finished arguing, that the president is immune from prosecution for any act committed while in office if he or she hadn’t been already impeached and convicted in a Senate trial. Is this Lauro’s idea of an office prank or hazing or something, like he’s going to fuck with the new guy by sandbagging him in front of the press? Lol.

When Trump spoke he threatened “bedlam in the country” if Joe Biden didn’t stop the case from proceeding and then later ignored a reporter who asked if he would tell his fanboys to avoid violence, as if it weren’t already clear enough that Donald wants to watch the world burn.

A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced non-CIA or FBI agent and future hundred-millionaire Ray Epps to a year of probation after Epps pleaded guilty to his crimes committed as part of the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 – a mob that later turned on him for being “Deep State.”

“I’ve heard you… and today I am back bigger, bolder, freer! My new media company’s first project is The Don Lemon Show. It will be available to everyone, easily, whenever and wherever you want it, streaming on the platforms where the conversations are happening. And you’ll find it first on X, the biggest space for free speech in the world,” says former CNN host Don Lemon on Twitter (Fuck off with “X,” we’re not calling it that until Twitter.com no longer works for the site, which isn’t happening anytime soon). “I know now more than ever that we need a place for honest debate and discussion without the hall monitors. This is just the beginning so stay tuned,” Lemon continued in a story so big that you think cable news media gossip site Mediaite would’ve gotten on it already.

They didn’t. They let the Don Lemon-watchers in their audience down. They got “scooped” by some punk-ass no-budget WordPress news blog run by a troll with a deeply unhealthy and inexplicable vendetta against them that not even he can really articulate why he hates them so much.

Following in the footsteps of his little brother Mike by quitting long before the first votes are cast in a primary election, Indiana Congressman Greg Pence on Tuesday broke the noose that he won’t be roped into running again this November, announcing in a statement that “after three terms, I’ve made the decision to not file for reelection. For the remainder of my term this year, our team will continue to focus on delivering outstanding constituent services. To the voters in Indiana’s 6th District – it is a privilege and honor to represent you in our Nation’s capital.”

A very rough scorecard so far going into primary season: Including Greg Pence, now 17 Republicans have either already left or will do so soon, been expelled, fucked off to run for state office back home, or thrown their seat away running in an unwinnable senate primary while 14 Democrats have done the same – just change the “unwinnable Senate primary” to “unwinnable presidential primary” to count that Dean Phillips asshole. Another two Republicans and nine Dems are running for the Senate and there’s plenty of room to argue how “winnable” those are, especially with Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee running against each other in a three-way primary in California. All this is based on a subjective read of Ballotpedia’s tracker (which added Greg Pence but not the other MAGA Hoosier who dropped out Monday). For the early exits we only counted currently open seats.

The exodus overall is winding down as registration deadlines have passed in a lot of states. In the previous two cycles the vast bulk of the announcements came the December before the election year, though a few stragglers were still calling it quits well into the spring of 2022. While attrition is hitting Republicans slightly harder this cycle after hitting Dems fairly harder in 2022, it’s still nothing on the scale of the “fuck this, I’m out” from the House GOP in both 2018 and 2020.

Disgraced former President Trump’s lawyers and Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team will face off in front of a three-judge panel at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday to decide whether or not the fat fuck’s lame “presidential immunity” argument ahead of his tentatively scheduled – maybe delayed – March 2024 trial on federal conspiracy charges for his failed post-2020 election coup attempt. The Orange God Emperor himself claims he will be present for the arguments for some stupid reason, maybe he thinks he’ll intimidate the judges into ruling in his favor.

Dutch white nationalist MP Geert Wilders, still trying to bang together a coalition and take the premiership after his very Reich-y Party for Freedom placed first in Tulipland’s November elections, has caved on his 2018 bill to ban the Koran and mosques in a concession to three more mainstream-ish parties Wilders working to form his majority, the Associated Press reports.

It’s not clear what the ban on mosques would’ve looked like. Would the government simply demolish them with bulldozers or was it just supposed to be a prohibition on new construction?

