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.

A Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday ordered a list of 140 of dead pimp Jeffrey Epstein’s friends to be unsealed next month, ABC News reports on hype for what ought to be a fun day.

They are going to try to steal it again.

How do I know?

Here’s the set up narrative.👇 https://t.co/U5D64lxkKe

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 19, 2023

Margie sure is more tenacious than we give her credit for around here. By setting up her own narrative about the narrative she imagined she’s one move ahead of the libs. Lots of people who don’t play chess but use a lot of tropes associated with it will see the cunning displayed here.

Mazi Melesa Pilip, the Ethiopian-Israeli-American IDF veteran picked by Republicans to run against Dem former Congressman Tom Suozzi in the February New York 3rd District election to replace Cameo star George Santos, tells Jewish Insider she has “no relationship with Santos, OK? He lied to us. Everything he said was a lie,” even though she called him an “amazing friend” back before his Republican-ish behavior was exposed by the New York Times on this very day a year ago.

Other possible weak points displayed by Pilip in the interview were her stance on the Orange Allah, saying he “has to go through his process,” and “Nobody’s above the law,” which is not the company line in the GOP at all these days. On the other side, she also refused to rule out supporting the fat fuck when he wins the nomination. “Trump is one of the candidates. The debate is ongoing. We have great candidates right now. We have to wait and see, and once we know who is the Republican nominee, we’re going to support that person,” she said. Pilip was also somewhat squirrely on abortion, saying “Now, I am a religious person, I have seven children, so I am pro-life. However, I’m not going to push my own beliefs on any woman. Therefore, I’m not going to support a national abortion ban,” as if we haven’t also seen “pro-choice” Republican women flip-flop before.

In shitty political news site The Hill’s shitty article titled “More than half of voters think Trump will act like a dictator if elected: poll” their shitty in-house pollster Mark Penn, a former Clintonite who began slobbering the mushroom during Donald’s maladministration and is leading the troubled “No Labels” scam to get his Orange Allah elected again, tells the Hill that “Democratic talking points are having an impact on Trump” as his poll found that 40 percent of respondents strongly agreed Trump “will act like a dictator if given a second term,” while another 16 percent “somewhat” agreed.

The “democratic talking points” line is just solid gold. What a female sexual organ this guy is, having the temerity to try to gaslight it as if this is some product of spin or ambiguity when it’s Trump himself saying all this shit about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation,” wanting the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff executed for “disloyalty,” threatening to prosecute journalists, bragging that he’ll be a “day-one dictator” in a live town hall. Penn is simply butthurt Dems are amplifying Trump’s own words while he’s admitting that it’s starting to work.

To be fair to The Hill, the article quotes Trump’s fascist ravings directly later in the article, possibly the writer passive-aggressively dick-slapping Penn. The article also states the poll “found that 59 percent of voters believe Democrats are unfairly trying to scare voters over Trump by saying he wants to be a dictator,” showing how seriously you should take the survey itself.

“James Biden, the brother of President Joe Biden, didn’t provide any services to Americore despite obtaining a $600,000 loan from the struggling healthcare company on the promise that his name could bring in funding from the Middle East, which never materialized,” Fox News literally writes in the lede to their explosive new breaking news report about the younger Biden Bro’s lobbying.

“Carol Fox, a Chapter 11 trustee for the financially distressed hospital operator, spoke with members of the House Oversight Committee in an interview where she detailed Americore’s relationship with James Biden. [Carol] Fox said the loan was provided to Biden with no documentation in return for the promise of funding from the Middle East that never came,” they continue, obviously having sourced this directly from James Comer and his minions selectively leaking it for political gain.

Which speaks a lot to Comer’s skill at playing this game: That James Biden failed to leverage his older brother’s political connections to the Middle East to find a way to bail Americore out and make them whole again on the cash they fronted him. Because Joe told James no, he wasn’t going to help but thanks for using a third of that money to pay back the $200,000 Joe had loaned to James.

When people say “Words fail me” what they really mean is they failed at words because they’re simply not articulate to fully describe what’s in front of them. We have no qualm admitting that we don’t have the lexical skill to truly do this situation justice. So let’s just go with profanity and call this possibly the greatest fucking own-goal so far in this moronic saga. How fucking stupid can you be to not only leak something that undermines your case but to act like it’s a goddamned smoking gun?

James Comer’s incompetence is almost Lovecraftian, a mass of vaporous tendrils emitting from a malignancy upon you dare not dwell, lest its blackened madness pervert your consciousness, depriving what little function remains of the simple clod of grey flesh within your simian skull.

Massive numbers of single adult men "from all over the world" are converging on the open southern border — "where many of them will be released and likely heading to a city near you."

THIS IS BIDEN'S BORDER CRISIS! pic.twitter.com/5DxWd1kIDW

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 18, 2023

A new national New York Times/Siena College survey of likely voters finds President Joe Biden leading his disgraced predecessor Donald Trump 47 to 45 percent in a 2024 matchup, finally satisfying our confirmation bias that all these pollsters showing the fat bastard in the lead were just wasting our fucking time and bandwidth by sampling jerkoffs who probably aren’t going to show up.

