Feeling the increasing heat from his Orange Master to do something to distract from 91 felony counts in four different jurisdictions and lacking the requisite 218 votes to get the full chamber to authorize it, titular Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is planning to simply open up an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden without actually holding a vote on it, CNN reports.

“I don’t believe that a vote of the House is required to open an impeachment inquiry,” large-foreheaded and credibly suspected sex trafficker Congressman Matt Gaetz told CNN. We guess just declaring an open impeachment investigation against the President of the United States is good enough to act like he’s going to be impeached but the fact that they’re not putting it to the full Republican caucus kind of doesn’t and actually sort of displays a lot of weakness on the GOP’s part.

“There’s no evidence that Joe Biden got money, or that Joe Biden, you know, agreed to do something so that Hunter could get money. There’s just no evidence of that. And they can’t impeach without that evidence. And I don’t I don’t think the evidence exists,” one anonymous Republican House member, too chickenshit to put their name on this quote, said to CNN.

Average Ohio blue collar schlub Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, who became the voice of the working man when he challenged Barack Obama to his face over his 2008 campaign tax plan has passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 49, BNOnews.com reports. Joe wasn’t really all that working class, since he was successful enough to be in the market to buy up a company with annual revenue in excess of a quarter of a million in 2008, but nevertheless he became a symbol of Caucasian Americans’ deep unease with a dark-skinned “socialist” running the country.

Joe then supported now disgraced former President Trump in 2016, telling Reuters that Donald was “a winner. He’s made billions. He’s dated beautiful women. His wife is a model. That’s not to sniff at. And a lot of people believe he can bring that kind of success to the White House.”

“At 400 AM CDT (0900 UTC), the center of Tropical Storm Idalia was located near latitude 20.1 North, longitude 85.2 West. Idalia is moving toward the north near 7 mph, with a continued northward motion bringing the center of Idalia near or over western Cuba tonight and over the extreme southeastern Gulf of Mexico by early Tuesday. On the forecast track, Idalia is forecast to increase in forward speed and turn north-northeastward over the eastern Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday and reach the Gulf coast of Florida on Wednesday. Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 65 mph with higher gusts. Idalia is forecast to become a hurricane later today and a dangerous major hurricane over northeastern Gulf of Mexico by early Wednesday. Tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 70 miles from the center” says a National Hurricane Center bulletin warning shit’s about to get real for the Florida panhandle later this week.

We tend to avoid printing “hype” articles ahead of expected big moments in the news. If XYZ is scheduled for a certain date and time we prefer to (1) let you know that it’s been scheduled (2) keep you updated on any noteworthy developments that related to XYZ and (3) carry XYZ live if possible or quickly report on the outcome if not. Other outlets like to fill space with reminders like “Suspense builds for XYZ” because they suck and we’ll just leave it at that to avoid a long tangent.

So yeah we’re going to break our unwritten rule against it to “preview” the action in two separate federal courts on Monday: First at 10 AM EDT a hearing is set in disgraced former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s attempt to remove the conspiracy charges against him in Georgia state court to a federal court. Marky’s got a shiny new Caucasian lawyer on his team ready to argue for him – a Ken Starr acolyte no less. Fulton County DA Fani Willis is using the Hatch Act to hatchet Meadow’s argument that he was acting on the color of federal authority when he helped Trump harass Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Could get ugly for the “Chief’s Chief.”

The bigger story however will be Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s crucial hearing – also at 10 AM EDT – in front of DC Circuit Judge Tanya Chutkan who will decide when to start the Orange God Emperor’s trial on the post-2020 election coup attempt charges. Make no mistake, this decision will be a very big fucking deal and could help determine the fate of American democracy if it ensures Trump is a convicted felon going into the 2024 election. The trial must be initially scheduled for late 2023 or early 2024 – before the Mar-a-Lago docs trial – if that’s going to happen.

BONUS: Two-time double-voting piece of shit Trump fan James Saunders will be sentenced to prison in a Cuyahoga County, Ohio court on Monday – also at 10 AM Eastern Time.

We’ve all heard the stories of how Newt Gingrich dropped divorce papers on his wife while she was battling breast cancer so he could shack up with one of his staffers as he investigated Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair.  It should be remembered, however, that Bill Clinton remained in office after Gingrich was booted from Congress, and Hillary held on to relevance long after Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign fizzled.  So let’s just say, Newt’s a bit bitter.

But I also think it’s important to understand:  Biden is the tip of the iceberg.  The real corruption is Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and O’Biden is the smallest of the three players, and I hope that the House Republicans are going to realize that they have a much broader and a much deeper investigation starting with subpoening all the financial records of the Clinton Foundation, which is going to produce evidence of a level of wrongdoing in terms of millions and millions of dollars, far beyond anything we’ve seen with Joe Biden.

