“I will be attending the the Federal Appeals Court Arguments on Presidential Immunity in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. Of course I was entitled, as President of the United States and Commander in Chief, to Immunity. I wasn’t campaigning, the Election was long over. I was looking for voter fraud, and finding it, which is my obligation to do, and otherwise running running our Country.”

“If I don’t get Immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get Immunity, and with the Border Invasion and Afghanistan Surrender, alone, not to mention the Millions of dollars that went into his ‘pockets’ with money from foreign countries, Joe would be ripe for Indictment. By weaponizing the DOJ against his Political Opponent, ME, Joe has opened a giant Pandora’s Box,” writes fat former President Trump early Monday, confirming his bloated presence at the DC Appeals Court.

With the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its allies boycotting the election claiming it was already rigged, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina won her fourth consecutive term in office after her Awami League Party won more than two-thirds of the 299 directly elected parliamentary seats, Reuters reports.

The campaign was marred with acts of violence, with both sides claiming the other was the cause.  As recently as Friday, an arson attack on a train left four dead, with seven members of the BNP and its youth wing being arrested by authorities for it.  The violence and repeated claims of corruption lowered voter participation rate to around 40%.

Heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Saturday told reporters in Iowa he’s been looking into removing President Joe Biden from the ballot in Florida because something something the border, shitty right wing clickbait site TrendingPoliticsNews.com reports.

“To have one election official decide that somebody is guilty of, quote, ‘insurrection,’ when there has not been a criminal conviction of anybody, much less the candidate himself, that opens up Pandora’s box,” DeSantis said. “I’m actually looking at this in Florida now. Could we make a credible case that Biden [should be removed] because of the invasion of 8 million [migrants]?”

Funny how it’s Trump who’s been falsely accusing Biden of somehow directing Maine and Colorado to disqualify him when, in reality, Joe had nothing to do with the decisions, which to Republicans are “an attack on democracy.” The way DeSantis says it, that if he were to win the GOP nomination (he won’t) and successfully get Biden kicked off the ballot in Florida (he probably won’t), then that would be like literally exactly the “election rigging” the MAGA shitheads are accusing Biden of.

And on top of all that “DeSanctimonious” is still acting like Trump’s bitch after all that abuse.

Dueling remarks by likely 2024 rivals President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump this weekend both sought to seize upon differing accounts of the events at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, with Biden alleging in a Pennsylvania campaign speech that supporters of the 45th president violently attacked the US Capitol in protest of his apparent defeat in the 2020 election.

Trump for his part denied the accusations, saying that the protestors should be pardoned after having faced prosecution for confronting police officers during the protest. January 6th remains a controversial topic among wide swaths of voters, with Democrats mostly believing it was an attack with the express purpose of disrupting the Electoral College vote, with some of the protestors allegedly seeking to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence. Republican voters meanwhile believe that leftist Antifa infiltrators and FBI agents disguised as Trump supporters perpetrated the attack on the Capitol, underscoring the large gap between competing narratives about the day’s events.

Many political observers see the issue of democracy as being a key theme of the 2024 election and that whoever can gain the most momentum on it will have the advantage among voters who find it important. Former President Trump has been charged with 91 felony counts in four different criminal cases, many of which concern allegations that he harassed a Georgia elections official in a phone call and may have had other involvement in improper attempts overturn the 2020 election, while President Biden faces accusations that he may have secretly directed the prosecutions against Trump as well as efforts to disqualify his rival under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause.

All the different accusations surrounding the 2020 election, January 6th, and the efforts to remove Trump from the ballot are sure to swirl around both candidates during a heated election year.

National Zero will resume our regular news coverage now that we’ve delivered a balanced, impartial, mainstream take on the current state of American politics for folks on both sides of the aisle.

