Damn, we missed out on covering Black Friday 2023 retail sales estimates. Could’ve picked it up on Saturday after Adobe Analytics first put out the initial numbers… if the hundreds of right wing influencers and news outlets we follow on Twitter had posted anything about it. Of course the MSM and lefty ones we follow probably did, but the MAGA stuff is usually much more attention-grabbing, especially when it comes to otherwise dry economic metrics that don’t always quite break through.

Like inflation reports. They loved those back in 2021 and 2022. These days not so much. Lately there’s been a lot of hype over this one $16 McDonald’s order that went “viral” on TikTok and that Americans have been racking up credit card debt. So they can always find something to highlight.

It’s just that on this one thing – the kickoff to the 2023 Christmas shopping season – that the MAGA media industrial complex in unison decided wouldn’t interest their fanbase, subsequently causing us to drop the ball. Better late than never, so here goes: Bloomberg reports this Black Friday was the best ever as Americans spent $9.8 billion online, up 7.5 percent over last year.

Well “reports” in the present tense implies that the financial news giant published that article this morning. They reported it on Saturday. We probably would’ve seen it and picked it up for our readers if MAGAmerica’s top propagandists had at least tried to spin the numbers by calling them a harbinger of increased inflation or something to make themselves feel better. Lazy fucking assholes.

Republican House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, who’s been alleged to have a secret or two of his own, on Sunday wondered out loud to idiot Maria Bartiromo why President Joe Biden never declared any income from interest he charged his brother James on repayments for personal loans back in late 2017/early 2018, coming perilously close to finally revealing the devastating truth at the heart of the matter, one opposite of the conclusion he’s been trying to work backward from.

The Republican National Committee under Ronna Not-Romney is in brutal shape financially, with its current cash on hand at just $9.1 million as of October 30th the lowest of any FEC report since 2015 and down from $60 million at the same point in 2019, the Washington Post reports.

“It’s a revenue problem,” said Tennessee RNC member Oscar Brock. “We’re going through the same efforts we always go through to raise money: the same donor meetings, retreats, digital advertising, direct mail. But the return is much lower this year. If you know the answer, I’d love to know it. The staff has managed to tighten down on expenses to keep the party from going into the red.”

That’s not even the worst news for the feckless RNC chair however, as the Post writes “Donors sometimes complain to Trump about McDaniel, and Trump has been asking people what they think of her, which is often an ominous sign that someone is losing their standing with him.”

A US Navy destroyer responding to a distress call from an Israeli-owned Liberian-flagged cargo ship taken over by Houthi pirates off the coast of Yemen captured the pirates as they attempted to flee after abandoning their booty, the Associated Press reports.  After the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Mason captured the five wannabe pirates, two missiles were fired from Houthi-controlled Yemen but landed at least 18 miles from the Mason and the other allied ships responding to the SOS from the cargo ship.

The 45,000 students in Oregon’s largest school district will be back in their classrooms after the Portland School District administration announced that it has reached a tentative deal with the teachers’ union, ending a three-week shutdown, the Associated Press reports.

The teachers’ union was negotiating for some standard items–like salary increases, improved health benefits and smaller class sizes–but the union also demanded increased resources for students adversely impacted by the pandemic.  Students missed 11 days of classroom instruction during the strike, with the union agreeing that teachers will return to work while the vote of the membership is pending.

Democrats have a strong slate of candidates running in the primary for Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, all salivating at the chance to take on media-fearing Freedom Caucus chairman Scott Perry, the Republican who currently holds the seat.  According to the Daily Beast, one of those in the running is literally a Top Gun pilot, not a poser like a certain Republican Florida governor.

Mike O’Brien, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who as a F-35 stealth fighter pilot completed the famed TOPGUN school, retired after 20 years and moved from a Philadelphia suburb to Harrisburg specifically to challenge Perry after seeing Perry’s support of the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress to install Trump to a second term.

