Former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called the Congressional Republicans effort to undermine the impending inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden by sabotaging the Electoral College contrary to conservative values, CBS News reports.

“Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden’s victory strike at the foundation of our republican,” Ryan said in a statement, calling Congressional Republicans’ efforts a “federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans.”

Ryan said it would be “difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act. … The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American democracy.”

Jason Miller 3:49 PM EST 1/3/21: “‘They published 4 minutes and 31 seconds – where is the other 35 minutes? [Georgia Secretary of State Brad ]Raffensperger is a political hack who doesn’t care about election integrity, nor does he care about telling the entire story. Release the full tape!’ – Jason Miller, Trump 2020 Senior Advisor” quoting himself for some reason in the tweet.

Jake Tapper 4:28 PM EST 1/3/21: “The full call is here and while I have your attention pay your child support” which obviously stung really hard because Jay hates paying child support to that AJ Delgado woman who he knocked up in 2016. Tapper included the link.

Jason Miller 5:26 PM EST 1/3/21: “You’re a fake news pussy, Jake. I’d like to see you say that to my face” was Jay’s response. It is unclear if Tapper and Miller will be settle this and in which DC parking lot the settling will occur.

What kind of scumbag records the Commander-in-Chief and then releases it public? @GaSecofState is a #POS!

— Bernard B. Kerik (@BernardKerik) January 3, 2021

Just a reminder about how many different kinds of criminal Bernie Kerik is:  the former NYPD Commissioner had his nomination by GW Bush to be Homeland Security Secretary upended by various reports of his criminal activity, including receiving kickbacks for NYPD contracts, tax fraud, lying to investigators, and (of all things) hiring undocumented immigrants as a nanny and a housekeeper. 

Otter Globe and Intelligencer: “This essay is intended to provide a greater understanding of how social media offensives correlate to traditional military objectives. The topic of information warfare has received far greater attention since the United States Presidential election of 2016. This essay will focus specifically on the topic of apparent information warfare efforts impacting the United States of America between 2016 and 2021.”

“The definition of information warfare capabilities used here comes from Russian General of the Army and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov: ‘The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness…The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures – applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population.'”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secured another term as Speaker of the House of Representatives on Sunday, her fourth since first being elected in 2007. Her 2011 – 2017 interregnum as minority leader saw the failed Republicans John Boehner and Paul Ryan both quit because they couldn’t deal with mental patients like Steve King, Jim Jordan, and Louie Gohmert, or complete morons like Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy, or douchebags like Jason Chaffetz and Matt Gaetz.

An armed pastor in a Texas church discovered a fugitive hiding in his church’s bathroom, but the burglar got the weapon away from the pastor and shot him and injured two others at the church, KHOU CBS-11 reports.  The pastor died from his wounds.

The suspect, who has been capture by police, led Smith County law enforcement on a chase, sometimes pointing a shotgun out the window of his car.  The fugitive abandoned his car after a tire blew out and he fled the scene, evading police.

He apparently took shelter in the bathroom of Starrville Methodist Church in Winona, Texas, where he was found in a stall this morning by the church’s pastor, who was armed.  The pastor instructed the fugitive to leave, but the fugitive wrested the gun away from the pastor and shot and killed him.  The suspect suffered a gunshot wound to the hand in the struggle.

Forty-three staff members at a California hospital tested positive for coronavirus from December 27th through New Year’s Day, with the source of the infection thought to be an inflatable Christmas costume, CNN reports.

An employee looking to spread holiday cheer visited Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center’s emergency room while wearing an inflatable costume, which has a small fan that pushes air through the costume and out a vent in the top. That employee apparently was asymptomatically infected. “A staff member did appear briefly in the emergency department on Dec. 25th wearing an air-powered costume. Any exposure, if it occurred, would have been completely innocent, and quite accidental, as the individual had no Covid symptoms and only sought to lift the spirits of those around them during what is a very stressful time,” Irene Chavez, Kaiser’s senior VP and area manager, said.

When the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua flew into our solar system and circled the Sun in 2017, Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb noticed some abnormalities that raised his interest, Complex reports via Yahoo News.

The cigar shape of the asteroid doesn’t meet hypothetical models of interstellar bodies that are tumbling through space, which would likely be more spheroidal.  But the issue that triggered his suspicions that it was an intelligently piloted craft was how it navigated around the Sun.

The object seemed to defy physics by bouncing away from the Sun and slow down, thereby somehow avoiding the pull of the Sun’s gravity which would typically cause the body to speed up heading toward the Sun.

NBC host Chuck Todd took on Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson’s claim that the November presidential election was tainted and the subsequent reaction from the public calling Republican Senators treasonous, Politico reports.

“You’re the arsonist here!” Todd told Johnson.  “President Trump is the arsonist here. You started this fire and now you’re saying whoa, look at this, oh my god, all these people believe what we told them because you didn’t have the guts to tell the truth that this election was fair.”

Johnson and 11 other Republican Senators as well as more than 100 Republican members of the House plan to challenge the Electoral College certification, claiming that the vote tallies from various swings states are fraudulent for various, unproven reasons.

Washington Post: “President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions. The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking ‘a big risk.'”

“Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected his assertions, explaining that Trump is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate. Trump dismissed their arguments. ‘The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,’ he said. ‘And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.’ Raffensperger responded: ‘Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.’ At another point, Trump said: ‘So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.’