At 2:18 a.m. ET Monday, a private company hopes to launch an unmanned mission from Cape Canaveral to land a probe on the Moon on February 23rd, the first new American mission to “soft land” a probe on the Moon in a half-century.  And it will launch a new era of NASA-endorsed private missions paving the way for the next step in the Artemis mission to return humans to the Moon, the Washington Post reports (via gift link).

Monday’s launch of Astrobotic’s probe with the help of two BE-4 engines made by (comparatively benign) billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin oddly, won’t make its cargo the first commercial probe on the Moon’s surface; a launch in the works planned for February and using evil billionaire Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket will hurtle its Intuitive Machines mission to the Moon with an expected landing date of February 22nd.

Astrobotic’s Peregrine spacecraft will take an unusually direct route to the Moon, allowing the craft to orbit the Moon and take measurements as it waits for its intended landing spot to spin into the sunlight.  The Intuitive Machines craft will take a similarly direct path, but it’ll just be a dick, cut in line, and land first.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Mike Johnson have an agreement for overall spending levels to be announced publicly on Sunday afternoon, CNN’s Haley Talbot reports on “the first step to averting a shutdown later this month even as that threat still looms.”

The Messenger’s Steve Neukam reports from sources that the number is $1.59 trillion, the same agreed between Biden and Kevin McCarthy before the debt ceiling deal last year.

We guess we’re supposed to write another paragraph or two speculating on what that means for Johnson’s standing in the House GOP conference and that it could be the last straw before the Freedom Caucasians vacate him like they did to McCarthy or maybe Johnson and the others in House GOP leadership have probably calculated that won’t happen again since last time was an embarrassing shitshow for all involved and it’ll be better if they can just focus on impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas or Joe Biden instead of dicking around over spending that the vast majority of MAGA voters don’t really care that much about anyway since it’s boring and complicated…

Actually looks like we already got that “paragraph” up in the form of a lengthy run-on sentence that didn’t really say anything. Maybe we should try to explain how that’s distinguishable from most mainstream media reporting about legislative negotiations but why be dishonest here?

Cops in the town of Silt, Colorado confirmed to the Daily Beast on Sunday there’s an “active investigation” after convicted weenie wagger Jayson Boebert reported his dumbass ex-wife Congresswoman Lauren Boebert for assaulting him publicly in a restaurant on Saturday night.

An aide to the “Little Bitch” tells the Beast it was a multi-episode drama starting when Lauren came by to pick up one of their boys from her ex-husband’s house. Jayson moved in for a hug (maybe hoping for a tug) to which Lauren shoved him back in the chest and left in a huff.

Jayson called to make amends, asking Lauren to meet again. She agreed but, per an aide, stipulated it had to be in a public place, picking a joint in Silt called the Miner’s Claim. From here the accounts differ, with American Muckrakers – the outfit that got jammed up on the “hooker” story – saying one thing in a series of tweets and aides to Boebert telling the Beast differently.

The Muckrackers say Lauren punched Jayson in the nose twice and her name was heard in the response report on the police scanner. Lauren Boebert’s aide says Jayson was “being disrespectful,” “being an asshole,” and getting “lewd,” with his Congresswoman ex-wife whose revulsion prompted an “aggressive move, not romantic” for her. Lauren then “put her hand in his face, put her hand on his nose,” per the aide, which sounds awful damage control-y considering Lauren was well within her rights to punch her ex-husband in the face if he had indeed grabbed her non-consensually.

The aide tells the Beast that Jayson then called the cops to report that he was “a victim of domestic violence.” Shortly after that Lauren called too to tell them there was no domestic violence, and that she’d be happy to speak with an officer at the joint. Reached by the Beast on Sunday morning, Jayson would neither confirm nor deny the incident, offering only “I don’t know what to say.”

UPDATE 1/7/2024 1:55 PM EDT: Jayson called the Beast’s Roger Sollenberger to confirm the Muckrakers’ reporting that Lauren had indeed punched him in the face “several times” and he had a witness to back that up. He also said he’s going to ask the cops to drop the investigation because he believes that would be best for them and their multigenerational white trash family.