PA-10 is rated an R+5 district, but Perry’s antics are grating on the nerves of the island of “purple” voters around Harrisburg who float in the sea of Pennsyltucky’s Republican “T” consisting of counties that bisect the state north-to-south and those along the northern border.  Perry has run largely without opposition in Republican primaries since his first election to Congress in 2012, and he remains without a serious GOP challenger.  In the general election, though, a strong Democratic candidate could take the district if high voter turnout pushes the vote.

Three Palestinian men walking to dinner Saturday night were confronted by a white man who, without saying a word, fired at least four shots at them, injuring all three, NBC News reports.  Two of the men were hit in the chest and a third was hit in the “lower extremities,” according to police.  Two of the victims are American citizens while the third is a legal US resident; a local college said one of the victims is a student there.

Two of the three men were wearing keffiyeh, the scarf-like traditional headwear some Middle Eastern men don, as they were walking to a friend’s home for dinner and conversing in Arabic along Prospect Street in Burlington.  All three victims were men in their 20s, and all three are expected to survive their wounds, but two were reportedly in intensive care as of Sunday morning.

“Derek Chauvin is in prison for someone else’s Fentynol overdose. The Left is destroying everything in this country… including the ‘justice’ they claim to be all about” – Top comment on the Power Line blog piece “Naked, Stoned, and Stabbed,” hyping a new right wing “documentary” called “The Fall of Minneapolis” which is about, you guessed it, the murder of George Floyd and the aftermath.

“Chauvin was lynched by a biased court and biased jury” – Top comment on Breitbart’s article.

“There are enough accusations and evidence of court room manipulation to warrant a new trial. Until then Chauvin remains a political prisoner not a criminal one” – Top comment on PJ Media’s article, which the commenter probably did not read to the end. If he did he might’ve seen where the writer mentions that the MAGA majority Supreme Court had literally refused to take up Chauvin’s appeal for a new trial two days before he was stabbed, explaining it away as “given the can of worms the Supreme Court would open if they granted Chauvin a new trial. The justices read the newspapers and watch the news channels. They are not going to light the fuse on another powder keg.”

“‘Privileged’ white male heterosexuals are, in fact, the sacrificial lamb demographic of society” – Top comment on TownHall.com’s article. It’s actually much longer, but that’s all we needed.

“Does the term ‘suppressed evidence’ ring a bell? He says he is appealing because he now has information from the coroner that was never presented in his trial. That seems to be the norm in our justice system these days. Do whatever it takes to get someone convicted and thrown in jail and then it’s their problem to prove their innocence later. By then most everyone has forgotten about them. That’s what people who are given powerful status are able to do and why they so desperately work to keep it” – Top comment on Fox News’s article by another appellate law expert.

Nice of Republican Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher to help Fox News hype their own coverage of the Satanic temple trolls getting a “HAIL SANTA”-decorated tree included in the National Railroad Museum’s annual Christmas tree show. The not-really-Satanists’ entry is among 66 trees displayed at the museum, a whole tradition ruined by savvy pranksters, per Gallagher.

Four year-old Abigail Edan was among the 17 hostages released to the Red Cross on Sunday, nearly two months after her parents were murdered in the October 7th attack, CNN’s MJ Lee reports.

Republican Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security Director Pete Antonacci, who in September 2022 collapsed and died in a hallway outside of heels-wearing Governor Ron DeSantis’s the Florida state Capitol after a “contentious” meeting with Secretary of State Cord Byrd, had laid dead on the floor of the hallway – one monitored in real-time by manned surveillance camera feeds – for 24 minutes before anyone noticed and sent a Capitol cop to try to resuscitate him, according to a state Department of Law Enforcement investigation’s final report obtained by the Florida Bulldog.

