Both Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster made a rather obvious choice for their word of the year choices, selecting “pandemic” for the honor, according to the Associated Press.

“Often the big news story has a technical word that’s associated with it and in this case, the word pandemic is not just technical but has become general. It’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period in the future,” said Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster.

Each organization considered words that not only have characterize the overarching flavor of the year, but are supported by the number of searches for the word online. 

Axios: “Ajit Pai will leave his post as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on Jan. 20, the agency said today. Pai’s Inauguration Day departure is in keeping with agency tradition, and could set up the Biden administration with a 2-1 Democratic majority at the FCC if the Senate fails to confirm another Trump nominee during the lame-duck period. Pai, a Republican tapped by President Trump to be chairman after serving as a commissioner, led a deregulatory charge in the telecom sector. Pai repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules and sought to loosen restrictions on broadcast station group ownership.”

We face great challenges as a country right now. To recover, we must restore the American dream—a society where each person can rise to their potential and dream even bigger for their children.

As Treasury Secretary, I will work every day towards rebuilding that dream for all.

— Secretary Janet Yellen (@SecYellen) November 30, 2020

Late Sunday night, a federal judge ordered three Georgia counties to preserve electronic files on their voting machines as part of a court filing that was made by Sidney Powell, a former member of Trump’s Elite Special Force legal team, Politico reports.

The suit alleges that the machines, owned by Dominion Voting Machines of Denver, Colorado, reflected wildly inaccurate counts because they were designed to flip votes to President-elect Joe Biden from lame duck president Donald Trump.  There is no evidence to support the claim.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten Sr., a George W. Bush appointee, issued the directive as a way of preserving evidence until he reviews a motion by the defendants, including Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which will be filed Wednesday afternoon.

Politico: “President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on Monday announced the formation of a Presidential Inaugural Committee ahead of their swearing-in on Jan. 20. The senior leadership of the committee, which will be responsible for organizing inauguration-related activities, consists of CEO Tony Allen and executive director Maju Varghese.”

“Allen is president of Delaware State University, and Varghese served as chief operating officer and senior adviser to the Biden-Harris campaign. Nevada state Sen. Yvanna Cancela and Erin Wilson, the Biden-Harris campaign’s national political director, will both serve as deputy executive directors on the inaugural committee. Accompanying Biden and Harris’ announcement on Monday was the committee’s digital rollout, including a new website featuring an online store ‘with exclusive inaugural merchandise and collectables.’ In their statement, Biden’s inaugural team said the committee would ‘work closely with the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies … to coordinate all activities surrounding the 59th inaugural ceremonies, prioritizing keeping people safe and preventing the spread of COVID-19 while engaging all Americans.'”

New York Times: “Since the election, surveys have consistently found that about 70 percent to 80 percent of Republicans don’t buy the results. They don’t agree that Joe Biden won fair and square. They say the election was rigged. And they say enough fraud occurred to tip the outcome. Those numbers sound alarmingly high, and they imply that the overwhelming majority of people in one political party in America doubt the legitimacy of a presidential election. But the reality is more complicated, political scientists say. Research has shown that the answers that partisans (on the left as well as on the right) give to political questions often reflect not what they know as fact, but what they wish were true. Or what they think they should say.”

“It’s incredibly hard to separate sincere belief from wishful thinking from what political scientists call partisan cheerleading. But on this topic especially, the distinctions matter a lot. Are Republican voters merely expressing support for the president by standing by his claims of fraud — in effectively the same way Republicans in Congress have — or have they accepted widespread fraud as true? Do these surveys suggest a real erosion in faith in American elections, or something more familiar, and temporary? Tracking surveys, which ask people the same questions over time on topics like the direction of the country or the economy, showed a lot of Republicans responding immediately after the election as if they believed the president had lost. Among Republicans, consumer confidence swiftly dropped, as did the share saying they thought the country was headed in the right direction. Those results, which mirror past elections, suggest many Republicans knew Mr. Biden would become president. But they don’t tell us much about whether Republicans believe he won fairly.”

Arizona’s Democratic Senator-elect Mark Kelly, who defeated Republican Senate appointee Martha McSally, will likely be sworn in to office Wednesday after Arizona certifies its results of the election, the Washington Post reports.

On January 1, 2019, Republican governor Doug Ducey appointed McSally to replace Republican Jon Kyl, who resigned after having been appointed to fill the seat opened by the death of Republican John McCain in September 2018.

