Claiming that there is “no compelling reason for the extraordinary haste” with which Special Counsel Jack Smith wants to proceed with the unprecedented prosecution of a former President and leading Party candidate for nomination in an election less than 11 months away, Donald Trump’s lawyers argue that the Supreme Court should just wait in line to hear the nationally-critical case in a new filing about his DC federal prosecution for undermining the 2020 election.

After first claiming that the Special Counsel doesn’t have standing to request the Supreme Court expedite hearing the case–a simply laughable claim–and then claiming the Supreme Court can’t take the case before the lower courts rule, Trump attorneys amazingly claims, “the Special Counsel identifies no compelling reason for the extraordinary haste he proposes. Instead, he vaguely asserts that the “public interest” favors resolution on a dramatically accelerated timetable, to ensure that President Trump may be brought to trial in the next few months.”

A new Quinnipiac University survey finds President Joe Biden leading disgraced former President Trump 47 to 46 percent among registered voters in a 2024 matchup, with Trump losing slightly more support to anti-vax freak Robert F Kennedy Jr in a three-way at Biden 38 – Trump 36 – RFK Jr 22.

A near majority at 48 percent say the economy will improve next year while 39 percent think it will sink. That’s a pretty important finding. Biden’s approval and favorability ratings are identical and still suck at 38 percent to 58 percent disapprove/unfavorable to Trump’s 41 percent favorable/54 percent unfavorable. Not as important Biden still outperforms Trump in the head-to-head.

More than half – 53 percent of voters say they’re “concerned” about the shit Trump says that makes him sound like Hitler, though probably at least some of those are only concerned because they’re fans who wish he would shut the fuck up and not risk his reelection chances with it.

An Arizona judge ruled Wednesday that losing Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate and current GOP Senate candidate Kari Lake can face defamation charges brought by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who asserts Lake wrongly claimed rigged various elections, the Arizona Republic reports.

Lake, who says she’s the Rightful Governor of Arizona despite various court judgments demonstrating her tenuous grasp on reality, repeatedly targeted Richer in statements and social media posts, claiming he was a partisan hack installed to help cover up a massive election fraud plot to deprive her and Donald Trump of their rightful victories.  After multiple recounts and audits, no irregularities in the Maricopa County vote counts were found.

The Rightful Governor of Arizona posted online, without evidence, that Richer is has “Soros-backed attorneys representing him” adding the predictable conspiracy:  “This is about taking away our First Amendment rights and interfering in the US Senate race.”

The vile hag’s protestations came right after Fox News ran a clip of President Biden being asked by reporters if he thought fat former President Trump is an “insurrectionist,” telling them “I think it’s certainly self-evident… He certainly supported insurrection, no question about it, none, zero. He seems to be doubling down on everything,” to which less desiccated anchor Harris Faulkner questioned Biden’s mental “acuity” for being honest about the situation with her viewers. Then Faulkner falsely claimed Trump hasn’t been charged for anything related to January 6th.

Anyway back to crazy Kellyanne and her stupid rant: If all Democrats think every day is still January 6th, 2021 then it’s only fair for us to come back with all MAGA Republicans think every day is still November 3rd, 2020. What the fuck else are we supposed to think when this month Trump posted some bullshit Rasmussen poll supposedly finding that 20 percent of respondents somehow cheated on their mail-in ballots in the 2020 election (which will do wonders for Ronna Not-Romney’s stupid “bank your vote” campaign), just this morning the stupid Gateway Pundit reports “Smoke and Mirrors: New Evidence Suggests That NO Audit was Performed by Election Machine Testing Company as Claimed by Georgia Secretary of State,” and that batshit “Sinaloa Cartel rigged the election” conspiracy theory surfaced again in Arizona… So who’s not getting over it here?

Conference Board press release: “The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index® increased in December to 110.7 (1985=100), up from a downwardly revised 101.0 in November. The Present Situation Index – based on consumers’ assessment of current business and labor market conditions – rose to 148.5 (1985=100) from 136.5 last month. The Expectations Index – based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions – leapt to 85.6 (1985=100) in December, up from its downwardly revised reading of 77.4 in November. This sharp increase brings expectations back to the levels of optimism last seen in July of this year. ‘December’s increase in consumer confidence reflected more positive ratings of current business conditions and job availability, as well as less pessimistic views of business, labor market, and personal income prospects over the next six months,’ said Dana Peterson, Chief Economist at The Conference Board.”