Concluding that fat former President Trump is beyond any doubt the person listed as “John Doe 174” in the documents unsealed so far in the 2015 lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre against dead scumbag pimp Jeffrey Epstein’s equally evil girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, Business Insider also floats the possibility that Trump may have been among the persons who fought against the unsealing in closed-door proceedings in front of Manhattan federal Judge Loretta Preska.

Insider infers this because in Preska’s order she specifically noted that for individuals such as “John Doe 36,” whom Insider now knows to be Bill Clinton, “did not raise any objection to unsealing, and thus did not meet his or her burden of identifying interests that outweigh the presumption of access with specificity,” while for Doe 174, she found only “no interests that outweigh the presumption of access have been identified with specificity,” without any mention of objections raised.

The upshot to all of this is that, aside from emails an Epstein accuser telling a friend that Dirty Jeff had tapes of Trump (and Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Richard Branson) having sex with a woman in Epstein’s mansion that were later “retracted” as false at a very suspiciously-timed moment in the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign and that Donald took his idiot son Eric with him on Epstein’s private jet, nothing revealed so far this month has been all that damning for fat Donald.

So far. Business Insider’s report notes that Doe 174 comes up in nine documents, six of which have been made public already. Which raises the possibility that Preska is saving the worst for last.

Joe Manchin’s nightmare is now reality in Europe: Reuters reports that wind turbines have overtaken coal-burning power plants as the continent’s main source of electricity as of the third quarter of 2023, with the cancer machines cranking out 193 terawatt hours to black gold’s 184 terawatt hours.

A new USA Today/Suffolk University survey of likely voters in New Hampshire finds President Biden leading fat former President Trump 42 to 34 percent, with anti-vax asshole Robert F Kennedy Jr pulling in 8 percent, yet another poll showing Biden’s standing vs Trump not deteriorating in the Granite State relative to the 2020 result amid troubling numbers elsewhere.

The Suffolk survey also found Trump far ahead of Nimrata “Nikki” Haley among Republican primary voters by a margin of 46 to 26 percent. A CNN/University of New Hampshire survey also published on Tuesday found that primary race much closer, with Trump ahead of Haley 39 to 32 percent.

Hawkeye State political nerds have taken a look at the brutally fucking cold forecast for Monday night’s Iowa caucus and concluded that fat former President Trump’s support is most likely to suffer given his reliance on older voters more susceptible to slipping on ice and what not. Important to remember is that a “caucus” is definitionally a meeting, so there’s no mail-in vote option like the primary elections held in most other states. Either you show up in person or you don’t count.

“Forecast now is for 7 degrees,” Iowa GOP strategist David Kochel tells Politico. “That’s just bone-chilling. Definitely can impact turnout. Caucus attendees tend to be older than the average voter in a general election, so it might be even more pronounced. Not sure it will help/hurt any specific candidate vis a vis the field but generally, it’s my sense that lower turnout is unhelpful to Trump.”

Local Dem consultant Jeff Link tells Axios that turnout overall will drop, hurting Trump because his fans will assume he’s so far ahead that their vote doesn’t matter (some fanboy operative said to Politico that he told Trump he can expect “80,000 votes, likely over 50 percent of total turnout… Our folks are motivated”) and that, again, Trump’s support skews older than that of Haley and DeSantis.

None of it means Trump is going to lose, but complacency plus -5° F nighttime lows in Des Moines have the potential to embarrass the fat bastard due to mismanaged expectations of a crushing victory and real-world circumstance easily turned into knocks on his tedious “enthusiasm” circlejerk.

Woman allegedly killed by 'Soldiers of Christ' likely beaten 'to exorcise demon spirit': expert https://t.co/UxxGkDg8FL

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 9, 2024

Bow wow! The AP reports South Korea’s parliament have finally tired of being dogged by jokes about eating canine meat and on Tuesday unanimously passed a bill banning the production and sale of the local specialty by 2027. Some farmers howled in protest outside of the legislature in Seoul

“This is a clear case of state violence as they are infringing on our freedom to choose our occupation. We can’t just sit by idly,” said dog farmer Son Won Hak, vowing he would petition the country’s supreme court to have the ban overturned, rather than just shutting the fuck up and taking the three-year grace period he has to switch to raising pigs or chickens instead.

