“Alarming as it is, the corrosive conclusion to 2020 in America was plainly visible in advance. A year ago, the impeachment of President Donald Trump foreshadowed the damage he has wreaked in the six weeks since Joe Biden beat him in the election. It demonstrated Trump’s elevation of self over country, his willingness to subvert democracy, and the Republican Party’s refusal to constrain his behavior. It was hardly clear then that Biden would end up as Trump’s general election opponent, much less that he would win. Biden was struggling through early Democratic primary debates on the way to embarrassing early losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

“But impeachment proceedings showed how much Trump feared Barack Obama’s vice-president. A pile of evidence – from a presidential phone call transcript to the sworn testimony of credible witnesses, including his own appointees – showed Trump sought to extort the government of Ukraine by making US aid contingent on the announcement of an investigation he could use to smear Biden. When the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, every Republican in the chamber voted to exonerate him. Then the impeachment articles moved to trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the lead House prosecutor, appealed to the jury’s sense of values, morality and national security. ‘You know you can’t trust this President to do what’s right for this country,’ Schiff told senators. ‘You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now, he’s done it before, he’ll do it for the next several months.’ ‘He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to,’ Schiff concluded. ‘This is why if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed…Because right matters, and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost'” – CNN.

AP: “One by one, several European Union nations banned flights from the U.K. on Sunday and others were considering similar action in a bid to block a new strain of coronavirus sweeping across southern England from establishing a strong foothold on the continent. Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Italy all announced restrictions on U.K. travel, hours after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that Christmas shopping and gatherings in southern England must be canceled because of rapidly spreading infections blamed on the new coronavirus variant.”

“Johnson immediately put those regions into a strict new Tier 4 restriction level, upending Christmas plans for millions. A government spokesman in Germany said Sunday that the country is working on a regulation to restrict travel between Germany and Britain to protect the country from the new coronavirus variant. The government said it was also in contact with its European partners about the travel restrictions. It wasn’t immediately clear when or for how long the restrictions would be. The Netherlands banned flights from the U.K. for at least the rest of the year while Belgium issued a flight ban for 24 hours starting at midnight and also halted train links to Britain, including the Eurostar. Austria and Italy said they would halt flights from the U.K. but did not say exactly when that would take place.”

Cute! https://t.co/bMkuaxd7lL

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2020

Washington Post: “Something surprising happened Friday night on Lou Dobbs’s top-rated show on the Fox Business Network. Dobbs, an opinion host and conservative ally of President Trump who has consistently raged over the past month that the president was robbed of a second term by a rigged election, introduced a segment that calmly debunked several accusations of fraud that Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump supporters have lobbed against the election technology company Smartmatic.”

“There are lots of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and voting software,’ Dobbs told his viewers before introducing Edward Perez, an expert with the nonprofit Open Source Election Technology Institute, to give ‘his assessment of Smartmatic and recent claims about the company.’ Perez then appeared in an apparently pretaped segment, where he shot down various conspiracy theories in response to questions from an off-camera, unidentified voice – not Dobbs’s. The segment, it turns out, was in response to a 20-page legal demand letter that was sent this month by Smartmatic to Fox News Media. Similar letters went to Fox’s smaller competitors on the right, Newsmax and One America News. The letters demanded ‘a full and complete retraction of all false and defamatory statements and reports’ aired by the network in its coverage of the Nov. 3 presidential election.”

CNN: “Twitter has updated the warning labels it applies to election misinformation to reflect that Joe Biden is the president-elect, the company said on Saturday. Previously, Twitter’s labels said that claims of election fraud were ‘disputed.’ The new labels say: ‘Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election.’ The fresh language is active now on President Donald Trump’s tweet from Saturday morning undermining the election outcome, and will be applied to all future tweets that do the same. ‘Following certification of the results of the 2020 US Presidential Election, we’ve updated our label to reflect thee latest information,’ Twitter spokesperson Nick Pacilio told CNN. The change follows mounting criticism by democracy experts who said social media platforms’ labels haven’t done nearly enough in the post-election period.”

Over the years, the MAGA Cinematic Universe has done incredible work to create a deeply memorable roster of supervillains. Everyone with even a casual interest in MAGA action tales knows about Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mueller, Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – just to name a few. But the MCU is also jam-packed with interesting, quirky, oddball or just downright lame villains that many people have never heard of before.

It takes a MAGA Cinematic Universe trivia master to be able to explain the significance of these members of Super-Trump’s Rogue’s Gallery. Can you remember why these people were/are important to MCU conspiracy fiction fans?

Martial law = Fake News. Just more knowingly bad reporting!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2020

Daily Beast: “Virginia state Senator Amanda Chase and her staff wanted to be clear: She was experiencing a sinus infection, not COVID-19 symptoms. Just a little head cold. In fact, Chase told The Daily Beast on Friday shortly before stating that she would refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, she was already feeling much better. Such a diagnosis would be very good news for Chase, but also her colleagues in the Virginia General Assembly. Chase, a far-right Republican and 2021 gubernatorial candidate, refuses to wear a mask during government session, forcing her at times to sit alone in a plexiglass quarantine box that she calls ‘the square of freedom.’ Framed by sheets of wobbly plastic in these moments, Chase is a portrait of her political reality: isolated from her fellow Republican lawmakers and walled off by conspiratorial belief.”

