Crooked Media - What A Day: Georgia of the bungle

With the presidential transition formally underway, Donald Trump’s increasingly bizarre post-election tantrum now poses its most immediate and hilarious threat to Georgia’s Republican senators in their January runoffs. As it is written on the Trump family crest, “if you can’t beat ‘em, set fire to everything in sight.”
 

• In spite of his crack(ed) legal team, Trump continues to lose the election in fresh and exciting ways on a daily basis. On Saturday the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed out a GOP effort to block the state from certifying its results. Recounts requested by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin’s two largest, bluest counties reaffirmed Biden’s victory. As of today, all six key states where Trump threw legal spaghetti at the wall—Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin—have certified their results, making Biden’s victory official.
   
• The administrative obstruction is also over. Biden received his first presidential intelligence briefing on Monday, after GSA Administrator Emily Murphy finally allowed the transition to begin in a weird, whiny letter last week. The Biden administration continues to glide slowly into view: Biden has confirmed that he will nominate former Fed Chair Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary and announced a diverse economic team, as well as an all-female senior communications team which Jen Psaki will be the face of as White House press secretary. We offer no comment as to whether Psaki should call an emergency press conference on January 20 to assert that no president has ever taken over from such a whiny little bitch, period.
   
• As his final days in the White House tick down,Trump has recommitted himself to his number-one priority: Slinging election fraud allegations so divorced from reality that his lawyers can’t repeat them in court without getting disbarred. In his first Fox News talk therapy session since the election, Trump regaled an obsequious Maria Bartiromo with the claim that “there’s no way Joe Biden got 80 million votes” (he got more) and that states’ “big massive dumps” (lol) must have been something more nefarious than mail-in votes being counted, based on the evidence of [footage not found]. 

Trump saved much of his ire for Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) and Georgia’s perfectly normal voting machines, in a giant fuck-you to his own party as it desperately tries to cling to its Senate majority.
 

• Trump has been demanding that Kemp do something to reverse his defeat in Georgia for weeks, but “the governor’s done nothing, he’s done absolutely nothing,” Trump whined to Bartiromo. “I’m ashamed that I endorsed him.” On Monday Trump stepped up his attacks on Twitter, asking why “the hapless Governor of Georgia” won’t use his “emergency powers...to overrule his obstinate Secretary of State” in order to uncover “a ‘goldmine’ of fraud.” (Hapless & Obstinate, the political buddy comedy that’s taking box offices by storm.)
   
• The president’s conspiracy-addled base is listening. Some Trump supporters have called for a boycott of the January 5 Senate runoffs, as a way to punish the Georgia Republicans who haven’t stolen the election for Trump. At a campaign stop in Marietta, GA, on Saturday, RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel found herself staring into the cold dead eyes of the monster she helped create, fielding questions from Republicans who didn’t see the point in voting, seeing as how the whole system is hopelessly rigged. 

Trump’s efforts to undermine faith in elections couldn’t be less funny in light of the long-term damage he’s inflicting for the benefit of his own ego, but it couldn't be more enjoyable that his first, greatest victims might be Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Grab a bag of popcorn—just don’t leave it up to Trump to help Democrats win the Senate. 

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OMB Director Russ Vought plans to reclassify 88 percent of budget office employees as Schedule F, which would in theory allow President Trump to fire them all before he dips. Just before the election, Trump issued an executive order creating that new classification of federal employees, which rolls back protections for civil servants and allows them to be fired at will. At the time, his goal was probably to fire people he viewed as disloyal upon winning re-election. Since that didn’t pan out, he appears to be preparing to use Schedule F as another tool to sabotage the Biden administration: More agencies are likely to follow in the OMB’s footsteps, and make huge swaths of the workforce available for Trump to fire and replace with loyalists (or just leave agencies gutted). Biden can easily reverse the executive order once he takes office, but given the mess Trump could create in the meantime, Democrats aren't inclined to wait. 

• Moderna has applied for FDA emergency-use authorization for its coronavirus vaccine, which was confirmed to be 94.1 percent effective in final trial results.
   
• New York City will begin reopening public elementary schools next week, after everyone yelled at Mayor Bill de Blasio for shutting down in-person learning but not indoor dining, for some reason. 
   
• The Supreme Court heard arguments over Trump’s plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from redistricting data, and even the likes of Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett seemed skeptical.
   
• Here’s the full text of Trump’s pardon of former national security advisor Michael Flynn, which absolves Flynn both of lying to the FBI and of “any and all possible offenses arising from the facts set forth...or that might arise, or be charged, claimed or asserted” in connection with the Mueller investigation or any grand juries. For sure!
   
• Joe Biden slipped while playing with his dog Major and sustained hairline fractures in his foot, in a blatant ripoff of the West Wing pilot. He’ll likely have to wear a boot for several weeks. Nothing against Major, but Biden’s yet-to-be-selected cat would never do him like this. 
   
• Here it is, the most evil thing you’ll read all week: The consulting firm McKinsey proposed that Purdue Pharma offer rebates to pharmacy companies for OxyContin overdoses as a way to boost sales.
   
• The mysterious Utah desert monolith has mysteriously disappeared, and a new mysterious monolith has mysteriously appeared in Romania. Thank you for subscribing to Monolith Watch. 
   
• Melania Trump’s final White House Christmas decorations are disappointingly normal. When you’ve been caught on tape saying “who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff” you can either go big or go home, and Melania has, regrettably, gone home. 
   
• At least we'll always have tiny Thanksgiving desk. 

Israel (evidently) assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist in a remotely controlled operation, complicating Joe Biden’s plan to rejoin and bring Iran back into the nuclear agreement. That may have been at least part of the point. In addition to impeding Iran’s nuclear program, the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh could torpedo future diplomatic efforts. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said shortly after Biden’s election that “there must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,” because that deal’s constraints on Iran’s bomb program would expire in 2030. If Iran retaliates significantly in the next few weeks, that option might not be available to Biden at all. 

On this week's Fake the Nation, Judah Friedlander and Jody Avirgan join host Negin Farsad to talk turkey, Croatian family traditions, and Thanksgiving 2020. Later on, Tochi Onyebuchi and Sarah Pappalardo break down what boredom really means. Sarah explains why we’re actually all dogs. Honestly, it makes sense. Listen here →

The AI group DeepMind has created a program that can predict how proteins fold into shapes, a major breakthrough that will allow researchers to better understand and treat certain diseases, and work towards breaking down plastic pollution. 

Michael Jordan has donated $2 million of his earnings from The Last Dance to food banks in the Carolinas and Chicago. 

Celeb chef David Chang will donate his $1 million winnings from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to restaurant workers who have been impacted by the pandemic. 

Cher has successfully saved the world’s loneliest elephant.