Kelly will be sworn in after Arizona’s election results are certified, which is expected to happen Monday afternoon.  The election results will also certify Democratic President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the state.

A former NASA astronaut, Kelly will become the fifth member of Congress to have flown in space.  Kelly is the husband of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was wounded by a gunshot wound in an assassination attempt in 2011.

….Also, quickly check the number of envelopes versus the number of ballots. You may just find that there are many more ballots than there are envelopes. So simple, and so easy to do. Georgia Republicans are angry, all Republicans are angry. Get it done!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2020

These spambots are great. I love how they just put in some generic right wing nonsense to get attention to their links, which are always some insane video about the apocalypse.

nf • 9 minutes ago
The democrats are the ones who started our crisis to overthrow Trump Admin so they can get their dirty cash and power back. Leaked information show the big players in this They want to do this to you .,.Look at this video ASAP!!!’
Mon, 11/30/2020 8:44 AM on ‘Can Anthony Blinken make American foreign policy great again?’

Sometimes I open them up in my TOR Browser. Originally when these started it was some bullshit about a “root cellar” or something. This time it’s some book about a “biblical propehcy”

“As Donald Trump started shambling toward the exit of the U.S. presidency last week, the U.S. left confronted the pivotal question hanging over our newfound interregnum: Who gets to say, I told you so? Since well before Trump’s election, progressives of various stripes have vigorously debated how to characterize the mogul’s brand of demagogy, and the threat that it posed to American life. Was Trump an ‘authoritarian,’ a ‘fascist,’ or a ‘typical conservative’? Was his open contempt for the rule of law a threat to Americans’ most basic freedoms, or an edifying illustration of our nation’s preexisting unlawful disorder, the mogul’s signature shamelessness making it easier for voters to see the rot in their republic, much as a caricature illuminates the flaws in a human face?”

“Most critically, what was a bigger threat to the progressive project in the United States: the mainstream media’s inveterate ‘both-sides-ism’ and attendant complacency about the GOP’s burgeoning contempt for democracy – or the anti-Trump movement’s embrace of a ‘tyrannophobic’ politics that obscured the material roots of right-wing populism, muted the ideological distinctions between Bernie Sanders and Bill Kristol, and privileged the defense of democratic norms over making our democracy responsive to the needs of working people?” – New York Magazine.

The Atlantic: “How well do we know Donald Trump? Pretty well, it would seem. Nobody has ever accused the outgoing president of possessing a complex personality. His behavior in office confirmed the common view, barely disputed even by his allies, that he is a shallow narcissist, blind or indifferent to common decencies, with poor impulse control and a vindictive streak. His futile attempt to litigate away electoral defeat may appall you, but it probably doesn’t surprise you. Still, just because we know bad things about the 45th president, don’t assume that there’s nothing bad left to find out. There’s always more to learn, and it’s seldom reassuring.”

“The outstanding questions are too many to count. How close did we come to war with North Korea when Trump threatened to rain ‘fire and fury’ on Kim Jong Un? After Trump decided instead to become the first president to meet with Kim, how close did Trump come to agreeing to remove U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula? Exactly how much revenue did Trump properties collect from the federal government during his presidency? How much from people seeking to influence Trump’s presidency? Who has received promises from Trump that they’ll be pardoned? Did Trump promise in advance to commute Roger Stone’s sentence? Did White House aides observe signs of mental decline in Trump related to aging? Precisely how much money does Trump owe, and how much of it is owed to people or banks linked to Vladimir Putin? Which companies did Trump steer business to, and did he violate any laws in doing so? What did Trump say in private about specific white-supremacist groups that supported him? What private agreements existed between Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, to advance Trump’s political interests? We may not learn the answers to all these questions. But we’ll likely learn a lot more than we know now.”

NBC News: “Jon Ossoff is ending the Trump era the same way he began it: as a young Democrat unexpectedly at the center of the political universe. He lost his first run for office in June 2017, but the stakes then were largely symbolic. This time, some say, the fate of the country, and even the world, hangs in the balance on what will be the last election of the Trump era. No pressure. ‘Jon ended up running an incredibly expensive and highly publicized race four years ago,’ said Atlanta City Council member Matt Westmoreland, a Democrat. ‘And now he’s found himself in a race with even higher stakes and more money because control of the Senate is at stake.'”