“But Chase, who recently left the state Senate’s Republican caucus and was ousted from her local chapter of the GOP, is not alone. All year, she has stood shoulder to shoulder with members of far-right militant groups and conspiracy movements, some of whom would be arrested by year’s end. Now, in the twilight of 2020 and the Trump presidency, she’s playing the hits for the extremist crowd, lying about the vaccine, knowingly taking donations and “security” help from neo-Confederate and QAnon-linked extremists, and calling on President Donald Trump to overturn his election loss by declaring martial law. Her gubernatorial campaign is an eerie preview of even stranger, more conspiratorial post-Trump Trumpism, even as her own state party grows increasingly uneasy with her antics.”

Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Minnesota & Pennsylvania are states in which martial law should be imposed & machines/ballots seized.

7 states under martial law.
43 states not under martial law.

I like those numbers.

Do it @realDonaldTrump!

Nation supports you.

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 20, 2020

US Army four-star general Gustave Perna accepted personal responsibility for the failure of his command to deliver all available coronavirus vaccine in the week after the doses became available, NBC News reports.

“I failed. I’m adjusting. I am fixing and we will move forward from there,” Perna told reporters in a telephone briefing.  “I want to take personal responsibility for the miscommunication.  I know that’s not done much these days. But I am responsible. … This is a Herculean effort and we are not perfect.”

Government efforts have come under scrutiny in recent days as it became public that millions of doses of the Pfizer vaccine, approved by the FDA last week, were in warehouses as they awaited delivery orders. 

The Republican-controlled Senate failed to confirm two Trump nominations, losing the votes by 39-48 margins, as 12 Republican Senators were absent from the daily session, Politico reports.

The nominations by lame duck president Donald Trump that failed were John Chase Johnson to become inspector general of the Federal Communications Commission and Eric Soskin to become inspector general of the Department of Transportation.

The Senate has also failed to act on a coronavirus relief package, a priority for Democrats and some Republicans as cases spike across the nation and vaccines supplies are in short supply because of administrative snafus of the administration. 

United Airlines is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track and contact passengers who were on a flight on which a passenger died Monday because the man may have had coronavirus, CNN reports.

The flight was scheduled from Orlando to Los Angeles, but diverted to New Orleans after the man fell ill.  He was taken off the flight upon landing in New Orleans by a medical crew, and was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Initially, airline staff and passengers were told the man was thought to have experienced cardiac arrest.  His wife, who was on the flight with him, told emergency medical technicians that her husband had experienced COVID symptoms, including loss of taste and smell. 

The easiest job in the world is Fact Checker at Fox News.  The third easiest job is proofreader at TheHill.

“Senior Trump administration officials are increasingly alarmed that President Trump might unleash – and abuse – the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election. These officials tell me that Trump is spending too much time with people they consider crackpots or conspiracy theorists and flirting with blatant abuses of power” Axios reports.

There are 32 days until President-elect Biden’s inauguration. Their fears include Trump’s interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance. A senior administration official said that when Trump is ‘retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends. People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe. These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.'”

Washington Post: “As the number of coronavirus cases ticked upward in mid-November – worse than the frightening days of spring and ahead of an expected surge after families congregated for Thanksgiving – four doctors on President Trump’s task force decided to stage an intervention. After their warnings had gone largely unheeded for months in the dormant West Wing, Deborah Birx, Anthony S. Fauci, Stephen Hahn and Robert Redfield together sounded new alarms, cautioning of a dark winter to come without dramatic action to slow community spread.”

“White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among the many Trump aides who were infected with the virus this fall, was taken aback, according to three senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussions. He told the doctors he did not believe their troubling data assessment. And he accused them of outlining problems without prescribing solutions. The doctors explained that the solutions were simple and had long been clear – among them, to leverage the power of the presidential bully pulpit to persuade all Americans to wear masks, especially the legions of Trump supporters refusing to do so, and to dramatically expand testing. ‘It was something that we were almost repetitively saying whenever we would get into the Situation Room,’ said Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. ‘Whenever we got the opportunity to say, ‘This is really going to be a problem because the baseline of infections was really quite high to begin with’ so you had a lot of community spread.'”

“NBC News has confirmed that the White House was preparing a statement yesterday attributing the cyber hack to Russia but officials were told to stand down. Trump’s tweets today downplaying the hack’s severity and pointing finger at China caught officials off guard and scrambling to square his comments with Pompeo blaming Russia only a day earlier” reports NBC News’ Josh Lederman.

Wall Street Journal: “In a week that began with the Electoral College affirming Joe Biden’s victory and ended with Vice President Mike Pence taking a new Covid-19 vaccine, with a massive national security breach in between, President Trump has been largely out of sight. Instead, six weeks after the election, the president remains fixated on his unsuccessful efforts to overturn the results, advisers say. He pays close attention to TV coverage of state hearings on alleged election fraud though no evidence of widespread fraud has surfaced, and in tweets and phone calls has urged his advisers and lawyers to keep going.”

“In early Saturday tweets, Mr. Trump chided fellow Republicans, ‘Don’t be weak fools!’ and urged them to join a protest in Washington next month. ‘He’s still in the fight-for-every-vote mode,’ said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), a Trump loyalist, who this week acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory and said the president’s path to overturning the results is ‘very, very narrow.’ An administration official described the president’s strategy to overturn the election results as: ‘Let’s throw a giant plate of spaghetti at the wall and hope that at least one noodle sticks.’ At other times, the president and first lady Melania Trump have shown signs of wistfulness about the prospect of leaving the White House. The president told advisers before the couple canceled their traditional Thanksgiving trip to Florida that it would be their last chance to celebrate the holiday at the White House. In a recent get-together in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began filling up bags with White House trinkets for his visitors, telling them he didn’t know what to do with the trinkets, according to a person briefed on the meeting.”