“‘While December’s renewed optimism was seen across all ages and household income levels, the gains were largest among householders aged 35-54 and households with income levels of $125,000 and above. December’s write-in responses revealed the top issue affecting consumers remains rising prices in general, while politics, interest rates, and global conflicts all saw downticks as top concerns. Consumers’ perceived likelihood of a US recession over the next 12 months abated in December to the lowest level seen this year – though 2/3rds still perceive a downturn is possible.'”

“A Manhattan federal court today unsealed terrorism charges against Samuel Salman El Reda, 58, a dual Colombian-Lebanese citizen and member of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), in connection with El Reda’s alleged role leading decades of terrorist activity on behalf of Hezbollah and the IJO. El Reda is charged with, among other offenses, conspiring to provide and providing material support to Hezbollah, a designated foreign terrorist organization. El Reda is based in Lebanon and remains at large,” says a Wednesday press release from the Justice Department.

“‘Nearly three decades ago, long-time Hezbollah terrorist operative Samuel Salman El Reda allegedly helped plan and execute the heinous attack on a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that murdered 85 innocent people and injured countless others,’ said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.”

Disgraced former President Trump’s legal team are freaking the fuck out in court filings in two separate federal court jurisdictions this week. Emphasis on federal because shit is obviously also going haywire for him at the state level. In fact we were working on this story Tuesday when the news of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling forced an immediate detour into that shitshow.

Now for those other shitshows: First off in New York City the Daily Beast reports that Donald’s defense team in next month’s damages-only defamation trial brought by writer EJ Carroll are desperately trying to block expert witness Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University professor who specializes in analyzing social media trends. That may not sound like it means much until you learn Humphreys testified to the jury in a DC federal court last week for former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shae Moss in their damages-only defamation case against alcoholic shitbrain Rudy Giuliani. Specifically about her calculations on how much the two should be awarded, which was $32 million. Then the jury added another $116 million on top of that. Humphreys has already crunched the numbers and found that Trump should owe $21 million to Carroll, which is going to be the jury’s floor to add likely tens of millions more. “This court should simply exclude Dr Humphreys’ testimony altogether,” one of the fat bastard’s lawyers wrote in a filing.

Meanwhile in the DC criminal case, Trump’s lawyers accused Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith of “improperly and unlawfully” attempting “to advance this case by serving thousands of pages of additional discovery, as well as a purported ‘Draft Exhibit List.’ These actions, the prosecution admits, are calculated to ‘help ensure that [a potential] trial proceeds promptly if and when the mandate returns.’ Such maneuvers are exactly what the Stay Order forbids, and impose a significant and prohibited burden on President Trump… as stated in President Trump’s letter response, neither he nor counsel will review the prosecution’s unlawful productions until and unless the Court lifts the stay order,” as if it wasn’t already clear that they really don’t want this trial to happen. So much so that they don’t even want the evidence in hand when they’re going to need it.

Jesus dork Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s team have as of Wednesday published on Rumble just 162 hours, or 0.4 percent, of the estimated relevant 44,000 hours of security footage from the Capitol captured by surveillance cameras on January 6th, 2021, CBS News reports. More than half of that, 90 hours or so, were already released to former top Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson by Johnson’s failed predecessor Kevin McCarthy. For some reason that particular batch of footage does not have the faces of the rioters blurred out as Johnson had claimed was so important to keep them from getting prosecuted, even though his office later tried to walk it back by saying that “faces are to be blurred from public viewing room footage to prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors,” and admitting that was stupid because “The Department of Justice already has access to raw footage from January 6, 2021.”

In an interview publisher last week, NBC News’s Ryan Reilly, author of Sedition Hunters, gave lefty Substacker Brian Beutler a good explainer of why the blurring was even more pointless. “Honestly, from the sleuths’ perspective, it is not an insurmountable challenge… The Capitol cameras aren’t the highest of quality, and the footage that has been the most effective in terms of identifying suspects through facial recognition is the rioters’ own footage, professionally shot video, and body-worn camera footage. The Capitol CCTV footage is certainly useful for placing events on a timeline and for figuring out which bodies/suspects entered the building, but if Speaker Johnson thinks he’s preventing many people from being IDed by blurring footage, he’s kidding himself.”

The MAGA assholes were, as we had anticipated, far more triggered by the blurring. “Don’t be fooled! Speaker Johnson’s proposal to blur faces helps the DOJ, FBI informants, and rogue Capitol Hill police hide their identities more than it will help defense lawyers and innocent men and women unjust jailed for their participation in a political political protest,” tweeted influencer Carol Swain.

A day after he issued a temporary restraining order barring the removal of the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery because a petitioner affiliated with a Florida “heritage” group claimed the removal would disturb nearby remains–a claim that if found “to be untrue or exaggerated the Court may take appropriate sanctions,” the judge promised–U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston, a Trump appointee, lifted the TRO Tuesday after touring the deconstruction project, the Associated Press reports.

