The wildfires raging through Canada’s Alberta province have prompted Premier Danielle Smith to ask for military help to control nearly 100 different fires, the BBC reports.  More than two dozen of those fires are out of control, according to officials.  Dreamboat Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Smith the Canadian military would be available if necessary in a Monday phone call.

Canada’s version of Texas, Alberta’s energy output was cut by about 2% since the wildfires began as drilling operations and pipelines were shut down.  Natural gas exports to the US from Alberta were cut back to levels last seen in April 2021, and losing about 185,000 barrels of crude oil.

New York Judge Juan Merchan on Monday ruled in favor of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s request for a protective order barring fat former President Trump from posting or otherwise publicly sharing the evidence against him in the Stormy Daniels payoff case, NBC News reports.

In imposing the order mandating that Trump and his team “shall not copy, disseminate or disclose” the material to third parties, including social media platforms, “without prior approval from the court,” Merchan disregarded the bitching the order would be “an unprecedented and extraordinarily broad muzzle on a leading contender for the presidency,” which lol, guess he’s been muzzled.

Following news that at least eight of the 16 fake Trump 2020 electors in Georgia have agreed to immunity deals to testify against the others in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s expected sweeping case against the MAGA coup plotters, lawyers for fat state GOP Chairman David Shafer on Monday wrote Willis a letter claiming Shafer was only acting on “repeated and detailed advice of legal counsel” when he organized the scam back in December 2020, CNN reports, adding that sources previously told them the outgoing chairman was among those who could face indictment.

Naturally fascist MAGA scumbag lawyer Cleta Mitchell was one of the lawyers who gave the “repeated and detailed advice” to Shafer. “I believe that any fair-minded person, with possession of all the facts, would conclude that Mr Shafer and the other presidential elector nominees acted lawfully and appropriately,” wrote one of Shafer’s lawyers. The letter also tries to weasel in that Shafer and the other fake electors were merely “contingent,” something which their counterparts in Pennsylvania and New Mexico explicitly stated on their documents at the outset and as such apparently have escaped legal scrutiny from federal and state authorities.

A cursory review of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize announcements on Monday confirms that National Zero won zero of the prestigious accolades for excellence in the categories of Public Service, Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, Explanatory Reporting, Local Reporting, National Reporting, International Reporting, Feature Writing, Commentary, Criticism, Editorial Writing, Illustrated Reporting and Commentary, Breaking News Photography, Feature Photography, or Audio Reporting, nor is there any evidence we were ever even considered for any of those.

On the bright side The Hill also won zero, which is hilarious because they’re supposed to be a “professional” news operation with the high budget and resources to compete in such categories and yet this demonstrates they’re just simply not in the same league as crosstown rivals the Washington Post and Politico. One snub that was legitimately bullshit was Josh Gerstein at Politico, who broke the story of the Dobbs decision months in advance and was nominated for Breaking News Reporting but lost out to the staff of the Los Angeles Times for their coverage of secret recordings of those sick fucks in Oklahoma using racial slurs in a private meeting. Not for nothing, as important and solid reporting as it was, it wasn’t as impactful as the Dobbs decision.

Biden accuser Tara Reade: 'If something happens to me, all roads lead to Joe Biden' | Just The News https://t.co/f5hW2TJiby

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) May 8, 2023

With the apparent final straw being an undorsement from the Texas Right to Life PAC, Texan nationalist Republican state Representative Bryan Slaton on Monday tendered his resignation from the legislature just a day before he was to face an expulsion vote following a damning report by the state House General Investigative Committee finding the former Baptist minister had engaged in an inappropriate and predatory sexual relationship with a 19 year-old female legislative intern.

Stay tuned to National Zero for more articles about Texas. Funny how on the one rare day so far we don’t cover Trump at all (that one Wisconsin article with his name in the headline wasn’t really even about him) we still end up largely stuck on some other singular nexus of right wing insanity.

In a surprising development, two Republicans on the Texas state House Community Safety Select Committee on Monday joined the Dems and voted to advance a bill raising the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 or similar guns, teeing up a vote in the full chamber, the Texas Tribune reports.