Josh Hawley wrote an email to Senate Republicans responding to Pennsylvania GOP Senator Pat Toomey saying Senator Bro was full of shit: “I read Senator Toomey’s statement regarding my intention to object during the Electoral College certification process. I recognize that our caucus will have varied opinions of this subject. That’s not surprising. But I also believe that we should avoid putting words into each other’s mouths and making unfounded claims about the intentions of our fellow Senators. I never claim to speak for another Senator, but I do speak for my constituents when they raise legitimate concerns about issues as important as the fairness of our elections.”

“For example, in Pennsylvania: since the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Constitution has required all votes to be cast in person, with narrowly defined exceptions. This fact is widely acknowledged. Pennsylvania courts have ruled on this question multiple times. But last year, the state legislature enacted a new law purporting to permit voting by mail for any reason, directly contradicting the state constitution. This November, state officials put the new law into effect. More than 2.5 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail on November 6 (or after), in numbers far exceeding the margin of difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. When Pennsylvania Congressman Mike Kelly and others challenged the law, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the case without hearing the merits – violating its own precedent in doing so. To date, no one has mounted a substantive defense of the state law under which the November election was conducted. And contrary to Senator Toomey’s claims, no court has ruled on the merits of this question. These are very serious irregularities, on a very large scale, in a presidential election.”

The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the United States because of @CDCgov’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low. “When in doubt, call it Covid.” Fake News!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2021

AP: “For decades, the red-bricked Gothic Revival church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached has been a monument to the history of Black Americans’ fight for civil rights and the legacy of an activist icon. It took a high-stakes Senate race and a Trump-era cultural debate to thrust Ebenezer Baptist Church into the center of the current political debate.”

“Its senior pastor, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, is running for the Senate in one of two runoff elections that could decide which party ultimately controls Congress in the first years of the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden. But Warnock’s preaching has become a focal point in the debate about race and justice in the election. His opponent, Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, has run attack ads using snippets of sermons Warnock preached from Ebenezer’s pulpit to accuse him of being a far left, radical socialist who doesn’t support police officers or military service members. For King’s former church, the intense spotlight isn’t new. Its 6,000 members are accustomed to standing-room only Sunday services, due in large part to the out-of-town visitors who flocked to the church. Still, Loeffler’s criticisms have renewed attention on a pillar of Black life in Atlanta and a tradition of political activism it represents. ‘The Republican attack is not just against Warnock, it’s against the Black church and the Black religious experience,’ said the Rev. Timothy McDonald III, pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta who served as assistant pastor of Ebenezer from 1978 to 1984.”

pic.twitter.com/0L5OBD7CBA

— Republican Party of Arizona (@AZGOP) January 3, 2021

Daily Beast: “The slogan for the Republican ticket in Georgia’s run-off elections, inescapable in TV ads and billboards and campaign buses around the state, is succinct: ‘Win Georgia, Save America.’ But to many people backing that ticket, the candidates on it—the ones doing the actual saving—aren’t all that important. Some voters don’t even especially like them. ‘I feel alright about them,’ said Jeremy Hillyard of Sens. David Perdue (R-GA) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), after casting a ballot for them at an early voting location in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs on Wednesday evening. ‘Each side has its flaws,’ Hillyard told The Daily Beast. ‘I’m voting more for gridlock than anything else.’ A fair chunk of electoral politics is based on fear rather than inspiration. That’s certainly been true in the age of Donald Trump, where campaigns have often been defined on foreboding attacks about the opposition. In that vein, Georgia’s run-off elections are no different.”

“Die-hard conservatives showing up to support Perdue and Loeffler have suggested that the candidates themselves are beside the point. At a recent rally outside Atlanta organized by the conservative group FreedomWorks, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the head of the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus, cautioned that he didn’t mean the senators any disrespect before saying of them: ‘They are merely tools.’ ‘We need them,’ said Biggs, ‘to preserve this country.’ To both sides, the stakes of Georgia’s run-off elections are so monumental as to make any of the candidates involved look small by comparison. Perdue himself has acknowledged this on the campaign trail. ‘It’s bigger than Kelly, it’s bigger than me, it’s even bigger than President Trump,’ the senator said at a Wednesday campaign stop. ‘It’s bigger than all of us.'”

After Jeanine Pirro, citing the Constitution, stated that the date of the presidential inauguration cannot be changed from its established date of January 20th, Trump advisor Peter Navarro mansplained that yes, in fact, the inauguration date can be changed.

https://youtu.be/g8GjBoCCv_A

“Well, it can be changed, actually,” Navarro lied.  “We can go past that date.  We can go past that date.  We can go past that date, if we need to.”

FACT CHECK:  No, they can’t.  It’s literally written into Section 1 of the 20th Amendment of the Constitution:  “The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.”

“This administrative panel is presented with an emergency motion for expedited appeal. We have appellate jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. That includes jurisdiction to determine both our and the district court’s jurisdiction. We have the benefit of the briefing before the district court and its 13-page opinion styled Order of Dismissal, issued January 1, 2021. That order adopts the position of the Department of Justice, finding that the district court lacks jurisdiction because no plaintiff has the standing demanded by Article III. We need say no more, and we affirm the judgment essentially for the reasons stated by the district court. We express no view on the underlying merits or on what putative party, if any, might have standing. The motion to expedite is dismissed as moot. The mandate shall issue forthwith” – Dismissal signed by Judges Higginbotham, Smith, and Oldham in Gohmert, et al v Pence.

What are David Perdue and his friends doing? pic.twitter.com/5eleQbmfcU

— Mystery Solvent (@MysterySolvent) January 2, 2021