Among the great many useful properties of adjectives and adverbs in coloring language is that they allow one to apply relative quanta to that which they describe. For example, California and Texas are both large states geographically, but Texas is quantifiably larger than California. That doesn’t mean California is small, it’s just smaller than Texas. Alaska however is larger than both of them.

Similarly, when we say James Comer is dumber and more incompetent than Jim Jordan that doesn’t mean Jim Jordan is smart or competent. It’s not really quantifiable so much as really a gut feeling based on watching them on cable news and how they conduct themselves at hearings. They just freaking suck at this, and this morning Jim Jordan did nothing to disabuse that notion when Maria Bartiromo – who lately has been betraying a dim but noticeable awareness that these “Biden Crime Family” stories all complete bullshit – asked Jordan to quantify in relative terms which piece of evidence he and Comer have on Joe Biden is the most “damning,” as in politically disadvantageous.

Jordan actually gives Comer a run for his money when Gymbo said that it was the Devon Archer interview, referring to a July 2023 deposition in which one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners said, from the transcript, Archer was “not aware” of “any wrongdoing by Vice President Biden” and that he did not have “any knowledge of Joe Biden having any involvement with Burisma.”

Gym also told Bartiromo that blowing off a congressional subpoena is a serious criminal offense.

Sources tell ABC News that Trump minions Nick Luna and Dan Scavino recently told investigators with Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team some previously unreported details about how the fat fuck reacted to being told that Mike Pence was hiding in a garage under the Capitol while the mob Donald had incited were sacking the building and beating the shit out of cops.

“So what?” was Trump’s response to Luna, who supposedly was shocked to hear that the Orange God Emperor didn’t care what happened to Mike Pence, while Scavino told Smith’s team that Trump was “very angry” the whole day. Not over the attack, but the “stollen” election, of course.

The longtime aide Scavino, who started out as a caddy at a Trump golf course in 1992 and still serves as Team Orange’s social media master, said he went out of his was to tell other aides that it was Trump and not Scavino who posted the tweet saying Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.”

Scavino said he and other aides went to the Oval Office dining room where the fat bastard was sitting with his arms folded watching the violence, “taking in the chaotic scenes.” They tried to get him to post something to discourage violence “but he was just not interested at that moment to put anything out.” Scavino then drafted the tweet asking the insurrectionists to support police and “stay peaceful,” which Trump approved and went up just minutes before Ashli Babbitt was shot dead.

Loathsome battle axe Congresswoman Elise Stefanik slithered into NBC’s Meet the Press studio on Sunday morning for a rare mainstream appearance, one centered largely on complaining about the mainstream media being biased against her and her Orange God Emperor. But for all her sophistries and bullshit when cornered by Kristen Welker on the matter of the fat former President’s recent spate of Adolf Hitler-inspired racist rhetoric, Stefanik did indeed confirm she was in fact comfortable with Donald saying that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Stefanik also reacted angrily when Welker brought the receipt of Stefanik’s floor speech from the aftermath of the insurrection in which the hellbeast had said the violence was “un-American and must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” with Stefanik telling Welker “As typical of NBC and the biased media, you played one excerpt of my speech,” as if that part was somehow “out of context” to the question of whether she still believes the rioters should face justice.

Stefanik made it abundantly clear she doesn’t, saying she has “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” while interspersing her hateful rant with all sorts of bullshit about how Pennsylvania making it easier to vote during the COVID pandemic was somehow unconstitutional.

The shrill, angry monster closed the interview by refusing to confirm or deny to Welker whether she and her Orange Allah have discussed her joining his 2024 ticket as a running mate.