HB 2744, authored by Uvalde-area Dem state Representative Tracy King to raise the age from 18 to 21 for purchase, passed the committee 8 to 5 just hours after Republican Committee Chairman Ryan Guillen told the Dallas News he wouldn’t even bring the measure up for a vote since it would be gunned down by the full floor. Guillen was not among the Republicans to have voted aye on it.

A Wisconsin judge on Monday ordered the state elections commission to reconsider a complaint brought against the 10 Cheesehead Republicans who in December 2020 signed the fake electoral college votes for disgraced former President Trump since one of those electors, notorious right wing scumbag Robert Spindell, is also one of the six members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and didn’t recuse himself when the panel rejected the complaint in March 2022, the AP reports.

“Surprise, surprise, I’m coming to the same conclusion, as all the parties have, that the appropriate remedy is to vacate the decision of the WEC and remand it back for further proceedings, which don’t include Commissioner Spindell,” said Dane County Superior Court Judge Frank Remington, a longtime nemesis of braces-wearing now-former Wisconsin 2020 election czar Mike Gableman.

The complaint brought by Madison-based liberal law firm Law Forward was dismissed unanimously by the board of three Democrats and three Republicans last year on what we would have to guess was likely some technical or jurisdictional grounds, so it’s not as if it was a D vs R deadlock that’ll be broken by Spindell’s recusal. Still, it’s an important step that could set a precedent for challenges to other matters involving Spindell, a complete piece of shit who earlier this year privately celebrated the GOP’s efforts to suppress the Black vote in Milwaukee in 2022 after complaining that the commission’s rejection of MAGA-sandbagging 2020 spoiler candidate Kanye West from the ballot over missed paperwork deadlines would suppress the Black vote.

DC Federal Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee who’s often gone relatively easy on MAGA insurrectionists in sentences in prior cases, did not stay true to that brand on Monday in sending Hitler-loving Navy reservist Hatchet Speed (yeah, that’s really his name) to the slammer for four years to be served consecutively to his now-ongoing three year bit after being convicted for illegal possession of pistol silencers, with the four year Capitol riot sentence actually exceeding the Justice Department’s recommendation of three years consecutive, WUSA9 reports.

Speed, a self-identified Proud Boy with a military security clearance who had been sentenced last month in the Eastern District of Virginia on the silencers charges, “blamed the Jewish community for making action movies that brainwashed Americans into supporting nonviolence against the government on January 6” and “became enamored with Hitler and apparently developed a world view where he and other Proud Boys were modern-day Nazis fighting to save white Christians from multiple ‘enemies'” according to federal law enforcement affidavits, did not actually shave a Hitler mustache on his face. That was a different Hitler fan Capitol rioter with a security clearance.

Witnesses to the Sunday morning SUV attack on Venezuelan migrants in the border city of Brownsville, Texas that left eight dead tell the Guardian the driver of the SUV screamed “Damn your mother, immigrants!” and “Leave my country” before plowing his Range Rover into the crowd who were waiting at a bus stop outside of an overnight migrant shelter called the Ozanam Center.

Some sketchy media reports indicated the driver’s name is George Alvarez, describing him as a gangbanger covered in tattoos. Not necessarily mutually exclusive with that he could also hate Venezuelan migrants, especially considering that it was a Latino MAGA white supremacist who slaughtered eight people with an AR-15 at a mall in North Texas less than 24 hours earlier, but it might take a little more time to get a fuller picture on the motive in the apparent attack. Missing from the Guardian’s report was whether “Alvarez” had screamed at the victims in Spanish or English, which would certainly help determine whether it was Latino-on-Latino violence.

UPDATE 5/8/2023 11:51 AM EDT: Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda at a Monday press conference confirmed the driver is 34 year-old George Alvarez, a criminal with “an extensive rap sheet” who is now charged with eight counts of manslaughter and ten counts of assault with a deadly weapon. Sauceda did not mention anything about the anti-migrant slurs.

Spadex-wearing grapple freak Congressman Jim Jordan on Monday threatened to hold Google in contempt for apparently refusing to fully comply with his moronic subpoena for documents, giving the tech giant a May 22 deadline to hand over everything he thinks they have that “EXPOSES” their bias against MAGA conservatives, CNBC reports on the ongoing “Weaponization” committee failure.

“The release of the Twitter Files has shown just how extensively the Executive Branch communicated and coordinated with technology companies regarding content moderation,” Jordan wrote in the letter, adding “We are skeptical that Alphabet’s interactions with the federal government where pressure was applied were any less concerning than those of Twitter.”

