Crooked Media - What A Day: Highway Hopes

Republican leaders have begrudgingly acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory in the election after an unsuccessful month-long assault on democracy, and can now turn their full focus to the task at hand: Cosplaying as the Grinches of coronavirus relief. 
 

• A full six weeks after Election Day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell joined a growing number of Senate Republicans in admitting that the jig is up: “The Electoral College has spoken. Today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.” Two minor quibbles with McConnell’s breathtaking show of courage: 1) Authoritarian Trump Handler Vladimir Putin beat him to the punch, and 2) McConnell later urged GOP senators not to join any House Republican in challenging the Electoral College results—not because it would be a seditious waste of time, but because voting it down would look disloyal to Donald Trump. 
   
• Unsurprisingly, not all Trump allies (or, uh, Trump himself) have taken the rubber-stamping of his defeat in stride. On Tuesday, State Sen. Amanda Chase (R-VA), a gubernatorial contender, called on Trump to “declare martial law as recommended by General Flynn.” Others have moved on to laying the groundwork for Coups of Tomorrow: Pennsylvania Republicans have asked the Supreme Court to overturn their state supreme court’s September ruling extending the deadline for mail-in ballots. That’s not an attempt to overturn this election, but to get the Court to say that state legislatures have unchecked power over election rules going forward, state constitutions be damned. When life gives you lemons, see if you can use those lemons to bludgeon popular democracy to death.
   
• In a Monday speech following the Electoral College vote, Biden took the opportunity to both declare victory (again) and criticize Trump for refusing to acknowledge defeat: “In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed. We the people voted. Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact. And so now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal.” As optimistic as Biden seems to be about establishing a working relationship with the GOP, it would be cool if absolutely everything didn’t depend on it; to that end, Biden journeyed to Georgia on Tuesday to campaign alongside Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and make clear to voters that a GOP-controlled Senate would obstruct his agenda. 

For evidence, voters need look no further than the current GOP-controlled Senate, which continues to block desperately needed coronavirus aid as the end-of-year deadline looms. 
 

• Congress has until the end of the week to pass spending legislation and another stimulus package before the Christmas recess, unless it passes another stopgap spending bill. A bipartisan group of lawmakers has released two new relief bills meant to bypass the main negotiation sticking points: A $748 billion package that includes new unemployment benefits, small-business aid, vaccine distribution, and other programs everyone can agree on, and a second bill with $160 billion in aid for state and local governments, and McConnell’s unacceptable liability protections for negligent corporations.
   
• That proposal reflects McConnell’s suggestion to toss out both liability protections and state and local aid as a “compromise,” which sucked then and sucks now, but here we are! The package also still doesn’t include another round of stimulus checks, an omission Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has pledged to keep fighting. Top Congressional leaders met in person for the first time in months to hash out a deal; what it will look like remains anyone’s guess.

If there’s one solid takeaway from the last few weeks, it’s that no one should expect (much less count on) coup-promoting congressional Republicans to make a good-faith effort to cooperate with Biden. We can spend the next two years watching McConnell shoot down every relief effort in sight, or we can spend the next four weeks pulling out two more victories in Georgia. Time to get to work. 

The January 5 runoff in Georgia that will determine control of the Senate is right around the corner. Early voting has begun, so if you've been waiting for the right moment to get involved, now is the time. 

 Head over to votesaveamerica.com/georgia to find something you can do right now, and sign up to Adopt Georgia, where we'll be sending new opportunities to donate and volunteer to support groups doing the work in Georgia between now and January. 

Security officials and terrorism researchers have characterized the widespread right-wing embrace of conspiracy theories as “mass radicalization,” which you don’t love to see. Domestic-terrorism analysts have warned in conferences, agency meetings, and op-eds that the line between mainstream and fringe conservatism is disappearing, with serious security implications. At an online Depolarization Summit, Elizabeth Neumann, who resigned from DHS in April over the administration’s failure to address the threat of domestic extremism, emphasized the danger of the right-wing propaganda machine in amplifying disinformation: "Breaking through that echo chamber is critical or else we'll see more violence.” How to go about that is less clear, but analysts agree that getting Trump out of the White House is a helpful first step.

• The FDA’s analysis of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine found it to be safe and 94-percent effective; the vaccine could receive authorization by Friday, freeing up six million doses for distribution. 
   
• Joe Biden has tapped Pete Buttigieg for Secretary of Transportation, and Amy Klobuchar has already congratulated him in a tweet citing his “local government experience.” A slow return to normalcy. 
   
• The New York supreme court has ruled that the Trump Organization must fork over any documents related to the New York attorney general’s investigation into Trump’s financial shenanigans. 
   
• Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said he’s exploring sanctions against lawyers who brought frivolous post-election lawsuits, as well he should. Relatedly, it turns out Trump elite strike-force team lawyer Jenna Ellis lied about why she was fired as a Weld County, CO, prosecutor in 2013 (spoiler: it was for being terrible at her job). 
   
• Former cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs will testify at Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) Wednesday hearing on “Examining Irregularities in the 2020 Election,” along with Ken Starr and attorneys in pro-Trump litigation. Johnson still plans to hold the hearing after calling the election legitimate on Tuesday, just to kind of shoot the shit about the general, abstract idea of voter fraud. 
   
• National security adviser Robert O'Brien is squiring his wife around Europe and the Mediterranean, and has sought a private tour of the Louvre, which is closed to visitors on account of the raging pandemic that U.S. government officials can’t be bothered to pretend to care about.
   
• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released the criminal referral alleging Trump did crimes on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, if you’ll cast your mind back to the impeachment proceedings of roughly 500 years ago. 
   
• A CNN/Bellingcat investigation identified the FSB agents who were following Alexei Navalny before he was poisoned. The investigation found that the unit had trailed Navalny on more than 30 trips to and from Moscow since 2017. 
   
• Pornhub purged more than 10 million videos from its site—almost 80 percent of its content—in the wake of a New York Times opinion piece on underage content that anti-pornography groups have spun into a larger moral panic, and that Josh Hawley (this will never stop being funny) learned about through his credit card company.
   
• Ben Rhodes has some splainin’ to do.

As excruciating as the wait for a vaccine might feel in the U.S., poorer countries are facing a much longer delay. The COVAX initiative, which was set up by the WHO, the vaccine alliance GAVI, and the global coalition for epidemic preparedness CEPI, was designed to ensure that coronavirus vaccines would be available worldwide. But COVAX has only secured a fraction of the two-billion doses it hopes to buy over the next year, while rich countries have already reserved about three quarters of the nine-billion doses that pharmaceutical companies expect to produce next year. COVAX has also yet to finalize any deals to ship vaccines, and is running low on cash. The result could be stark inequality, with people in rich countries getting vaccinated while the pandemic continues to rage in the developing world. 

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The FDA has authorized the first rapid, over-the-counter coronavirus test for at-home use.

The District of Columbia council has passed a bill that would give people who committed crimes as young adults a chance to have their sentences reduced. 

The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal to a decision requiring Indiana to recognize same-sex spouses on birth certificates.

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has been donating about $1 billion a month to just under 400 nonprofit groups.