Crooked Media - What A Day: Everyone has seen enough

The Crooked Media Decision Desk (three labradoodles wearing glasses) has seen enough: Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States. Pop a bottle of champagne, fall asleep holding the champagne, drink the warm champagne for breakfast. We won.
 

• The cowards on cable news won’t call it, but the presidential race is over and it’s not particularly close. Biden has taken the lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia, expanded his margin in Nevada, and held onto a slim lead in Arizona. Pennsylvania is the only one of those states Biden needs for a decisive victory, and Donald Trump no longer has any reasonable mathematical chance of coming out ahead there. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will deliver a prime-time address, people are dancing in the street in Philadelphia, and somewhere in Washington, a very pale Ivanka Trump has just experienced the novel feeling of “rejection.” 
   
• Here’s the less fun part: The absence of an official call has left the door open for Trump and his allies to continue filling the vacuum with disinformation and conspiracy theories, which have already fueled real-world danger. On Thursday night, two armed men with a QAnon decal on their car were arrested on their way to the Philadelphia Convention Center, a ballot-counting location. Also on Thursday, a Republican firm run by a top advisor the Trump campaign sent unmarked text messages to supporters urging them to descend on the convention center: “ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump!” Totally unrelated, probably! Armed Trump supporters have also continued to protest outside election offices in Maricopa County, AZ, joined on Thursday night by famed de-escalation expert Alex Jones.
   
• Trump reportedly has no plans to concede (you could knock us over with a feather), and White House aides have been plotting an intervention to break the news to him that it’s over (RIP aides). Meanwhile, Jared Kushner has selected Citizens United President David Bossie to lead the campaign’s anti-democracy legal effort, since even George W. Bush’s 2000 recount czar James Baker thinks this whole thing is stupid. It’s getting stupider by the day: Pennsylvania Republicans have now asked the Supreme Court to make election officials separate out late-arriving mail ballots, a thing they are...already doing. 

While the courts have dismissed Trump’s meritless election fraud claims out of hand, some Republicans are still very much along for the ride.
 

• A few hours after Trump stood at the White House podium and spewed lies about Democrats and pollsters (?) stealing the election, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that he plans to donate $500,000 to the Trump campaign’s legal effort, while Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) pledged his allegiance to Team Fascist Coup.  Other Republicans criticized Trump indirectly or feigned shock, a few years too late. Only Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has had the guts to go all the way off in the Notes App. 
   
• Amid all the noise, we shouldn’t let it slip under the radar that Trump’s very real attempts to steal this election, while unsuccessful, did put thousands of votes in jeopardy. Postal Service data shows that more than 150,000 ballots were trapped in mail processing facilities on Wednesday, including more than 12,000 ballots in states that had yet to be called. The number of ballots that the USPS failed to deliver by Election Day is expected to grow as more data is released. On the bright side, Judge Emmett Sullivan has indicated he might hold Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in contempt of court for ignoring his order on Election Day. 

We’re likely in for a dumb few weeks of presidential tantrums, and time-wasting recounts, court battles, and forms of malarkey we can’t begin to imagine. All after a historic number of people voted for No Malarkey. On January 20, it all ends. Voters have chosen decency over destruction, and elected a woman—a Black and Indian American woman—to be vice president for the first time in American history. Don’t forget to dance in the streets about that. 

Today on Pod Save America: Jon, Jon, Tommy, and Dan discuss Joe Biden’s victory over one-term President Donald Trump, and what comes next in the fight for democracy. You probably don't wanna miss this one. Listen now wherever you get your pods →

While we all had our eyes glued to Steve Kornacki, the U.S. reported more than 121,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, shattering the record of more than 100,000 cases set the day before. The country is now averaging 895 coronavirus deaths per day, and that number is also rising rapidly. There has reportedly been no formal White House coronavirus task force meeting since October 20—even while Joe Biden, the guy who is not yet president, has been receiving regular briefings. You didn’t need data to know that Donald Trump’s indifference and lies about the pandemic have harmed the people who listen to him (and everyone around them), but here it is: Across the country, the counties with the worst current coronavirus surges overwhelmingly voted for Trump. 

• Clayton County, GA, part of the district represented by the late John Lewis, was the county that tipped the lead in Georgia to Joe Biden. We will pause here for everyone to finish weeping. 
   
• And we’re back! Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said that the state would conduct a recount when Joe Biden’s margin over Trump was razor-thin, but Biden has since expanded his lead. Even if Raffensberger does Trump a solid and holds a recount anyway, it’s unlikely to change the outcome: A state hasn’t flipped after a recount in at least the last two decades. 
   
• Twitter banned Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray, and then Bannon’s lawyer quit. Always fascinating to find out exactly where the arbitrary line is.
   
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has formally announced her intent to run for speaker again. 
   
• Native American voters turned out in record numbers to flip multiple swing states blue, only to then be designated “Something Else” in a CNN graphic breaking down voter demographics. Anyway, the Something Else Vote looks cool as hell. 
   
• Russian lawmakers are considering a bill that would give Vladimir Putin lifelong immunity after he leaves office. Eyes emoji, but with a little raised eyebrow over it.
   
• Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is currently writing a book and happens to be one of few people in Trumpworld who never signed an NDA. :) 
   
• One of the largest “Stop the Steal” Facebook groups was forcibly rebranded  “Gay Communists for Socialism,” proving that once in a blue moon, against all odds, good things still happen on Facebook. 

Centrist House Democrats tearfully blamed their more progressive colleagues for the loss of Democratic seats in a private conference call on Thursday, and warned the party to stay away from liberal rhetoric ahead of January’s Senate runoff elections in Georgia. “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again...We lost good members because of that,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), calling the election a failure. As Brian Beutler wrote in this week’s Big Tent, the fact that Republican propaganda labeling *Joe Robinette Biden* a radical socialist proved successful has more to do with a dangerous right-wing disinformation bubble than the left wing of the party, and that problem won’t be fixed with internal finger-pointing. Democrats held together a massive coalition that was simply met with very high GOP turnout; alienating progressives and young people now hardly seems like the way forward. 

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A federal court has thrown out a Republican lawsuit to halt the vote count in Nevada. 

Joe Biden is expected to tap former regulator Gary Gensler to be an advisor on Wall Street oversight. 

Six Native American and Native Hawaiian candidates were elected to Congress on Tuesday, a record-breaking number.

~Donald Trump is a lame-duck, one-term impeached president.~