A new CBS News/YouGov survey of US adults finds 66 percent of Republican voters, and 38 percent of all respondents, supporting pardoning for the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol after fat former President Trump’s humiliating defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

The poll also did a little better of a job on the question of perceived culpability for the rioters than a recent one done by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland which gave respondents too much wiggle room on the “Fedsurrection” conspiracy shit by offering a “not sure” option on whether it was true or false that “FBI operatives organized and encouraged” the attack. CBS News/YouGov worded it more directly by asking whether or not respondents thought the rioters were “Typical of most Trump supporters” plus a third option of “People pretending to be Trump supporters,” for which 37 percent of GOP voters and 21 percent overall said they were “pretending.”

We would love to see numbers on how many MAGAmericans answered both yes on pardons and that the rioters were “People pretending to be Trump supporters.” The crosstabs on the poll don’t get into the overlap between questions, but we crunched the numbers quick and found that, if in absolutes there were 399 Republican respondents who said yes on pardons and 224 who think the insurrection was a false flag out of a sample of 608 GOP voters, then at least 2.1 percent of MAGAmericans think the FBI agents and Antifa fifth columnists who they believe attacked the Capitol three years ago should be pardoned. Probably significantly more. That is friggin impressive.

After an Alaska Airline 737 Max 9 lost a window section as it was gaining altitude after takeoff from Portland on Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered 171 of the aircraft worldwide grounded until the aircraft can be inspected and maintenance safety procedures reviewed, USA Today reports.

The panel that blew out of Friday’s Alaska Air flight was a door exit plug, a piece that can be inserted instead of an emergency door exit when the plane is in certain configurations based on passenger loads.  If the plane carries fewer passengers, fewer exits are needed.  And removing an exit means lowering weight, which means less fuel and … ain’t capitalism grand?

While using door exit plugs isn’t unusual, having blowouts midflight is, so the manufacturer will review installation procedures and checks with planes in the same configuration.  Each check and inspection should take between four and eight hours, and then a determination will be made if the issue was specific to this specific plane, its configuration or another larger system.  It’s the latest question in the history of the Boeing Max:  introduced in 2017, one Max 8 crashed in 2018 and another in 2019.  The planes only returned to service after Boeing made a global update to an automated flight control system that may have somehow caused the crashes.

Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the bare-chested body-painted who gained a modicum of infamy as the QAnon Shaman after participating in the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress three years ago Saturday, wants the Department of Justice to return his trademark horns, evidence that was used in the case leading to his conviction for obstruction, the Daily Beast reports.

Chansley told the Daily Beast that “[t]hey’re keeping it like it’s evidence.  The case is over, so there’s no reason for them to continue holding onto it.”  However, as recently as July, Chansley has sought to get his guilty plea thrown out, and he sought a pardon from Trump in the days after the attack saying Trump invited him and others.

Released from prison last March after serving 27 months of a 41-month sentence, Chansley is on probation until 2026 so he is unable to vote in Arizona until he at least fulfills that part of his sentence, but last November he registered with the state as a Libertarian candidate for Congress in the 8th Congressional District, currently held by Republican Debbie Lesko, who is not seeking re-election.

A missing 16-year-old Ohio girl groomed by a 31-year-old Florida man was located at the man’s Dunnellon home after she accessed her account for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft and the FBI geolocated the account, CNN reports.

On Wednesday, police questioned Thomas Ebersole in the unnamed girl’s disappearance after finding the girl in his home with him, as he was signed into his World of Warcraft account too.  From the same IP address.  At the same time.  While sitting in another room of the same house.  Of course, he initially did not know anything about the underage girl who was playing the same MMORPG in the house where he lived, but later admitted to driving to Ohio to pick up the girl after arranging the abduction using the Discord platform, which is apparently the home to various kinds of nefarious people.  Ebersole said he intended to keep the girl at the house and planned to later marry her because he was in love.  There was no information on Ebersole’s disqus handle.