Recent surveys found a majority of South Koreans no longer consume dog meat and half supported the ban, while a third opposed it, even as many of those respondents didn’t eat it themselves.

Low on the long list of stupid, outrageous shit that fat former President Trump said or did on Monday but still noteworthy in its own right was posting a link to an article on shitty right wing propaganda site Gateway Pundit which in turn was relaying a January 1 piece in other shitty right wing propaganda American Greatness claiming that Nimrata “Nikki” Haley was ineligible for the presidency because her parents were not citizens when she was born in South Carolina in 1972.

Interesting how the degenerate who more or less started his political career by challenging the eligibility of the sitting president, Barack Obama, for not exactly the same but similar enough reasons to this current “question” on Haley is only interested enough to put it up in the middle of a flurry of other such “content” from his own information ecosystem. In a way it’s almost a tacit acknowledgement that the whole “birtherism” thing was a scam from the very beginning, that if it was weighty now that an actual rival could, at least in some racist incel fanboy’s “theory,” be ineligible for the presidency then you would think he should pursue it with considerably more vigor than he did as a private citizen against Obama. Just blithely posting it now as if to say “Oh hey, this sure is interesting, isn’t it?” is giving away far more of the game than intended.

As it is for Haley too. There’s zero chance that Trump’s post hasn’t been brought to her campaign team’s attention and that – at least at this point – they’ve chosen not to turn it into a news cycle because they know it’s almost certainly going to be a loser with the Republican voter base.

A GOP candidate for the state senate backed by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott and many in state Party leadership might be excluded from the ballot in the primary over questions about his eligibility for office, the Texas Tribune reports.

Candidate Brent Hagenbuch’s candidacy was set to be reviewed Monday morning in a Texas courtroom when a lawyer for one of his opponents asked for an extension to check out a new claim Hagenbuch was making:  that he lived in a corporate apartment he rented for one dollar per quarter in the office building he claimed was his residence on his candidate application.  According to a court filing Hagenbuch made hours earlier, he “slept there, showered there, ate there and lived there.”

The judge postponed further arguments until January 19th, pushing deadlines before the GOP primaries slated for March 5th.  The senate seat is the only safe “red” seat open in the upcoming election after its longtime denizen announced his retirement, and four Republicans are vying for the seat that will essentially mean a lifetime in Austin for the winner.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was released from an intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, just days after it was disclosed that he had been hospitalized since New Year’s Day with a complication from a pre-Christmas medical procedure, the Washington Post reports.  Austin’s absence was apparently news to even his second-in-command at the Pentagon, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico when she assumed some of Austin’s duties last week after he was already hospitalized.

The White House reportedly did not learn of Austin’s hospitalization until Thursday, a lapse a Pentagon spokesperson attributed to a series of untimely events, absences and illnesses that coalesced around the holiday period.

It sounded better in the original German, but on Monday Fox News Reichsleiter Laura Ingraham ordered the volksministers of the Party Congress to cease negotiations with Old man Biden on any border deal to prevent the blood of the nation from being poisoned as it could give him a “victory.”

A one-liter bottle of water may contain as many as 370,000 bits of microparticle and nanoparticle plastics, a new study by Columbia University researchers found, demonstrating how pervasive manmade pollution is in the environment.

According to CNN, a 2018 study set the benchmark at around 300 bits of plastic per liter in bottled water.  The new study, however, used technology able to detect bits of plastic so small they’re undetectable under an ordinary microscope. These plastic bits found in the tested water samples from were microparticle plastics ranging from 5 millimeters to 1 micrometer (roughly 1/25,000 of an inch) or smaller nanoplastics.

Plastics do not naturally leave the environment; instead, they erode down to smaller and smaller particulates that end up in the food system.  Some of the plastic contamination in bottled water, however, may come from the bottling process itself because other studies have found tap water with fewer microplastics–and presumably fewer nanoplastics–in it, researchers say.

Someone who didn’t understand Jack Smith is under 24-hour armed protection attempted to “swat” the Special Counsel on Christmas Day, NBC News reports, calling 9-1-1 claiming a man had shot and killed his wife and children at Smith’s home address.  Montgomery County, Maryland police were dispatched to the house, but US Marshals informed the police department that the call was a fraud.