UPDATE 4:35 pm 12/6/20: Looks like these clowns already deleted it for whatever reason. Was able to catch a screenshot from another tab.

Associations concerned that the outgoing Trump Administration will destroy records documenting the actions of the president and his staff have filed lawsuits against the administration to ensure the administration preserves its records and documents, the Washington Post reports.

The American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed suit in the DC District Court to require the administration ensure it is compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

The groups are concerned that with ongoing investigations into Trump’s administration and personal business, Trump will direct the destruction of relevant documents.  With Trump’s “potential legal and financial exposure once he leaves office,” the groups said, “there is a growing risk that he will destroy records of his presidency before leaving.”

Axios: “President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has tested positive for COVID-19, Trump tweeted on Sunday. Giuliani has been traveling the country, and meeting with lawmakers, as part of a push by Trump’s legal team to claim that the 2020 election was rigged against the president and that state results should be overturned. He often has not worn a mask at these events.”

This is a no-brainer. Obviously we have to do this, under the national security umbrella. https://t.co/D6Mz1qO3AT

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) December 6, 2020

Interesting! https://t.co/Ge1h3UKW5O

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2020

Back in July, we made The Hill’s spam filter, but that was something applied after the comment had been posted. Now the term “NationalZero” is on the same tier as “fuck” and “dickhead” and cannot be posted until it’s been “approved” – meaning never since the mods are assholes.

However the dipshits neglected to add it as “National Zero” which is how it’s actually spelled. There’s a space in there. The filter for some reason also kick in when the URL is for an article (as you can see in the bottom comment), which one would think is the whole point in having this filter so they don’t lose readers to a superior experience in news and Disqus-ing.

Washington Post: “The tea party movement was just getting started when I began writing a history of the Republican Party in 2009. I viewed the movement as the latest iteration of a basically cyclical populist phenomenon. It would push American politics to the right, I thought at the time, but eventually its impact would dissipate. The country would then swing back toward the center for a number of years until the next conservative counter-reaction. But the tea party never really faded away. It mutated. It became the Trump movement, which is likely to dominate the Republican Party and have a major impact on politics for years to come. If the best guide to conservatism was once Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s ‘The Cycles of American History,’ now it might be Leon Trotsky’s ‘The Permanent Revolution.’ Conservatism’s familiar pattern of advance, consolidation, retrenchment and renewal has vanished. In its place is something that looks like #MAGA Forever.”

“Periodic upwellings of grass-roots anger and enthusiasm have energized the conservative movement for decades. They shared a basically populist character and to some extent opposed the Republican establishment as well as Democrats; their energies peaked and then diminished, followed, until the tea party, by 10- to 15-year periods of quiescence. Why did this cycle persist? For one thing, it’s hard to keep any political movement going at full steam for a long time. Activists can put their jobs and personal lives on hold for a while when their efforts gather force and advance toward victory, but that’s not sustainable indefinitely. Equally important is that these different conservative movements succeeded in electing at least some people who sincerely tried to address the grievances and aspirations that animated the grass-roots activism. These activists turned legislators chose, in short, to govern.”

LA Times: “A month after the presidential election, President Trump’s claim that the election was rigged to benefit Joe Biden has been debunked by numerous Republican state elections officials. Dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and its proxies have been rejected by judges in both state and federal courts. There is no evidence to support any of the campaign’s baseless charges of election fraud, though its power to undermine faith in American democracy is real. Yet millions of Americans believe the election was stolen. Why?”

“One standard answer is that Trump’s backers will believe anything he says. Another perspective, popular among some psychologists, is that people filter ambiguous information through an ideological lens, preferring interpretations that favor their political affiliations. But in this case, these explanations seem insufficient. People follow charismatic leaders and selectively process political information, but they do not typically cling to a belief that contradicts all available evidence. Understanding the fallout from the intense polarization of this election will take time. But research into social and political psychology can offer some insight into this response from Trump supporters. Whether by accident or design, the election fraud narrative features three characteristics that supercharge its psychological appeal: It makes a complex and hostile world seem orderly, controllable and certain.”

“Despite our compatriots who fall for everything Trump says, there are plenty of Republicans who held their nose and voted to reelect him. They can’t stand the guy but support GOP policies no matter the vessel. But despite this, Biden won handily with more votes than any presidential candidate in history and a popular vote lead closing in on 7 million – one of the largest margins ever. History is also not on Trump’s side. The only incumbent president to lose his reelection, only to regain it four years later was Grover Cleveland – who won in 1884, lost in 1888, and took back the White House in 1892. The difference is that in each of those three elections Cleveland won the popular vote, losing reelection because of the quirks of the Electoral College map. Trump, for his part, has lost the popular vote by huge margins in each of his two elections. And Biden, in contrast to Trump, has significant room to expand his standing. The incoming president will get full credit for the country’s economic revival – and he will reach those Americans who are desperate to be healed again. Every time Trump taps the keyboard, the majority of the country will breathe a sigh of relief that he’s just irrelevant and desperate. Biden will benefit from the contrast. While Trump breathes fire, Biden’s cool reads the country’s temperature more accurately.”