Here’s just a friendly reminder that this is the crime-fighting federal organization that members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene scream to demonize and defund because it’s investigating crimes committed by, y’know, her friends without understanding the vast amount of investigations–like this–they do regularly.  And for the record, unshockingly, Florida man Thomas Ebersole is not a member of the LGBTQ community nor is he a drag queen, sparing him the moral outrage of Moms for Libertines Liberty or Ron DeSantis.

Members of the Michigan State Republican Party Committee voted on Saturday to remove QAnon freak Chairwoman Kristina Karamo by an overwhelming 40 to 5 margin, the Detroit Free Press reports. The vote went down at a meeting that Karamo had already declared to be null and void, so who knows what the fuck happens now with the deeply dysfunctional Great Lakes state branch of a national party that’s already pretty goddamned dysfunctional. We guess this is what you would call a “constitutional crisis” or whatever, but who cares. It’s hilarious. Especially that they’re deeply in debt and part of the reason is that they had to take out a loan to pay a $110,000 speaking fee to other QAnon freak actor Jim Caviezel when he gave a speech to their annual retreat.

The former chief of staff to the now-resigned conman leader of the NRA agreed to a settlement of a civil fraud lawsuit brought the New York Attorney General’s office, the Guardian reports.  Under the agreement, Joshua Powell, Wayne LaPierre’s former aide and one of the five named defendants in the civil suit brought by Attorney General Letitia James’s office, will acknowledge wrongdoing, admit to breaching his fiducial responsibilities, and pay a $100,000 fine.

The lawsuit alleges that LaPierre, Powell and others in the leadership of the guns fetishist organization intentionally and knowingly misdirected funds from the organization to personal benefit and profit.  LaPierre is accused of using NRA money to fund lavish vacations, pay for private jet travel, and finance luxury items for himself and his wife.

The fat bastard already mocked Abraham Lincoln for not “negotiating” with the Confederacy to avoid the Civil War – which would’ve been actually surrendering because they started it.

Rival Republican Missouri gubernatorial hopefuls Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft – son of far right former US Attorney General John Ashcroft – and state Senator Bill Eigel – the Nazi who literally staged a book burning just a few months ago – are engaged in a contest to see who can perform more loudly for disgraced former President Trump by figuring out some 14th Amendment-based pretext for disqualifying President Joe Biden from the 2024 ballot in the Show Me State.

In one corner is Ashcroft telling NBC News “If Democrat states are saying we’re not going to let these Republicans run, you bet you’re going to see the same thing happening from Republican states. And it’s not good. If you’re playing a basketball game and the other team doesn’t have to dribble the ball, eventually you’re going to say, ‘Why am I worried about dribbling the ball?'” which we guess is supposed to mean something. Biden “let an invasion unstopped into our country from the border,” while Kamala Harris “supported people that were rebelling against the US government during the riots in 2020,” Ashcroft said, adding he’s “99 percent certain the Supreme Court will stop” the Trump disqualification “but if they don’t, chaos is ahead and we’ve got to avoid it.”

Convicted Jan 6. participant: Under Biden, things are getting better. However, MAGA’s narrative around January 6 is getting worse. It's really scary. I have the receipts. I was there that day. I hold Trump totally responsible pic.twitter.com/jaXUu12onn

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 6, 2024

Five days after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the region and with aftershocks continuing to hit, rescuers pulled a 90-year-old woman from the rubble of a collapsed building in Suzu, a city in the Ishikawa Prefecture on Honshu, the Guardian reports.

Officials say the likelihood of finding survivors after 72 hours is rare because victims typically succumb to injuries or blood loss before rescuers can find them.  Suzu suffered the second most fatalities from Monday’s earthquake, with 38 dead; around 20 miles away, the town of Wajima, with 28,000 residents, reported 69 dead.

Authorities say 126 people were killed in the earthquake, but that number is likely to increase as rescue and recover efforts continue to be hampered by aftershocks, difficulty getting equipment to some hard-hit areas, and more than 100 landslides in the region that have occurred since Monday.