Upstart conservative cable news/propaganda network Newsmax is planning on expanding its broadcast lineup as it challenges stalwart Fox News for the eyes of the Trump-loving audience.

In a story about viewers defecting from Fox News, the Washington Post learned that Newsmax plans to develop an original show for the 9 p.m. timeslot, as well as expand its morning show by an hour.  The prime time show will be women-centric, similar to The View.

Newsmax, which has seen viewership rise by more than 400% since the election, is benefiting from endorsement by lame duck president Donald Trump and other conspiracy-based conservative activists who feel spurned by Fox News for calling the election for President-elect Joe Biden.

I’m not going back to yesterday’s Republican Party.

THIS IS DONALD TRUMP’S PARTY!

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) December 27, 2020

The world was stunned today as Poland’s Michal Dubicki took the European championship on Sunday after the chain came off of Czech Martin Komarek’s saw during the final round – while Komarek was in the lead. I guess nobody saw that one coming!

Wow. Holy fuck. Komarek needs to fire his equipment manager – or get a new sponsor, because Stihl just ain’t cutting it for him anymore… Literally! Dubicki’s underhand chop game is the strongest in the field, but let’s be honest here: The fucking prick won by default. He just doesn’t know how to work a hot saw like Martin Komarek does. I guess that’s just the way the game plays out. One minute you’re comfortably in the lead, the next minute your chainsaw falls apart during the last round of competition. But as they say: There’s always next year in the world of timbersports.

President Trump has signed the Coronavirus relief bill after dicking around pointlessly for a few days, per Politico’s Jake Sherman. Stimulus payments will be $600, not $2,000.

Good news on Covid Relief Bill. Information to follow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci said that he agrees with the statement made by President-elect that the darkest days for the coronavirus still may lay ahead of the United States, particularly with a potential post-holiday spike in cases.

Interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Fauci said “And the reason I’m concerned and my colleagues in public health are concerned also is that we very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year’s, surge, and, as I have described it, as a surge upon a surge, because, if you look at the slope, the incline of cases that we have experienced as we have gone into the late fall and soon-to-be-early winter, it is really quite troubling.

“We are really at a very critical point. … So I share the concern of President-elect Biden that as we get into the next few weeks, it might actually get worse,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said.

CNN: “On Christmas Eve, staff at Mar-a-Lago made preparations for President Donald Trump to sign the Covid-19 relief package and government funding bill, a holiday gift of relief to millions of Americans suffering in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. But the plan was scrapped at the last minute, two sources with knowledge of the circumstances told CNN. As a result, critical benefits lapsed for millions of jobless Americans Saturday evening, and the government is now poised for a partial shutdown Tuesday if the legislation remains unsigned. The bill was flown to Mar-a-Lago on Thursday afternoon, two days after Trump surprised even his own aides by objecting to the package in a video. Trump did not explicitly say whether he would veto the bill, and aides – with no clear instructions from the President – made preparations at his Florida club for him to sign it.”

“In anticipation of the signing, the smaller of Mar-a-Lago’s two ballrooms was prepped for a 7 p.m. ceremony, complete with a desk and chair for Trump to sit, and his customary pens at the ready, according to the source. However, as the hour approached, aides were informed the President would not be signing the relief bill that evening. One source told CNN that Trump had ‘changed his mind.’ The country, Congress and many of Trump’s closest aides and advisers remain in the dark as to what he intends to do. He has not offered any clarity since posting the video objecting to the bill on Tuesday night. When a deal was struck between congressional leaders, Trump’s aides had signed off believing the President was on board, though two officials previously told CNN they did not believe he was walked through the package in detail. In fact, throughout his video message asking Congress to amend it, Trump railed against several provisions that were actually part of the omnibus spending bill, not the Covid relief bill. ‘It is called the Covid relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with Covid,’ the President said at one point.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper said that he made a decision not to book chronic liars from the Trump campign like Kayleigh McEneny (who’s also White House Press Secretary) and Jason Miller, calling them “mendacious.”

https://youtu.be/lg3f4dwbKvY

“They are just so mendacious, I would never put them on air.  Kayleigh McEneny, I would never book her.  Jason Miller, from the Trump campaign, I would never book him,” Tapper said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” hosted by Brian Stelter.  “These are just people, they just tell lies the way that most people breathe, and there was no value in that.”

We need THE PEOPLE to put pressure on AZ, GA, PA, NV, WI, MI state legislatures to rescind their certifications.

Then we need THE PEOPLE to put pressure on their Senators and Congressmen to object on the 6th.

WE THE PEOPLE!

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) December 27, 2020

“The United States has survived the 2020 election and its seemingly never-ending and increasingly bizarre aftermath. Efforts by Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the courts met abject failure at almost every turn even as a number of Republican elected officials and Republican voters embraced them. The most apocalyptic scenarios that some scholars worried about before the election did not come to pass. But nothing that happened after November 3 can be considered normal – not the threats to election officials, not the concerted legal effort to invalidate millions of votes, and certainly not Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Some prominent academic figures who study how countries fall into dictatorships are deeply concerned about what would come next.”

