Rafer Johnson, one of only seven American athletes to win an Olympic gold medal in the decathlon, died Wednesday of a stroke at the age of 86.

An American hero after having won the decathlon at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Johnson was also a reluctant hero in one of America’s tragic events:  Johnson and two other men, football player Rosey Grier and journalist George Plimpton, tackled Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, moments after Sirhan fired the shots that killed the Democratic presidential contender at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968.

An acclaimed athlete, Johnson won the Sports Illustrated magazine Sportsman of the Year award in 1958, when he was a basketball player at UCLA.  In 1959, he was selected by the Los Angeles Rams in the 28th round of the NFL draft. 

Washington Post: “Intensifying attacks on the integrity of the vote by President Trump and his allies are fueling deep alarm among state and local officials, who have watched with dread in recent weeks as election workers have been targeted by fast-spreading conspiracy theories. They echoed calls by Gabriel Sterling, a top Republican election official in Georgia who on Tuesday urged Trump and other GOP politicians to tamp down their baseless claims of widespread fraud. In an impassioned statement, Sterling blamed the president for ‘inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.’ He noted that a 20-year-old contractor for Dominion Voting Systems has been besieged with online attacks after QAnon supporters falsely claimed a video showed him manipulating voting data, when he was in fact simply using a computer and thumb drive. Similar threats have cropped up across the country since Election Day.”

“In Arizona, authorities are investigating calls for violence against the family and staff of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D). In Vermont, state election officials received multiple voice mails Tuesday from an individual who urged violence against the staff – including execution by firing squad, according to the secretary of state’s office. ‘When it rises to the level of obscenities being shouted at my staff on a regular basis, or threats of physical violence, it has gone too far,’ Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos (D) said in a statement to The Washington Post. ‘The conspiracy theories and unfounded rhetoric being pushed by the President and his team only serve to inspire this dangerous behavior, and deepen the divide between the American people – THIS HAS TO STOP.'”

The Washington Post reports that their calculations show the United States logged more than 200,000 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday and 2,800 fatalities Wednesday.  The number of new cases was a new daily high using the WaPo metrics, with the number of fatalities the highest since April, when the first wave impacted primarily northeast states.

Different sources show different specific numbers, but the trend is the same across the board:  the US is setting records for new cases and nearly all-time highs for daily fatalities.  Data are also hard to pinpoint after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Worldometers, another frequently referenced aggregator, shows the daily high in new cases was 204,166 logged on November 20th.  The site’s high for daily fatalities was 2,744, on April 21st.

Another site, COVID Tracking Project, supports another report from WaPo:  that the US crossed 100,000 hospitalized with coronavirus, an ominous harbinger for future fatalities.

The ball is now officially in Mitch McConnell’s court.

Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced in a joint letter Wednesday that they are backing a $908 billion coronavirus relief bill proposal hammered out by a bipartisan team of Senators, Yahoo News reports.

Previous aid bill have died in the Senate because Senate Majority Leader McConnell could not garner enough support in his caucus to pass the bill.  This includes the HEROES Act, passed by the House in May, and a scaled-down version of the bill, with a $2.2 trillion price tag, offered by Pelosi later.

McConnell also failed to rally the Republican caucus to support a $1.5 trillion offer made by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who took over negotiations for the White House after McConnell was pushed out of the process.

CNN: “Ivanka Trump, the President’s daughter and adviser, sat for a deposition Tuesday with investigators from the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office as part of its lawsuit alleging the misuse of inaugural funds, according to a court filing. In January, the DC attorney general’s office sued the Trump Organization and Presidential Inaugural Committee alleging they abused more than $1 million raised by the nonprofit by ‘grossly overpaying’ for use of event space at the Trump hotel in Washington for the 2017 inauguration. Depositions of witnesses as part of the lawsuit have been underway over the past several weeks. Tom Barrack, chairman of the inaugural committee, was deposed on November 17, according to the court filing. The attorney general’s office has also subpoenaed records from Barrack, Ivanka Trump, first lady Melania Trump, and Rick Gates, the former inaugural committee deputy chairman, the filing said.”

Seriously, just look at the differences between the sites. National Zero: Cool interface, slick production values, inviting colors, sans-serif typefaces. Breitbart: Looks like it was designed by a 17 year old gamer, ads for some of the dumbest shit imaginable, mentally ill people writing comments under the articles. The Gateway Pundit: Completely insane circlejerk, even more mentally ill people writing comments under the articles. There’s absolutely no way they get more traffic than us.

