Crooked Media - What A Day: Lost in transition

Joe Biden now looks certain to have won by the same number of electoral votes that Donald Trump designated a “massive landslide” in 2016 (plus, with, you know, a giant popular vote margin) and Senate Republicans have started to sidle away from the Trump administration’s obstruction efforts. Everyone take a drink, Susan Collins is concerned.
 

• Biden has officially won Arizona, vindicating early calls by Fox News and the AP, and flipping the state blue for the first time since 1996. (Before Bill Clinton, the last time Arizona voted for a Democrat was in 1948.) Native American voters were instrumental to that win, overcoming voter suppression and systemic accessibility issues on tribal lands to give Biden the edge, after the Trump administration left tribes to fend for themselves during devastating coronavirus outbreaks. A certain tweet comes to mind. 
   
• Five days after news networks called the election for Biden, some Republicans have begun to come around to the possibility that perhaps, and this is still just a theory, Biden may have won the election. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said that he would “step in” if Biden didn’t start receiving intelligence briefings by the end of the week. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and John Thune (R-SD) have agreed that Biden should have access to classified briefings, just in case President Trump’s very valid and reasonable fraud lawsuits don’t pan out. Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) went so far as to call Biden the president-elect. 
   
• Trump’s ongoing Coup Lite™ aside, all it would take for the transition to proceed normally is for one lady at the General Services Administration to sign a piece of paper. Democrats in Congress wrote this lady a letter demanding an explanation for why she hadn’t done so, to be received by Wednesday. An answer, shockingly, never came. Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) has said Democrats will now consider “next steps” to ramp up the pressure. Those steps could and should include hearings and subpoenas.

We may need a stronger reaction than “gently peeved” when the president is jeopardizing national security for the sake of one last scam.
 

• A number of Trump’s aides and advisors have courageously leaked off the record that Trump is aware it’s all over and has no real overarching legal strategy, if you can believe it—he just wants to be able to say he fought. (With the improper help of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, naturally.) If nothing else, Trump’s lawsuits have proved an easy way to make a quick buck off his credulous supporters, whom his campaign has bombarded with requests for money to pay for election challenges. But any donation under $8,000 actually goes to Trump’s new PAC and the RNC, which can use the funds more or less however they want—including paying off Trump’s personal expenses.
   
• To keep the lucrative fraud dream alive, Trump has amplified whatever conspiracy theory crosses his Twitter feed, whether it’s the all-caps baseless claim that Dominion voting machines magically erased millions of Trump votes (fact check: nah), or a video of workers collecting ballots from a Los Angeles drop box on November 4 (fact check: yeah dude that’s when the final Election Day ballots get collected). Trump has also retweeted undeniable evidence that Scott Baio spent an hour at Michael’s defiantly rearranging a bunch of candles, so at least he’s keeping morale high on both sides. 
   

No Republicans get a cookie for indirectly acknowledging Biden’s decisive victory several days late, but it’s a reassuring sign that a majority of the Senate has recognized Biden as the president-elect, and that shift should embolden Democrats to demand that Biden’s transition team be permitted to get to work, now. The voters gave Biden a mandate to lead; it’s time to start acting like it. 

The 2020 election proved Georgia is winnable. While the race hasn't officially been called yet, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were able to win more votes from Georgia voters than Donald Trump did. And so many voters turned out on both sides that neither candidate in Georgia’s two Senate races finished with over 50% of the vote, which is why we're headed to two Senate runoff elections in January. 

Control of the Senate is riding on these two races, and they’re tight. But Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock have a shot to win and flip the Senate.

That’s why Vote Save America is back with Adopt A State: Georgia Edition. Sign up to Adopt Georgia at votesaveamerica.com/georgia and keep an eye on your email for the best ways to help organizers on the ground. They flipped this state for Biden and Harris, let's help them finish it out. 

Dark-money donors seem to have funded three candidates in Florida Senate races with the aim of siphoning votes away from Democrats. Three third-party straw candidates in three Florida Senate district races (two of them in Miami-Dade County) did no campaigning and no fundraising, and shared unusual similarities in their campaign filings and contributions. Two of them filed as No Party Affiliated candidates, despite having recently been registered as Republicans. In one of those races, a recount is currently underway because there was a margin of only 31 votes between the Democratic incumbent and Republican challenger; the mysterious third party candidate received more than 6300 votes. Just a cool, normal way for a party to win elections without policies that appeal to human voters!

One soulless consulting firm ran a network of influence campaigns to portray the interests of some of the largest oil and gas companies as grassroots movements. FTI Consulting has been a key player in the oil industry’s efforts to influence public opinion around fossil fuels, monitoring environmental activists online and studying other online influence campaigns to better promote the industry’s messages while obscuring its role. That includes driving seemingly grassroots campaigns like Texans for Natural Gas, Citizens to Protect PA Jobs, and New Mexicans for Economic Prosperity—sometimes with the use of fake Facebook profiles and testimonials accompanied by stock photos. As the Biden administration moves forward with more aggressive climate regulations, this is the deceptive new face of the opposition it’ll be up against.

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Howard University has received a $1 million gift to open the Center for Women, Gender and Global Leadership, a center designed to amplify minority women’s issues and promote Black female leaders. 

Stacey Abrams will reportedly run for governor again in 2022. 

Joe Biden’s transition team has announced over 500 members this week, half of whom are women, and Black policy leaders will be heading up more than one quarter of the teams.

Biden’s Justice Department will likely get back to giving a shit about white-collar crime.