“At approximately 1:46 pm, Mr Antonacci is observed standing up and walking out of the conference room [WORDS REDACTED],” FDLE Agent Larry Shallar writes in the report. “Upon exiting the conference room, Mr Antonacci is observed staggering as he moved forward until he collapsed to the floor. Mr Antonacci did not appear to move once he collapsed to the floor.” The report further indicates that Antonacci appeared to have hit his head on a doorknob or the side of the door as he fell down. Whether he could’ve been saved if the other DeSantis minions present at the meeting had noticed him earlier is anyone’s guess. There’s no list of attendees and the medical examiner did not perform an autopsy, typical unnecessarily shady behavior by Mickey Maoist’s regime.

We were to understand that potentially starting wars was a big no-no in MAGAmerica, yet Southern drawlin’ Arkansaw Senator Tom Cotton’s feelin’ awful awnery bout them Hamas sons a bitches not releasin the American hostages from Gaza yet, even though one of them is on the list for later Sunday.

Lost in the flurry of the languid news stream that is a long holiday weekend Saturday here at National Zero was the promise of multiply-times indicted defendant Donald Trump to flee the jurisdiction while out on bail to visit newly-elected right-wing Trumplicant Argentinian President Javier Milei, himself a muss-haired populist thrust into office off antics, not policy.

According to the Associated Press, Trump promised to visit Milei, known for wielding a working chainsaw while campaigning as a metaphor for his cutting… something… relating to Argentine’s long-time economic crisis.  “The president-elect received a call last night from the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, who congratulated him and pointed out his triumph by a wide margin in last Sunday’s election had a great impact on a global scale,” a news release from Milei’s office said.  Per an Argentinian journalist, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, himself a Trump acolyte, facilitated the call.

No date for the trip has been announced, nor is it clear if the defendant will have to clear any proposed trip out of the country with the various courts he faces, although he was not required to turn over his passport when he was indicted.  And in case you’re wondering:  yes, the United States does have an operative extradition treaty with Argentina.  For now.

As he attempted to show up former Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in her home state, Donald Trump was brought into the Clemson-Univ. of South Carolina football game in Columbia on Saturday through a private entrance, as he was showered by boos and curses from the crowd lining the overhanging concourse.  (Video from Beth Hoole, who lists herself on Twitter as “Fox Carolina Sports Director.”)

Hamas released thirteen of its estimated 225 Israeli prisoners and four Thai citizens in exchange for at least 33 Palestinians released by Israel during the second day of a four-day ceasefire that will allow food, fuel, medical supplies and other aid to be trucked into the Gaza Strip, the Washington Post reports.  The exchange was delayed after Hamas claimed Israel violated the agreement because it would not allow aid to be delivered to areas it determined to be “military zones.”

According to a number of sources, lame-duck Republican New York Congressman Anthony Devolder George Santos was on fire during a Twitter livestream (called something silly like an “X Space”) for a right-wing blogger Friday night, repeatedly taunting his GOP colleagues in the House to expel him including calling the Republican head of the Ethics Committee that investigated him a “pussy.”

Santos doesn’t want to resign his seat; he wants to be kick out so he can claim victimhood like all Republicans crave.  So to put some cream on top of dare to his colleagues to boot him, he added a Madison Cawthorn-esque flourish to the reason he’s not running for reelection:  it’s not because he’s going to get convicted of felonies.  It’s because they’re having frequent sex with lobbyists.

“Within the ranks of the United States Congress, there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds … I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyists that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on and sell off the American people. … Not show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them. This shit happens every single week. Where are the ethics investigations?”

“Has anybody noticed that Hamas has returned people from other Countries but, so far, has not returned one American Hostage? There is only one reason for that, NO RESPECT FOR OUR COUNTRY OR OUR LEADERSHIP. This is a very sad and dark period of America!” writes fat former President Trump without explaining what he did to pitch in to make a deal happen.

Safe bet that it’s because he was too busy losing his shit over some guy few have heard of, “Bob Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years. He’s more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory, but now he’s going around using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats. I don’t believe anything Bob Vander Plaats says. Anyone who would take $95,000, and then endorse a Candidate who is going nowhere, is not what Elections are all about!”