“So let me be the first Democrat to say it: Please run again, Mr. Trump. You may be able to troll Biden a little. You may be able to distract entertainment news a bit. But you’re not going to win. Biden will be more popular in four years after he’s fixed the mess you’ve left. Your continued loser status is the best news cycle for all of us” – Michael Gordon, Business Insider.

New York Times: “For months, Saturn and Jupiter have appeared to be courting, as the giant celestial bodies have gradually drawn nearer in the night sky. Over the next two weeks, as their orbits align more closely, the planets will pull closer until they appear to be just a tenth of a degree apart – about the thickness of a dime held at arm’s length, according to NASA. The encounter, known as a great conjunction, happens about every 20 years. But this one – arriving on Dec. 21, the winter solstice – is special, astronomers said.”

“It will be the closest alignment of Saturn and Jupiter, the largest planets in our solar system, since 1623. But that conjunction, just 14 years after Galileo built his first telescope, was 13 degrees away from the sun, making it almost impossible to view from Earth, said Amy C. Oliver, a spokeswoman for the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. This one will be the closest visible encounter between the two giants since the Middle Ages, in 1226, Ms. Oliver said. The next time the planets will be this close is 2080, she said, making the event a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle for most adults. Across the United States, the best view of the two planets coming into near-alignment will be just after sunset, in the southwestern portion of the sky.”

Axios: “Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ Sunday that Gov. Brian Kemp (R) will not call a special session of the state legislature to hand Georgia’s electoral college votes to President Trump — something the president has called for despite Biden’s victory in the state. Trump has continued to falsely claim he won the election. He has pressured Kemp on Twitter and in a phone call to call the General Assembly back in to give Georgia’s electors to him instead of Biden, who won the state by more than 12,000 votes.”

“Duncan, who voted and campaigned for Trump, said that ‘calling the general assembly back in at this point would almost be along the lines of a solution trying to find a problem,’ since Georgia has completed multiple recounts that affirmed Biden as the winner. ‘I absolutely believe that to be the case, that the governor is not going to call us into a special session.’ ‘We certainly will not move the goalposts at this point in the election,’ Duncan told host Jake Tapper.”

Happy Holidays to all of you angry right wingers who push that ‘War on Christmas’ bullshit. How about a little empathy for the people who don’t celebrate Christmas and can’t even buy a goddamned Slurpee without hearing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” on the 7-Eleven radio? Can’t you just admit that this is just a dog whistle for your deep insecurity over America becoming a little less white and Christian every year? Christmas isn’t going to be cancelled. No secular authority is going to penalize you for nearly killing yourself hanging Christmas lights on your roof eaves and then again when you finally get to taking them down sometime in early May of 2021. Soros isn’t going to preempt CBS’s broadcast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with an infomercial for his “Open Societies Foundation”. And despite what your president says, he did not make it legal to say “Merry Christmas” again. He’s full of shit. “Happy Holidays” is a creation of American capitalism that you all profess to love so dearly, inclusive to all customers of the companies of which you supposedly own stock. Stop being such a Karen.

Merry Christmas to all of you pants-wetting worms who worry about “exclusion” during December. It’s not “endorsing” any one religion or another to acknowledge Christmas. Let’s also stop pretending that Hanukkah was ever a major holiday for Jewish folks prior to the commercialization of Christmas (though of course they’re entitled to a holiday too). Department store owners in the 20th century wanting to capture sales from a smaller segment of the populace during December were largely responsible for making it a gift-giving celebration, and thus the corporate boilerplate “Happy Holidays”. It’s not offensive to acknowledge that reality. You can say “Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah” if you’re unsure what of what faith the person is whom you’re addressing. You’re extremely unlikely to offend a Muslim if you’re somehow mistaken. You probably will offend an atheist, but fuck them if they can’t have a sense of humor about it.

Washington Post: “The shameful complicity of Republican leaders in President Trump’s torrent of deceit about our election tells us there is little hope for a more reasonable post-Trump GOP. But what about conservatism as a philosophy? Is it equally discredited? Let’s begin by just saying it: The country owes the Never Trump conservatives a debt. Yes, many progressives have been uneasy with these unusual allies. They insist that Trump was not some alien imposition on conservatism but rather the product of long-standing trends in Republican politics. Trafficking in racial division and racism, nativism, extremism, conspiracy theories and voter suppression did not start with Trump. Progressives are entirely right about this. But the Never Trumpers deserve our respect precisely because so many of them stood against these tendencies and, in more cases than not, undertook a deeper critique of their own side.”

“This applies to many of my conservative Washington Post opinion colleagues, the folks over at the Bulwark, the online journal that owes its existence to the right-of-center rebellion against Trump, and many of those ad-makers at the Lincoln Project. For those of us arrayed from the center to the left, the awfulness of Trump is so obvious that we can underestimate how hard it is to walk away from the people who were your comrades for so long.”