Again, this document is almost certainly merely an “intake form,” meaning some asshole simply alleged to the FBI that there was a Biden bribery scheme, not that the then-Trump-led Justice Department found any actual evidence of it. Comer is so much better off if the FBI refuse the subpoena and don’t make it public. Otherwise voters might find out the tip came from Rudy Giuliani.

“The EU Delegation to Israel is looking forward to celebrating Europe Day on May 9, as it does every year. Regrettably, this year we have decided to cancel the diplomatic reception, as we do not want to offer a platform to someone whose views contradict the values the European Union stands for. However, the Europe Day cultural event for the Israeli public will be maintained to celebrate with our friends and partners in Israel the strong and constructive bilateral relationship,” says the staff of the EU Delegation to Israel in a statement, canceling a reception due to the planned participation of extremist Netanyahu Regime National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who naturally bitched about it after finding out the Eurocrats want nothing to do with him.

Center-right Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger on Monday announced his resignation ahead of September elections in which the Moscow-backed leftist Smer-SD Party, led by former Prime Minister Robert Fico – a traitor who blames “Ukrainian fascists” for starting the war and opposes continuing Slovakia’s generous support for defending Kyiv – is expected to return to power once again following his stints as premier from 2006 to 2010 and 2012 to 2018, the Guardian reports.

Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová named central bank deputy governor Ľudovít Ódor to serve as “caretaker” prime minister, making him the third such seat warmer to lead the increasingly politically unstable Central European nation since 2020. The whole situation serves as a reminder that despite the constant news about how incompetently the Putin Regime conducts its business at home and on the battlefield, they still remain a formidable threat to Western democracy politically.

WATCH: Fox News captures stunning drone images of migrants at the border ahead of the end of Title 42 this week.https://t.co/GtbJmuviun pic.twitter.com/nIuz6CwNP8

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 8, 2023

The article, which features video of Fox News coverage from Sunday morning during pretty much the exact moment a still-unidentified driver quite possibly intentionally plowed into a crowd of Venezuelan migrants at a bus stop in the border town, does not at any point mention the tragedy.

In a long piece about the continued resistance by Texas Republicans to any sort of gun control, the New York Times reports that Lt Governor Dannie Goeb (aka Dan Patrick), who presides over the state Senate, last month commanded Uvalde-area Dem state Senator Roland Gutierrez to stop bringing up gun control legislation or Goeb would ban Gutierrez from speaking in the chamber.

Lawyers for the IRS whistleblower who claims to have damning information about the agency stonewalling an investigation into Hunter Biden met with Congressional staffers Friday to discuss the material the witness will disclose, CNN reports.

The lawyers met with investigators from the Democratic-controlled Senate Finance Committee and Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee in a pro forma discussion to go over the general information and the conditions for possible testimony.  The witness reportedly will testify that the US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss is being thwarted from bringing charges against Hunter Biden by officials acting politically.

The deadline for fat former President Trump to notify federal Judge Lewis Kaplan of whether he would come to testify in his defense in the civil trial over EJ Carroll’s credible rape accusation before the case goes to the jury came and went at 5 PM EDT on Sunday with no new filing of such notice from Donald’s lawyer Joe Tacopina, Law and Crime’s Adam Klasfeld reports.

Meaning, to the surprise of no one, Trump was full of shit about returning to New York to “confront” Carroll at the trial and his defense won’t be reopened. Closing arguments will begin on Monday.

The shooter who killed at least eight people and wounded several others in a Saturday rampage at the Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas, just now identified by law enforcement as Mauricio Garcia, was wearing “patches or stickers on his clothing that raised suspicion he may have gravitated toward right-wing extremism,” according to an ABC News report on the massacre.

Garcia, age unknown but possibly in his late thirties, was killed at the scene by a cop who had been responding to an unrelated call at the mall when the gunfire erupted, but not before he mowed down nearly 20 people – children among them – with his trusty AR-15 personal defense weapon.

At least seven people are dead and another six wounded after a car plowed into a crowd of migrants at a bus stop adjacent to a shelter for migrants in the border city of Brownsville, Texas on Sunday morning, the AP reports on more violence and insanity in the Lone Star State.