“Daniel Ziblatt, a political science professor at Harvard and the co-author of How Democracies Die, told Intelligencer, ‘I think it’s pretty clear that there was a somewhat serious effort to steal this election. It’s not going to succeed. In that sense, the acute normative crisis has passed. It doesn’t mean our checks and balances have worked.’ He pointed to what he described as ‘a chronic slow burning problem’ within the American electorate, the “radicalization” within the Republican Party. ‘One can’t have a democracy where one of the two parties is not fully committed to democratic norms.’ Ziblatt described the current situation as an escalation of constitutional hardball, where political actors ‘sniff out weakness in constitutional structure,’ violating long-standing norms if not technically the law. He pointed to the Trump-led effort in 2020 to have Republican-controlled state legislatures pick their own electors to throw victory to the president, regardless of how their states voted” – New York Magazine.

“The U.S. Attorney says that Anthony Quinn Warner is the Nashville bomber, he died at the bomb site. The FBI says that at this point they believe that Warner is the only suspect in this investigation and they are not looking for any other individuals at this time” reports NBC’s Tom Winter.

On Sunday, tens of millions of Americans lost many of the financial protections–from supplemental unemployment to eviction moratoriums to small business protections–afforded to them by the CARES Act passed by Congress in March, but a looming government shutdown will make things worse.

According to the Washington Post, lame duck president Donald Trump’s rejection of the coronavirus relief package passed by Congress before Christmas will be amplified by his simultaneous refusal to sign the omnibus spending bill funding the government.

Millions of federal government employees and countless contractors will be left without a paycheck as the government shuts down for an indeterminate time.  The chaos created by Trump’s volatility will reverberate across the country.

Republican Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey–who is retiring at the end of his term in 2022–said on “Fox News Sunday” that lame duck president Donald Trump’s issuance of pardons to political allies is a “misuse of power,” Politico reports.

While he defended the pardon to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, saying that Flynn was wrongfully prosecuted, Toomey said many other pardons were improper political favors to Trump friends.

“I mean, my goodness, we have tax fraud and bank fraud, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, but because they were close to the president they got pardoned,” he said.

Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Phil Niekro, a 300 game winner famous of his unpredictable knuckleball, has died at the age of 81, the Associated Press reports.

Niekro played for four teams during his 24-year Major League career, which included two stints with the Braves–when the team was located in Milwaukee and then moved to Atlanta.  He also played for the Yankees, Indians and Blue Jays.

Niekro’s career was likely extended because of his mastery of the knuckleball, a unique pitch that is unpredictable because there’s little or no spin.  In 1979, he became the only player in the post-war era to win and lose 20 games in one season.

Washington Post: “Not to be alarmist, but we should recognize that the United States will be in the danger zone until the formal certification of Joe Biden’s election victory on Jan. 6, because potential domestic and foreign turmoil could give President Trump an excuse to cling to power. This threat, while unlikely to materialize, is concerning senior officials, including Republicans who have supported Trump in the past but believe he is now threatening to overstep the constitutional limits on his power. They described a multifaceted campaign by die-hard Trump supporters to use disruptions at home and perhaps threats abroad to advance his interests. The big showdown is the Jan. 6 gathering of both houses of Congress to formally count the electoral college vote taken on Dec. 14, which Biden won 306 to 232. The certification should be a pro forma event, but a desperate Trump is demanding that House and Senate Republicans challenge the count and block this final, binding affirmation of Biden’s victory before Inauguration Day.”

“Trump’s last-ditch campaign will almost certainly fail in Congress. The greater danger is on the streets, where pro-Trump forces are already threatening chaos. A pro-Trump group called ‘Women for America First’ has requested a permit for a Jan. 6 rally in Washington, and Trump is already beating the drum: ‘Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!’ Government officials fear that if violence spreads, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military. Then Trump might use ‘military capabilities’ to rerun the Nov. 3 election in swing states, as suggested by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Trump ‘could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election,’ Flynn told Newsmax in a Dec. 17 interview.”

Daily Beast: “A 37-year-old member of the military from Florida has been charged with the random shooting at an Illinois bowling alley that left three men dead and three people injured. Prosecutors said Duke Webb, who was arrested at the scene, has been charged with three counts of murder and three counts of first-degree attempted murder. ‘We believe this is a completely random act,’ Rockford Police Chief Dan O’Shea said at a Sunday news conference. ‘There is no prior meeting or any kind of relationship between the suspects and any of the victims.'”

“Police arrived at Don Carter Lanes in Rockford while shots were still being fired inside on Saturday night. They rushed inside, and quickly located Webb, who was trying to hide his two handguns, in a crowd of about 25. The slain victims, whose names were not released, were ages 69 to 73. A 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl were wounded but are in stable condition; a 62-year-old man who was wounded was in surgery overnight and is in critical condition.”

With the nation seeing record high numbers of coronavirus cases, a shortage of critical supplies, and available intensive care beds in short supply, outgoing vice president Mike Pence has decided to take an extended vacation in the posh ski resort destination of Vail, Colorado.

VP and Mother Pence arrived in Vail prior to Christmas with other family members and will stay until after New Year’s Day, RealVail reports.

Pence is the head of the White House coronavirus task force.  While vaccines have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, there have been problems with distribution and government acquisition of doses. 

“News4 Investigates has confirmed FBI agents spent Saturday speaking with a top Nashville real estate agent, who contacted them after fearing the subcontractor who worked for him may be the same man whose home they were searching. Other federal agents spent much of the day searching the Antioch home of Anthony Warner. A source close to the federal investigation said that among several different tips and angles, agents are investigating whether or not Warner had paranoia that 5G technology was being used to spy on Americans. A spokeswoman for the FBI said they could not comment because of the pending investigation” – NBC Nashville.