“When a party loses the White House, a new crop of presidential hopefuls typically begin moving quickly to lay the groundwork for a run in the next campaign. Not this year. President Donald Trump’s increasingly overt flirtations with running again in 2024 are freezing the potentially vast field of Republican candidates. GOP White House hopefuls are essentially left to watch what Trump does next instead of courting fundraisers, building networks and visiting early-voting states – the usual campaign planning steps – for fear of angering Trump and risking turning off his large and loyal base. And that’s just the way the president likes it, ensuring he stays in the spotlight and generating the cash and media coverage he craves.”

“But strategists say Trump is essentially leaving the party in a holding pattern, with could-be-candidates unable to prepare as they try to avoid crossing a notoriously unforgiving president who has an enormous Twitter bullhorn and little tolerance for perceived disloyalty. ‘Trump is delaying the start of the 2024 campaign in a significant way,’ said Alex Conant, a Republican operative who served as communications director to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. In a normal campaign cycle, Conant said, ‘you would see potential presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire this month.’ This year, ‘That’s not going to happen because nobody wants to be seen as challenging Trump'” – AP.

New York Times: “Last April, when Rob Flaherty, the digital director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, told me that the former vice president’s team planned to use feel-good videos and inspirational memes to beat President Trump in a ‘battle for the soul of the internet,’ my first thought was: Good luck with that. After all, we were talking about the internet, which doesn’t seem to reward anything uplifting or nuanced these days. In addition, Mr. Trump is a digital powerhouse, with an enormous and passionate following, a coalition of popular right-wing media outlets boosting his signal, and a flair for saying the kinds of outrageous, attention-grabbing things that are catnip to the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And after I wrote about Mr. Biden’s comparatively tiny internet presence last spring, I heard from legions of nervous Democratic strategists who worried that using ‘heal the nation’ messaging against the MAGA meme army was like bringing a pinwheel to a prizefight. But in the end, the bed-wetters were wrong.”

“Mr. Biden won, and despite having many fewer followers and much less engagement on social media than Mr. Trump, his campaign raised record amounts of money and ultimately neutralized Mr. Trump’s vaunted ‘Death Star’ – the name his erstwhile campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gave to the campaign’s digital operation. Figuring out whether any particular online strategy decisively moved the needle for Mr. Biden is probably impossible. Offline factors, such as Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and the economic devastation it has caused, undoubtedly played a major role. But since successful campaigns breed imitators, it’s worth looking under the hood of the Biden digital strategy to see what future campaigns might learn from it.”

“President Trump held another massive rally in Georgia on Saturday night. Tens of thousands of Trump fans came out to support this historic president. The Gateway Pundit sent reporter Katie to cover the rally in Georgia. Trump trolled the fake news media at the rally. The WiFi ID was ‘Make America Great Again’ The password was ‘RiggedElection!’” is the entirety of an article on The Gateway Pundit that has 480 comments as of 7:31 am EST on Sunday.

The current top comment says “Best president EVER!”. It has received 159 upvotes.

CNN: “President Donald Trump expanded his extraordinary efforts to overturn the election Saturday, attempting to pressure Georgia’s governor to force a special session of the legislature to change the result, while using an evening rally for two GOP Senate candidates to rant about his own grievances and thrash Republican leaders who have not done his bidding.It was more evidence that the President will spend the remaining days of his presidency ignoring the deadly course of the pandemic, spreading falsehoods that amount to an attack on democracy and nursing his own grudges even if that works against the interests of his own party.”

“The purpose of Trump’s visit to Valdosta was to get voters mobilized and primed to support Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in January’s Senate runoffs that will determine control of the US Senate. Trump’s relentless claims of voter fraud in Georgia have alarmed many GOP leaders who fear they may lead many Republican voters to stay home. But in his seemingly endless narcissism, Trump found it difficult to keep the focus on Loeffler and Perdue, repeatedly turning back to his own complaints and made only passing references to the alarming rise in Covid-19 cases nationally at a rally where almost no one wore masks and there was no social distancing. He made up fantastical stories about votes in suitcases, re-litigated his election tallies in battleground states and suggested that he will be successful in reversing the November results where President-elect Joe Biden beat him with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. ‘We will still win it,’ he said, even though there is no means for him to do so.”

On December 5th, the United States has already logged one million confirmed coronavirus cases and averaged 2,600 fatalities per day since the beginning of the month, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project.

The nation recorded 2,500 fatalities from the coronavirus, with another 210,000 new infections, on Saturday.  More than 101,000 remain hospitalized with the virus, a dip of 86 people from the previous day.

California logged more than 25,000 cases, according to Worldometers, a new record.  Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio, Florida and New York all recorded more than 10,000 new cases Saturday.   Three states–Illinois, Texas and Michigan–registered more than 200 fatalities; Pennsylvania was the only other state with more than 100 deaths.