Fast forward to the end of October.  The jury has reached a decision in the first trial of one of Donald Trump’s co-conspirators from the Fulton County racketeering trial.  This is possible given the trial for Kenneth Chesebro, who invoked his right to a speedy trial under Georgia law, has been set to start on October 23rd.  Maybe this verdict is his, maybe it’s for another one of the defendants who may also make the speedy trial demand.

As Halloween approaches, the nation’s on edge as the first verdict is in.  A lot is on the line.  First, every defense attorney for the other defendants has been following this trial, examining prosecution arguments and defense tactics, grading each.  Those assessments don’t matter; the only one that does is coming from the people in the jury box.

Chesebro–and later, the Kraken–invoked the speedy trial date most likely as a gambit to try to get District Attorney Fani Willis and her prosecutors early and unprepared.  It may have backfired:  Chesebro now has less than 60 days to prepare his defense since Willis called his bluff and submitted a seven-week trial start date.

“The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ on Crooked Joe Biden. Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off, and he wouldn’t give One Billion Dollars to Ukraine unless they ‘got rid of the Prosecutor.’ Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING! Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US!” writes the Orange God Emperor on Truth Social, increasingly getting agitated for his underlings in the House GOP to do something to try to bring the incumbent down to Trump’s level.

That it’s literally the same thing they tried four years ago and Trump got impeached (the first impeachment) for it doesn’t matter, he just needs the Republicans to do something yesterday.

With classes scheduled to start next week, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s reimagined New College of Florida has turned into a mismanaged mess after more than 40% of the faculty resigned in the previous months, CNN reports.

Fourth-year student Chai Leffler, an urban studies major, returned for the new year to find that most of the faculty who would have overseen his senior thesis had resigned.  He now has to search for faculty from other disciplines to work with.  “It’s a little messy, kind of like a dumpster fire right now in terms of administration,” Leffler said.  “At the end of the day, I want to get my degree.”

New College was founded as a non-traditional center of higher education with a progressive policy about social issues like gender identification and race. Intending to punish the current population and turn the school into a conservative cultivation center, DeSantis removed the former board of directors and executives, replacing them with right-wing ideologues.  This prompted many faculty to resign, fearing backlash in DeSantis’s totalitarian Florida for educating students in subject matter The State finds objectionable.

The shooter who killed three people in a racially-motivated attack at a Jacksonville Dollar General store first tried to get onto the campus of a historically Black college nearby but was turned away by a security guard, the Associated Press reports.

A security guard spotted the shooter outside the library at Edward Waters University and asked him what he was doing on campus.  After checking his identification, the security guard escorted the man back to his car, which he drove off campus without incident.

The man then put on a mask and a bullet-resistant vest before shooting up the store, less than a mile away.  After barricading himself in the store, leading to a standoff during which he spouted his racist idiocy, he canceled himself.

We don’t use the “/sarc” or “/s” tags here in our satirical articles at National Zero, instead relying on an italicized footnote reading “National Zero will resume our regular coverage” and some contrived explanation for why we wrote what we did in pieces like “Crossing gates are for snowflakes,” “Just wait libs, CNN and MSNBC are going to end up paying way more than $787 million to Trump and Russia for their ‘collusion’ lies,” and “When does the REAL House January 6th Select Committee start investigating the House January 6th Unselect Committee?” and, what was maybe the biggest hit, “Case Closed: Libs are responsible for attack on Paul Pelosi.” It’s a fun, albeit somewhat weasely way to temporarily duck out of our commitment to real news and commentary, indulging in what’s often not particularly challenging satire since it takes only slight reframing of genuine MAGA insanity.

Came pretty close to writing another one about certain recent developments in the news, but it would’ve rehashed too much of “Face it libs, the Durham Report just got Trump reelected” from May. It’s not like we can only make that joke once, it’s just maybe we should keep it to once a year or so.

Yeah, that “Pledge to support the eventual nominee” precondition to get on the stage at the RNC debates is really working out for weaning the party off of the guy wouldn’t sign it. Great job, Ronna.

Extremely butthurt over disgraced former President Trump having to surrender himself to arrest last week, White nationalist Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs on Friday introduced the “WILLIS Act” to defund the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney’s office, the Washington Examiner reports.

Being capitalized, the “WILLIS Act” has to be an acronym and this one stands for “Withholding Investments from Lawless Litigators In States.” To make the dead-end waste of time that will never pass even sadder, the bill also requires “the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office to reimburse the Federal Government for all amounts expended for such Office after the date of January 1, 2021.”

“At the request of the Federal Government of Somalia, US Africa Command conducted a collective self-defense airstrike against al Shabaab terrorists in the vicinity of Seiera, Somalia, approximately 45 kilometers northwest of Kismayo. The collective self-defense airstrike was conducted in the early morning hours of Aug 26, in support of Somali National Army forces who were engaged by the terrorist organization. Working with the Somali National Army, US Africa Command’s initial assessment is that the airstrike killed 13 al Shabaab fighters and that no civilians were injured or killed” says US Africa Command in a press release on the high score airstrike.