I have it on good authority that the US Army seized servers in Germany that will show that Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit are falsifying their traffic numbers – even converting visits to National Zero into visits to those two sites illegally. If you only count the legal traffic, then National Zero wins by a landslide. We win. Viktor Orban and Robert Mugabe worked to rig the system against National Zero and we have the evidence. You can’t see it. Only a MAGA Nazi piece of shit would dare ask us to show the evidence. It’s real. Deal with it. We’re going to prove it soon. Send us donations to stop the steal of our traffic. We’re going to win. We mean it.

Three Texans who went on a two-state crime spree could face terrorism and hate crime charges that resulted in one person dead and at least three wounded in an early attack in what one attacker called a prelude to an “upcoming war,” the Associated Press reports.

Brothers Shawn McDonnell and Christopher McDonnell and Kayleigh Lewis, Christopher McDonnell’s wife, started their crime spree robbing a convenience store in Las Vegas were they murdered Kevin Mendiola Jr., 22, of North Las Vegas and shot three others.

Christopher McDonnell told investigators that his brother Shawn told him to “shoot the Black guy,” which he did.  The trio then sped across Nevada highways into Arizona, during which they fired into passing cars throughout their drive.

Otter Globe and Intelligencer: “While the media has a habit of always being flabbergasted by the behavior of elected officials, those of us who study political communication as an avocation and are equipped with a certain degree of cynicism find that the actions of the GOP have become quite predictable. The only way that you can really learn to deal with the outrageous nonsense of the modern conservative movement is to develop the capacity to profile and predict future Republican actions. Naturally, if you demonstrate any capacity for such predictions, a gas-lighting prick like Mitch McConnell will insist that ‘Now we’re trying to operate in good faith but how can you expect us to do that when right out of the gate you’re accusing us of having ill intent.'”

“The only appropriate response to those kinds of comments is of course to say, ‘Fuck you, you obnoxious gas-lighting prick, and while you’re at it take all that sanctimonious bullshit you’re peddling and shove it straight up your ass.’ Because they’re going to do these kinds of things whether you predict it or not, and the false sanctimony that they employ when you do predict and prepare for their actions is just an effort to off-set blame, just like when (insert line from movie where husband starts getting weepy and apologetic after beating his wife here).”

In what can only be described as a combination of a tent revival, poor man’s Trump rally and in-person Infowar broadcast, Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood held a “Stop the Steal” rally in the lobby of an office building in Atlanta.

TMZ: “Gina Bisignano – the latest ‘Karen’ to let hate speech fly – received major business backlash for her bigotry on Yelp, where people loaded her page with negative reviews until postings got temporarily shut down. Bisignano owns a beauty biz in Beverly Hills called Gina’s Eyelashes and Skincare, so after seeing video of her spewing homophobic comments at an L.A. protest of COVID lockdowns, it seems several outraged Internet users took it out on her shop’s Yelp page. It got flooded with bad reviews, and got so bad so quickly Yelp decided to temporarily suspend the option to leave a review. Yelp says it’s working to investigate whether this batch of new reviews ‘reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events.'”

“With an assist from Sen. Krysten Sinema, Vice President Mike Pence just administered the oath of office to Arizona’s newest US Senator, Mark Kelly. Both of Arizona’s senators are now Democrats. And the GOP majority in the Senate has shrunk by one vote, to 52-48” – KJZZ reporter Ben Giles.

Martha McSally’s whereabouts were unknown at press time, though it would be fun to imagine her applying for a hostess job at a Phoenix-area Applebee’s.

“President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has no plans to remove Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director installed by President Trump, if he is still in the job when the new administration comes in, according to a senior Biden official. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Biden’s team was ‘not removing the F.B.I. director unless Trump fired him’” – New York Times.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket outlined numerous errors in Sidney Powell’s recent Wisconsin court filings, listed below verbatim from the Court’s response [with my highlights] from Chief Judge of the US District Court Pamela Pepper.

“Just an amazing pattern of lawyers showing up with what they say are the most important cases ever filed and botching the basics. Even the President’s lawyers screwed up the everyday rules for suing people,” Brian Heath of Reuters tweeted.  “These are the mistakes you see when prisoners represent themselves.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will issue new guidelines reducing the length of isolation time for people exposed to coronavirus from two weeks after exposure to seven to ten days, CNN reports.

Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, informed the White House Coronavirus Task Force of the change in the recommendation during a Tuesday meeting.

People can leave quarantine after seven days if they receive a negative coronavirus test or after ten days if they have not had a test but have no symptoms.

https://youtu.be/1eCHcUWZXMY

“Rocky start continues for Sidney Powell’s election-fraud lawsuit in Wisconsin. The judge assigned to the case says her team filed a draft motion by accident and still hasn’t complied with the basic rules for seeking a temporary restraining order.” — Brad Heath of Reuters.

Credit to National Zero reader Now_tense for the find. Contact details have been changed to protect the privacy of the Craigslist poster, however dumb and misguided he may be.