“In the unsettled early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Ossoff, then 30, captured progressive hearts — and dollars — in a special election to flip Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat, which became the most expensive House race in history and the first real bellwether of the political trends that would come to define the era. Now, he’s running for the Senate in one of two January runoffs in Georgia that will ‘determine the direction of our country for the next 50 to 100 years,’ according to his Republican opponent, Sen. David Perdue. If Democrats win both seats, they’ll end the Trump era by giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tiebreaking vote in the Senate. It would also be vindication for Ossoff, whose loss in the House race set off a familiar circular firing squad among Democrats. Some in the party wondered whether they had wasted precious money on the seemingly hopeless cause of winning one House seat in a heavily Republican district.”

Wall Street Journal: “President Trump accused federal law-enforcement agencies run by his own appointees of ignoring his claims of mass election fraud, as his legal setbacks continued to mount. ‘Missing in action,’ Mr. Trump said during an interview Sunday on Fox News. ‘You would think if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I’ve not seen anything.’ No evidence of widespread voter fraud has surfaced, and homeland-security officials in early November called the 2020 contest won by former Vice President Joe Biden ‘the most secure election in U.S. history.'”

Federal officials also have agreed with state election authorities that they have seen no evidence that voting systems were tampered with. Multiple federal judges-including some appointed by Mr. Trump-have dismissed Trump campaign complaints, saying they lacked proof backing up allegations of fraud. The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to comment Sunday on Mr. Trump’s remarks. The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment. Sunday’s complaints about the two agencies follow earlier criticism by Mr. Trump against officials at both. The president has expressed frustration in recent months with Attorney General William Barr for not more aggressively probing shortcomings in the FBI’s investigation into members of Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and any links to Russia’s election-interference efforts. Mr. Trump on Sunday maintained claims of widespread fraud in Mr. Biden’s victory. ‘And how the FBI and Department of Justice-I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe they are involved. But how people are allowed to get away from this stuff-with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged.'”

President-elect Joe Biden’s accident while playing with his German Shepherd Major earlier today was a little more serious than initially thought, with Biden breaking some bones in his foot, WCAU CBS-10 in Philadelphia reports.

Initial x-rays came back negative, so the first reports stated Biden had twisted his ankle.  A more detailed CT scan was ordered by his doctor, which showed small fractures in his metatarsal bones, which will require Biden where a recuperative boot for a few weeks.

Otter Globe and Intelligencer: “Barack Obama was absolutely correct when he said in a recent interview that the GOP had convinced rural and working class whites that they were victims. If the Democratic Party is to succeed at attracting support from working class voters, it is essential that the party leadership make a greater effort to understand where that sense of victimization comes from, and make an effort to describe how Democratic Party policies are likely to produce more positive outcomes for working class voters. In this article I will present what I believe is the root of that sense of victimization. The root of modern day GOP propaganda involves a blame-shift, where labor unions, environmental regulations, and Democratic Party policies are blamed for the loss of working class factory jobs in America. The root of working class anxiety is the loss of steady employment, and the substitution of far lower paying ‘Gig’ and retail jobs.”

“The real cause of that job loss has been the rotation of points of production and consumption among different countries; an outgrowth of economist Milton Friedman’s principle of ‘shareholder primacy’ and improvements in international shipping. Friedman was an idol to business friendly conservatives, and his ideology is rarely questioned among modern day business leaders. In short, Republicans managed to weaponize disinformation by blaming the Democratic Party for economic conditions that occurred because of the ideology of conservative business leaders.”

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul tweeted a continuation of outgoing president Donald Trump’s debunked conspiracy theory that random nefarious forces changed votes in the early morning hours after Election Day, when in fact, the vote counts changed as mail-in ballots were counted.

Interesting . . . Trump margin of “defeat” in 4 states occurred in 4 data dumps between 1:34-6:31 AM. Statistical anomaly? Fraud? Look at the evidence and decide for yourself.(That is, if Big Tech allows u to read this)

Anomalies in Vote Counts; https://t.co/DgBlYj9zUP

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 29, 2020

We have some big things happening in our various litigations on the Election Hoax. Everybody knows it was Rigged. They know Biden didn’t get more votes from the Black community than Obama, & certainly didn’t get 80,000,000 votes. Look what happened in Detroit, Philadelphia, plus!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2020

Reuters: “President-elect Joe Biden will receive on Monday his first presidential daily briefing, a report with information from the intelligence agencies of the United States, Biden’s office said. In a short statement released on Sunday regarding Biden’s plans for the following day, his office said that following the briefing, Biden would meet with advisers.”