It’s not an actual lead as, if it were predictive, would almost certainly result in an electoral college win for Trump. Still a welcome switch from the doomerism being served these days such as the all registered voters sample in the same survey that finds Trump leading Biden 46 to 44 percent.

“Has any smart and energetic Republican in the Great State of Texas decided to run in the Primary against RINO Congressman Chip Roy. For the right person, he is very beatable. If interested, let me know!!!” writes disgraced former President Trump on Truth Social, plainly pissed at the bald House Freedom Caucasians member “Colonel Sanders” for reasons not totally clear at this point.

Roy has endorsed heels-wearing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for president, but so did a handful of others, not least of which are incoming Freedom Caucasians chair Bob Good. So has right Kentucky hick Thomas Massie. “Marshall Law” dumbass Ralph Norman backed fellow Palmetto Stater Nimrata “Nikki” Haley too, and none of those guys have been singled out yet.

A possible clue lies in a later post by the fat bastard. “The Ron DeSanctimonious ‘team’ of misfits and grifters has largely quit his campaign to go on to greener pastures. It has been a terrible experience for them as they have watched their candidate fall violently from the sky like a wounded bird. Jeff Roe, his ‘chief strategist’ and head of his PAC, ‘Always Back Down,’ after having done major surgery on Ron’s wallet, couldn’t get out of town fast enough. Now Jeff can spend full time in Texas working with Ted Cruz, formerly known as Lyin’ Ted, who is working hard to get back the magic they had together in 2016!” Trump wrote, hilariously directing his rage at the 2016 rival-turned-weakling shih-tzu of a Texas Senator. Chip Roy used to be Cruz’s chief of staff, so there’s probably some inside Republican politics through-line of “disloyalty” to Trump, real or perceived, here.

Roy’s punishment will have to wait, as Twitter user @AGHamilton29 points out “Only problem for Trump, who has never been big on rules, is the primary filing deadline has already passed.”

A newly-declassified Office of the Director of National Intelligence report titled “Foreign Threats to the 2022 US Elections,” contains pretty much no surprises on malign influence operations. The “Key Judgments” with emphasis added – not the order in which they were presented too:

“China tacitly approved efforts to try to influence a handful of midterm races involving members of both US political parties. People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence officers, diplomats, and other influence actors probably viewed some election influence activities as consistent with Beijing’s standing guidance to counter US politicians viewed as anti-China and to support others viewed as pro-China. We have high confidence in this assessment. PRC leaders most likely see their growing efforts to magnify US societal divisions as a response to what they believe is an intensified US effort to promote democracy at China’s expense… Iran‘s influence activities reflected its intent to exploit perceived social divisions and undermine confidence in US democratic institutions during this election cycle. We assess that Tehran relied primarily on its intelligence services and Iran-based online influencers to conduct its covert operations. We have moderate confidence in this assessment. Tehran’s efforts during the midterms probably in part reflected resource limitations because of competing priorities and the need to manage internal unrest.”

“The Russian Government and its proxies sought to denigrate the Democratic Party before the midterm elections and undermine confidence in the election, most likely to undermine US support for Ukraine. We have high confidence in this assessment. Elements of the Kremlin and its intelligence services conducted extensive research and analysis of US audiences to inform their election-related efforts, including identifying target demographics and the narratives and platforms that they perceived would appeal to these audiences, reflecting some of the IC’s most explicit reporting to date on Russia’s US-focused influence operations,” says the third key assessment, almost like they “buried” it on purpose to hide the “leftist Democrat bias against Russia.”

Icelandic officials on Monday said the spectacular explosion of a lava fissure on the Reykjanes peninsula in the island country’s southeast appears to be sparing the evacuated fishing town of Grindavik for now, a Christmas miracle for those kept from their homes, Reuters reports.

Besides reaffirming the finding from the January 6th Committee’s hearings that Donald Trump planned to call for his mob to march on the Capitol (p. 19) and it was spontaneous as he claimed, a new report from the Department of Interior Inspector General concentrating on the actions of National Park Service personnel lays out a few details worth noting.

On January 6th, Park Service personnel were shown text messages by a representative for the group organizing the January 6th rally on the Elipse, Woman for America First, reportedly from a White House representative, saying Trump intended to “unexpected” urge people to march to the Capitol and the Supreme Court, where they would set up a second stage for more speeches.

Around 9 a.m. on January 6th, long before the Capitol attack, Park Police members arrested a protester who had moved a bike rack barrier by the Washington Monument.  Police and Park Rangers were forced to retreat to a security area near the Monument when a crowd started menacing them.  After they secured themselves in the facility,  “people outside banged on the glass with flagpoles, sticks, and fists.”

After being shown a clip of Trump using Nazi imagery during weekend rallies, second-term New York Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis does her sycophantic best to defend Donald Trump’s use of the Nazi’s “blood poisoning” theme, first asserting that Trump wasn’t *really* talking about immigrants–using a GOP version of “some of his best friends are immigrants” (whom he married)–before trying to say Trump wasn’t referring to immigrants; he was referring to Democrats… ’cause that makes it better.  (We added the Trump clip to the end for clarity.)