Newly-resigned CPAC Vice Chairman Charlie Gerow – a guy who’s kind of a fucking mess himself considering he ran over a dude on a motorcycle and continued driving for several miles afterward with the goddamned bike still under the front of his car two years ago – urged other members of the right wing fan-con promotion’s leadership to appoint an independent investigator to look into two alleged assaults by sexual predator chairman Matt Schlapp on top of the October 2022 Herschel Walker campaign incident he’s already being sued for, the Washington Post reports.

Gerow didn’t mention these other assaults in his public letter announcing his resignation on Friday, but sources told the Post he privately informed CPAC’s board of the sexual predator’s past exploits. In the first incident, a young male staffer said a drunken Schlapp tried to kiss him at a work function in 2017. The Post’s mention of the second incident does not get more specific than “unwanted advances on someone else’s employee” in early 2022, but sounds problematic enough.

It’s all problematic and of course very on-brand for the CPAC circlejerk, especially having hitched their wagon so closely to Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban’s deeply anti-LGBT regime.

“The White House counsel’s office met with a top aide to Special Counsel Jack Smith just weeks before he brought charges against former President Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents – raising serious concerns about coordinated legal efforts aimed at President Biden’s likely opponent in 2024,” the New York Post reports on “serious concerns” they themselves raise in the article by quoting “legal experts” like Trump co-defendant Rudy Giuliani and Jonathan Turley.

Evidently it never occurred to the Post that a team of prosecutors investigating the theft of classified documents from the White House might want to maybe visit to scene of the crime irrespective of who currently occupies the building but then again it’s not like they’ve got a lot to work with these days when they’re trying to make the Biden Administration look nefarious.

“At 500 AM AST (0900 UTC), the center of Hurricane Franklin was located near latitude 24.7 North, longitude 68.7 West. Franklin is moving toward the northwest near 8 mph. A turn toward the north-northwest is expected later today, followed by a northward and north-northeastward motion into the early part of the week. Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 90 mph with higher gusts. Rapid strengthening is forecast over the next 24 hours, and Franklin could become a major hurricane by tonight. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 25 miles from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 140 miles. The estimated minimum central pressure is 973 mb,” says a National Hurricane Center advisory bulletin. The expected track of the storm otherwise does not show it potentially threatening the US East Coast directly though seriously stay the hell out of the water if you’re planning on going to the beach over the next few days.

Neighbors of 21 year-old registered Republican neckbeard Ryan Palmeter, of Orange Park, Florida, tell Action News Jax that he was the asshole who on Saturday murdered three Black shoppers at a Jacksonville Dollar General store before turning his Swastika-painted assault rifle on himself.

Within hours of the Jacksonville shooting, we have the manifesto and know the motive of the evil, racist terrorist. And yet we still don't have the manifesto of the transgender terrorist who shot up the Nashville Christian school. Why? #Jacksonville

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) August 26, 2023

This of course is how fanboys like former Fox News host Todd Starnes are reacting to the news about the killing. The problem isn’t the guns or the racism it’s that “we have the manifesto.”

“We” do not fucking “have the manifesto,” we have a brief description of it because Palmeter’s father, a liberal Dem, read it and immediately called the Clay County Florida Sheriff’s department to warn them that his son was armed, dangerous, and intent on shooting Black people. This was relayed to Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters who told reporters about that portion of the manifesto’s contents, specifically that Palmeter “wanted to kill [n-words].” That a Black lawman clearly upset over a MAGA shitbag targeting other Black folks publicly discloses that portion of the manifesto and nothing else while the cops in Nashville have disclosed absolutely nothing of Audrey Hale’s final screed is naturally evidence of some sort of coordinated, far-reaching conspiracy to make MAGA look bad. It’s unlikely either manifesto will be made public in its entirety for a long time, if ever, yet it’s somehow unfair that the media learned a detail about Palmeter’s but not Hale’s. That’s how fucking petty and demented these people are. And Starnes is far from alone in this.

Fox’s cable propaganda network finally issued an apology to the family of a Marine killed in Afghanistan for claiming that the Marines made the family pick up the $60,000 cost of shipping her remains back to the United States, CNN reports.

After Florida Republican Congressman Cory Mills–you may remember him for sending dummy grenades to his colleagues when he first joined the House–made the claim, Fox ran with it online on July 25th with the headline “Family forced to pay to ship body of Marine killed after Pentagon policy change: ‘Egregious injustice’.”

“The allegations originally published turned out to be false, which I suspect Mr. Lee knew in the first place, and was the reason he did not seek comment from the Marine Corps,” wrote Marine Corps spokesman Maj. James Stenger in an email to the Fox executives after the initial story ran.

Far too busy campaigning to be 1st runner-up–“Should Miss America be unable to fulfill her official duties…”–among the also-ran GOP candidates, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will have his people check his schedule and they’ll get back to the people of Jacksonville, the Florida city struck by a racially-motivated mass murder earlier today.