In his order, Alston said he saw “no desecration [of any graves] at all. The grass wasn’t even disturbed,” when he toured the section of the cemetery where the memorial, one of the largest structures on Arlington’s grounds, was to be disassembled.  Regarding the desecration allegations made by a group called Defend Arlington, which is associated with Save Southern Heritage Florida, Alston said they  “were, at best, ill-informed and, at worst, inaccurate.”  He did not state if he would pursue any sanctions against the petitioner.  The cemetery’s manager said work to take down the monstrosity would restart immediately.

Perhaps cosmic karma for all the uncaught red dots, NASA used a laser beam to transmit a cat video from a probe 19 million miles away back to Earth in a demonstration to prove the viability of near-infrared laser communications, IFL Science reports.

As part of the Psyche mission to an object in the asteroid belt with the same name, NASA loaded a video of an orange cat named Taters unsuccessfully pursuing the Taunting Red Dot, not to be confused with the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, onto the probe, which blasted the laser back to Earth from an area of space outside the Moon’s orbit.  The test showed that the laser could transmit the 15-second video at 267 megabits per second, delivering the entire file in 101 seconds.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” said JPL’s Ryan Rogalin. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”

This Colorado shitshow sure came out of fucking nowhere, right? Nobody was more surprised than the fanboys, lulled into complacency by Trump’s wins elsewhere. They weren’t happy over it.

“So the Colorado Supreme Court basically convicted Trump of insurrection without first having a trial for insurrection. Does that cover it?” – Top comment on Town Hall’s article. There was a trial. The judge literally made a fact finding that Trump had indeed engaged in insurrection.

“So, the court has decreed Trump guilty with no indictment and no trial. Sounds like standard Democrat practice. Note that Colorado was purple with some red tendencies not that long ago (like when we moved here), but as soon as mail in voting was instituted, it has been solidly blue. This is not a coincidence” – Top comment at PowerLine. Holy shit, they’re all going to say there was no trial.

“I missed the part where Trump was first convicted of insurrection in a trial” – Top comment on an Instapundit post about a Jonathan Turley tweet. Fuuuuuuuuuu-uuuuuuuuuuuuuu-uuuck…

“Of course it’s a fraudulent move in the court’s part. Trump has never been charged, let alone tried or convicted of insurrection or even sedition. So, how can they do this? Simple. They are truly political animals with a passing acquaintance wit my the law. It says a little something that at least three opposed the ruling, but the other four wanted throw their Dem buddies a juicy bone. I can’t believe this can and will stand if it makes it to SCOTUS. They jumped the gun here before even one of the cases went to trial” – Top comment at PJ Media. Yup, this asshole also says there was no trial.

“As a DeSantis supporter I can still honestly ask how the CO Supreme Court can do that when he hasn’t even been convicted of inciting an insurrection” – Top comment on RedState. Okay, at least this pudding-fingers fanboy uses the word “convicted,” stupid as his non-distinction is.

Throwing his considerable weight around, and trying to flex the political influence that led the GOP to lose virtually every contested Senate race but two in 2022, Donald Trump endorsed Cleveland area car dealer Bernie Moreno, a loser in the 2020 GOP Ohio Senate primary, over two other more experienced Republicans, the Washington Post reports.  The Republican nominee will face incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown in a closely watched race that could decide control of the Senate in 2024.

A federal judge affirmed that the FBI could access nearly 1,700 records from the cell phone of Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Scott Perry, one of the House members who helped Trump’s attempt to undermine the legitimate outcome of the 2020 election, the Washington Post reports.

The amount is slightly less than the 9,000 a lower court had granted the FBI access to, but it reaffirms limits on communications members of Congress can claim was protected by the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution that shields some communications of members of Congress from criminal or civil action.  Perry was allegedly integral to the effort to have Jeffrey Clark named Attorney General so he could issue a letter to state election officials casting doubt on the legitimacy of election tallies.

Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the DC District Court lowered the number of items after reviewing more than 2,100 individual messages, emails and other items on Perry’s phone to decide which ones fell outside the scope of official acts.

“Today’s ruling attempting to disqualify President Trump from the Colorado ballot is nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack. Regardless of political affiliation, every citizen registered to vote should not be denied the right to support our former president and the individual who is the leader in every poll of the Republican primary. We trust the US Supreme Court will set aside this reckless decision and let the American people decide the next President of the United States,” writes Jesus dork Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in a statement following Trump’s disqualification in Colorado.

