Crooked Media - What A Day: Cootie Giuliani

Donald Trump is rapidly running out of new ways to lose an election that ended a month ago, but Republicans have continued to encourage his conspiracy theories and attempts to throw out the results—mostly in the most cowardly way possible. 
 

• Hours before heading to Georgia on Saturday for a Senate campaign rally/public whining opportunity, Trump called Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) and demanded that he a) pressure the state legislature to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, and b) order an audit of absentee ballot signatures. Kemp declined, which doesn’t make the request itself any less of a criminal attack on democracy. Trump continued to dump on Kemp at his evening rally, in between ranting about his own loss and distractedly urging Georgians to go vote in their hopelessly rigged election: “This election was rigged, and we can’t let it happen to two of the most respected people in Washington. Your governor could stop it easily if he knew what the hell he was doing.”
   
• Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and David Perdue (R-GA) were met with chants of “stop the steal!” and “fight for Trump!” when they took the stage on Saturday, and while neither repeated Trump’s lies about his stolen victory, they’ve continued to support them. When asked whether Trump lost the election in her Sunday debate with Raphael Warnock, Loeffler repeatedly deflected, saying only that Trump “has every right to use every legal recourse available.” Any thoughts about recourses that involve asking the state legislature to violate election laws, Kel? (Perdue was too chickenshit to show up for his debate with Jon Ossof, but here’s his empty podium speaking volumes.) 
   
• They’re in good company. (Well, terrible company, but there’s a lot of it–you get it.) The Washington Post contacted all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, and found just 27 who were willing to acknowledge Biden’s victory. About 88 percent of congressional Republicans refused to say who won the election, functionally pledging support for Trump’s attempts to invalidate it. Those attempts have not and will not work, but a chilling majority of GOP lawmakers just confirmed they have no problem with the kind of extralegal election-stealing tactics Trump has engaged in.

When Republicans refuse to condemn Trump’s insane lies, they assume responsibility for the threats to election officials that follow.
 

• Armed protesters gathered outside of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s home on Saturday night, shouting obscenities, conspiracy theories, and demands to overturn the election results. (The 2020 version of Christmas caroling.) Election-related threats and harassment have been rising steadily in battleground states across the country, and 88 percent of Republicans in Congress have tacitly said “no notes!”
   
• It’s unclear how Trump’s gun-toting fans will react when his options have been exhausted, but we’re nearing that point. Georgia has recertified its results after counting all ballots for a third time, handing Biden his weekly Georgia victory. Judges have dismissed Sidney Powell’s kraken lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan, and the official Trump legal team has lost its pinnacle of legal flatulence Rudy Giuliani, now that he’s been hospitalized with coronavirus after potentially exposing hundreds of people. A fitting conclusion to both the post-election mess, and one man’s utterly extraordinary six-week faceplant. 

Just as the stakes of the presidential election were existential, the aftermath has brought the stakes of the Georgia Senate runoffs into sharp relief: We can have a Senate that’s prepared to work with Joe Biden to bring about a national recovery, or we can be stuck with one controlled by a party that refuses to even recognize Joe Biden as president. Don’t ease up now.

Make sure to order your Crooked Store goodies by the 11th to get them by December 24—we feel like we heard something about the USPS being slow? No tree is complete without “How the Vote Saved America” and “Is That Ho Ho Hope?” Grab your ornaments before they sell out → crooked.com/store

Senate Republicans have invited anti-vaxx doctor Jane Orient to be the lead witness at a Tuesday hearing on coronavirus treatments, upholding their sworn oath to make public-health officials’ work as hard as possible. Orient is the executive director of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a group opposed to government involvement in medicine, and has called vaccine mandates “a serious intrusion into individual liberty, autonomy and parental decisions.” Orient has also spread conspiracy theories about coronavirus vaccines and promoted hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment, and said she plans to use her Senate testimony to do the same. This is the person Republicans are giving a platform, as health officials prepare to roll out a life-saving mass vaccination program hinging on public cooperation. Mark it down, the first time dis-Orient-ing would be a good thing. (Sorry! Sorry!!!)

• Joe Biden has selected California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky for CDC director.
   
• Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered to sell the U.S. additional vaccine doses in late summer. Punch one (1) wall, then take a look at this useful thread on how the incoming administration that cares about human life can come back from this. 
   
• An Ohio sheriff's deputy shot and killed Casey Goodson, Jr., a 23-year-old Black man who was walking into his own home. Goodson’s family has disputed Ohio authorities’ account of the shooting. 
   
• Florida police raided the home of Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who was fired from the state health department for refusing to manipulate data. Agents pointed guns at Jones and her family and seized her computer equipment. Seems normal!
   
• Attorney General Bill Barr is reportedly considering resigning before the end of Trump’s term in order to spend more time tear-gassing his own family.  
   
• Stay-at-home orders have gone into effect for tens of millions of Californians, after available ICU capacities in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley dipped below 15 percent. Five counties in the Bay Area have also preemptively implemented lockdowns. 
   
• Top public health officials are calling for long-term coronavirus symptoms to be recognized as a syndrome and taken more seriously by doctors, warning that hundreds of thousands of Americans might be affected. 
   
• Service industry workers are seeing a decline in tips and an increase in sexual harassment from customers during the pandemic, now that the restaurant-going population is composed exclusively of selfish creeps. 
   
• Yes, nearly 12 million Americans will head into the new year over $5000 behind on rent, and sure, food banks are distributing 60 percent more food to millions of first-time users, but what if we were to tell you that the White House tennis pavilion is finished? 
   
• The former head of Israel’s space security program said that aliens are real and have been in contact but that humanity’s not ready for that conversation. (Counterpoint: Try us, bitch!) Anyway, new monolith just dropped. 
   
• Lifetime and KFC made a “mini-movie” called A Recipe for Seduction and it stars Mario Lopez as Sexy Colonel Sanders and there’s not a single thing any of us can do about it. 

A massive MIT study of fake news found that false information consistently outperforms the truth on Twitter, and it’s not because of bots. The study analyzed some 126,000 stories tweeted over more than ten years, and found that a false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker than a true story, on average. That’s the case on every subject, but false stories about politics regularly get the most action. It seems to be a matter of human preference: Between 2006 and 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as often as they amplified fake ones. The MIT team proposed two hypotheses for why people are more eager to share misinformation than real news: First, fake news seems more “novel,” and second, fake tweets evoke more emotion, on average, than accurate tweets. To be fair, this study came out before Lifetime tweeted about the very real and deeply upsetting Colonel Sanders movie, which might have skewed things.

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A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to resume the DACA program, allowing new applications and renewal requests to move forward. 

The Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to school district policies that allow transgender students to use bathrooms aligned with their gender identities. 

California has become the biggest state to launch a coronavirus contact-tracing app. 

The Virginia Military Institute has removed a statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.