Hamas says it will delay the next round of hostage releases slated for Saturday because it claims Israel is not in compliance with other parts of the agreement, namely that the promised aid had not reached the northern stretches of the Gaza Strip because the Israeli military had blocked the trucks, the Washington Post reports.

A spokesman for the Red Crescent–the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross–confirmed that a number of its trucks delivering supplies to civilians in the north were barred from entering areas because they were declared “military zones” unilaterally by the Israeli Defense Force.

The Associated Press reports that prior to the latest announcement, Hamas had provided Qatari and Egyptian mediators with a list of 14 hostages it would release Saturday.  An Egyptian spokesperson confirmed Israel’s prison system was preparing no fewer than 42 Palestinian prisoners for release.

Amidst the gutter right wing content shared in a Saturday morning Truth Social posting binge – a flurry more likely the work of the Trump campaign’s social media team rather than the fat former president himself – was a post linked to a Substack piece written by some douchebag – and sponsored by MyPatriotCigars.com – titled “It’s Time To Revamp The RNC.” In it MAGA cock knob Paul Ingrassia proposes all sorts of ideas how to reorganize the Republican National Committee to properly combat the “voter fraud” responsible for the “underwhelming results of the 2022 and 2023 elections (to say nothing of the stolen 2020 election),” backing only candidates “who can prove an extensive history of robust support for the 45th President,” and “cooperating with [QAnon freak who was fired from the Virginia GOP for having sex with a man in their office and posting pics of it on Craigslist] Scott Presler and other voter-outreach grassroots groups to register Republican voters.”

All pretty standard stuff for the MAGA Reich and even if it’s a very safe bet that Trump himself didn’t read it he almost certainly agrees with it when one of his minions summarizes the whole thing for him. Especially the part at the end where Ingrassia very unsubtly warns Ronna Not-Romney.

“Tyranny has arrived on these shores. The Biden regime has made political prisoners of those who peacefully exercised their rights to free speech and assembly. We are going through a great spiritual reckoning as a nation. It is high time that Ronna McDaniel’s RNC, which can be a powerful weapon in this battle, start deploying its resources for good. If not, her fate will be the same as those who similarly betrayed the movement, and she too will be relegated, alongside Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy, and the rest of the Republican establishment – to the dustbin of history,” Ingrassia writes.

This is "Gaza Population Explodes, but They're Definitely the Victims of Genocide" levels of cope

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 25, 2023

For those who might not get what’s going on with this tweet, here’s an explainer: The Associated Press is a non-profit commercial collective, funded by subscriptions from local and national news outlets, to provide coverage of stories not everyone can send a reporter to. Like the above story about endangered sea turtles carried on Breitbart. Founded in 1846, the AP is one of the few concepts originating in the print media age to prove extremely durable in the digital era. Just as, for example, the Denver Post in 1943 was able to deliver their readers updates on fighting between American and German troops in North Africa without the Denver Post having to send a reporter there, AP wire reports enable local and national outlets’ websites to carry stories they wouldn’t otherwise have on their own in 2023. You can see it in a number of articles we’ve published here at National Zero that, even though we correctly attributed them as “the AP reports” their links go to the websites of ABC News, WRAL in North Carolina, NBC News, PBS, 1010 WINS in New York City, Politico, CTV News in Canada, and others rather than their official APnews.com site.

Breitbart’s one of those websites. We have no idea what it actually costs for them to license AP stories – as opposed to simply copying and pasting them like we did in the earliest version of National Zero. That was free… and possibly civilly actionable. As with a lot of high-level enterprise services, the pricing is opaque and appears to be based on traffic, just as the print-centric era AP was based on newspaper circulation. The best data point on that we could find was in a 2009 Harvard Nieman Lab article where the publisher of the 9,000-subscriber Norwalk Reflector in Ohio said they were paying $48,000 a year to carry AP content before they dropped it.