Former US Solicitor General Neal Katyal was not responding directly but he had an interesting take on what the US Supreme Court is going to have to grapple with, writing “Some are saying this is a 4-3 decision, with 3 Justices disagreeing. True, but much of the dissents are about Colorado state election law, which is irrelevant as this case goes to the US Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court cannot second guess the Colorado Supreme Court on its own law… What this means, practically, is that much of what the dissenting Colorado Justices wrote is now irrelevant, as it is not something the US Supreme Court can pick up to reverse the Colorado Supreme Court on. There are of course federal constitutional issues left, but a key focus of the dissents is now [irrelevant].”

We can’t speak to what that means other than that the MAGA Supreme Court are going to have to more or less make it up as they go along to contrive a pretext to overrule Colorado. Not trying to raise anyone’s hopes here but it just doesn’t sound like it’s going to be the clean win that Johnson and the rest of the right wing freaks are already guaranteeing… if they even get a win.

This ought to be a good one. If Trump actually knows what happened to him at the Colorado state Supreme Court just a little while ago. That’s up in the air, but we’ll find out very soon.

Reacting as angrily as expected to the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling, large-headed Trump spokesman Steven Cheung on Monday raged in a statement, writing “Unsurprisingly, the all-Democrat appointed Colorado Supreme Court has ruled against President Trump, supporting a Soros-funded, left-wing group’s scheme to interfere in an election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden by removing President Trump’s name from the ballot and eliminating the rights of Colorado voters to vote for the candidate of their choice. Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead President Trump has amassed in the polls. They have lost faith in the failed Biden presidency and are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November. The Colorado Supreme Court issued a completely flawed decision tonight and we will swiftly file an appeal to the United States Supreme Court and a concurrent request for a stay of this deeply undemocratic decision. We have full confidence that the US Supreme Court will quickly rule in our favor and finally put an end to these unAmerican lawsuits.”

The thing is that it was Cheung who wrote that, not Trump. The fat bastard himself in the last 40 minutes since the hammer dropped posted two angry rants on Truth Social, both of them about the federal criminal cases against him. “It’s a sad day for America when a lowlife Prosecutor like Deranged Jack Smith, who was put into the position of Special Prosecutor by Lisa Monaco and the other Thugs that surround our incompetent President, Crooked Joe Biden, to sully my reputation for the purpose of Election Interference and ideally, put me in jail,” Trump wrote in the first one.

Holy shit. The Colorado state Supreme Court on Tuesday found that disgraced former President Trump engaged in insurrection and is disqualified from running again in the state in 2024 under the 14th Amendment. The defeat comes after the fat bastard notched a string of victories in challenges in other states with Michigan and North Carolina ruling against the plaintiffs just this week.

The decision was a 4-3 squeaker. “In this appeal from a district court proceeding under the Colorado Election Code, the supreme court considers whether former President Donald J Trump may appear on the Colorado Republican presidential primary ballot in 2024. A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. The court stays its ruling until January 4, 2024, subject to any further appellate proceedings,” the justices wrote in the intro to their 213-page opinion.

Again, holy shit this is a big deal. Expect the US Supreme Court to overturn it if and when it gets on their docket and look really stupid in the process of justifying their decision. Still big.

Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju if he was “comfortable with your party’s leading presidential candidate referring to legal immigrants as people who are poisoning the blood of our country,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday said “That didn’t bother him when he appointed [his wife] Elaine Chao Secretary of Transportation.” You know because Chao’s an immigrant from Taiwan who Trump has more than once since 2021 called her “Coco Chow” and suggested she was a Chinese Communist fifth columnist, so that he hired her in 2017 means Trump isn’t racist.

LOL! Check out Twitter, the Republicans are SCREAMING at the sky over this new “muh border crisis” like it actually matters. What a bunch of wieners. “12,600+ encounters in one. single. day. Biden’s border disaster will have generational impacts on our nation,” tweeted cuck loser Senator Mike Braun. LMAO Cry more Braun-hole! “OMG! There’s Central Americans coming in to use fake IDs to work in poultry plants and on farms and other shitty jobs no US citizens want!” they frantically cry with their non-stop white nationalist virtue signaling circlejerk. Losers.

Their salty tears over the “blood of the nation being poisoned” is hilarious. They squirm and cry while Biden just laughs at their pain. “OPEN BORDERS!” is a hoax, replacement theory is a hoax, the cartels are a hoax. The Border Patrol are a bunch of crisis actors. Deal with it MAGA Nazis.

National Zero will resume our regular news coverage after treating an important issue for GOP voters with the same seriousness they’ve treated COVID, global warming, Ukraine, and democracy.