Politico: “Nobody involved in Donald Trump’s reelection thought the president would win the youth vote in 2020. But they didn’t think it would be this bad. Now the finger pointing has begun. When the data came pouring in after Election Day, campaign aides and Trump allies alike were struck by the president’s poor performance with the 18-to-29-year-old crowd – especially in a cycle with surging youth turnout. In nearly every Midwestern battleground state that mattered to Trump’s reelection, the president performed worse among young voters than in 2016, according to a POLITICO review of state exit polls. Trump ceded ground in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two states he lost. He also regressed in Arizona, another critical state that slipped away.”

“In several of these states, the erosion was considerable. In Pennsylvania, President-elect Joe Biden won young voters by a 20-point margin, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 9-point advantage in 2016. In Wisconsin, Biden won the state’s youngest voters by a 16-point margin, a dramatic rise from Clinton’s razor-thin edge in 2016 — and a significant swing in a state Trump only lost by 20,000 votes. Michigan saw a four-point shift from 2016 to 2020. To Trump’s critics, Biden gained ground with young voters because of who his opponent was: a divisive politician with a culture wars playbook that failed to energize audiences outside of his base. But among the president’s campaign aides and allies, the consensus is far less clear. Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in Trump’s 2020 operation revealed rifts, acrimony and a system in which no one would take the blame but everyone had a scapegoat — from the president himself, to the campaign to outside groups like Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative campus organizing group.”

“A Hackensack School Board member who made national headlines by opposing a LGBTC curriculum has resigned after an embarrassing incident during a Zoom meeting. Frances Cogelja didn’t realize she’d left her laptop camera on when she took it with her while going to the bathroom during the public comments section of a board meeting Monday night. Nearly 150 participants, including students, apparently saw Cogelja relieve herself” reports the Daily Voice.

“No one immediately said anything when she returned from her trip to the toilet. A short time later, Vice President Scott James-Vickery reportedly told Cogelja: ‘You need to go. We’re here trying to get work done while you’re sitting on the toilet.’ BOE Pres Lancelot Powell later said that Cogelja couldn’t be removed because she was an elected official. ‘We can’t make her resign,’ he reportedly said. ‘None of us can kick off a board member,’ he said. Early Tuesday afternoon, the board announced that the trustees ‘have received a letter of resignation from Mrs. Frances Cogelja, effective November 24, 2020.’ The remaining trustees must fill the vacancy within 65 days – or by Jan. 29, 2021 – under state law. Cogelja made headlines – and drew widespread condemnation – last year when she called new state laws that require teaching about LGBTQ history ‘repugnant.’ ‘I have every right as a parent to not have my child participate in something that I do not think is suitable as part of a public school curriculum,’ she said at the time. ‘I believe conversations having to do with sexuality should be had at home between parents and their children.'”

AP: “Lawmakers in Taiwan got into a fist fight and threw pig guts at each other Friday over a soon-to-be enacted policy that would allow imports of U.S. pork and beef. Premier Su Tseng-chang was due to give a regularly scheduled policy report to lawmakers on Friday morning about the pork policy when opposition party lawmakers from the Nationalist party, also known as the KMT, blocked his attempt to speak by dumping bags of pig organs. Legislators from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party attempted to stop them, resulting in chaos and an exchange of punches.”

“A DPP lawmaker wrestled a KMT lawmaker to the floor in the scuffle. President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration lifted a longstanding ban on imports of U.S. pork and beef in August, in a move seen as one of the first steps toward possibly negotiating a bilateral trade agreement with the U.S. The ban is due to be lifted in January. That decision has met with fierce opposition, both from the KMT and individual citizens. The new policy allows imports of pork with acceptable residues of ractopamine, a drug that some farmers add to animal feed that promotes the growth of lean meat.”

Twitter is sending out totally false “Trends” that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative “stuff”. Same thing will happen to Twitter as is happening to @FoxNews daytime. Also, big Conservative discrimination!

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

The British government will undertake a review of the coronavirus vaccine recently introduced by AstraZeneca as questions arise about its claimed effectiveness, the Associated Press reports.

AstraZeneca and Oxford University, its partner in development, acknowledged that the primary positive results were based on a dosing error for the medication.

The company reported that the drug was 62% effective in a group of 2,741 volunteers after one dose followed by another dose three weeks later.  The results improved significant, to 90%, when 8.895 participants received a half-dose first, followed by a full dose weeks later.

Politico: “President Donald Trump’s demonization of mail-in voting may have cost him votes in the recent election. Now, his demonization of Georgia’s entire electoral system is hurting his party’s chances at keeping the Senate. Driven by Trump’s insistence that Georgia’s elections are indelibly rife with fraud, conspiratorial MAGA figures are calling for a boycott of the two Senate runoff races, slated for Jan. 5, that will determine which party controls the upper chamber. Their reason: The two GOP candidates, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are not only insufficiently pro-Trump, they may be complicit in Georgia’s electoral fraud.”

“It doesn’t matter that both candidates are essentially lock-step with Trump, or that there is no evidence of links to electoral malfeasance. On Twitter and its less-restrictive alternative Parler, Trump’s more hardline followers have linked the duo to the president’s favorite — and untrue — voter-fraud theories. Hashtags like #CrookedPerdue and #CrookedKelly are flying around. The two lawmakers’ Parler accounts are brimming with posts accusing them of being secret ‘liberal DemoRats.’ The swelling anger is not just emanating from everyday QAnon believers in the MAGAverse. It’s also coming from prominent lawyers working on Trump’s behalf, including Sidney Powell, who was briefly a lead attorney in Trump’s push to overturn the election. The growing chorus has caught the attention of some of Trump’s top surrogates, who have scrambled to push back against the movement. ‘I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @Perduesenate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people,’ implored Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son and typically a MAGA world leader, in a Monday tweet. The top comments below the tweet disregarded the plea: ‘We’re telling everyone to write in Donald J Trump!’ one read.”

Disney announced that it will lay off more employees than it originally planned, increasing from the 28,000 it announced in October to 32,000, Reuters reports.

The move comes four days after Universal Orlando announced a layoff of an additional 1,100 employees by the end of the year.

The Disney layoffs will occur during the first half of 2021, in a further sign that the impact of the coronavirus on the tourism and travel industry.

Lame duck president Donald Trump said it would be “a very hard thing to concede” the election to President-elect Joe Biden because of his unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud, Washington Post reports.

In his first time taking questions from the press since his November 3rd defeat at the polls, Trump reiterated debunked claims that the election was rigged and that the vote count was fraudulent.

Despite speculation from pundits and even some Trump confidantes that he will put up a fight when Biden is inaugurated, Trump said, “Certainly I would, and you know that,” when asked if he would leave the White House when the Electoral College certifies Biden’s victory. 

Will go down much further. Weekend daytime even worse, dead. They still don’t get it. Fantastic alternatives! The late/great Roger Ailes is seriously missed, but I still won LEGAL VOTES by a lot!!! https://t.co/rm0ygRnW3S

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2020

Too bad we still have that shitty MAGAvirus going around. I’m sure a lot of you would have loved that traditional cliche of arguing with your Conservative relatives this Thanksgiving – especially this year would’ve been payback for four years of bullshit from them. No doubt there are many a former-Fox News-but-now-Newsmax-watching uncle out there glad that their fucking snot-nosed liberal brat niece or nephew isn’t there spiking the football on their faces because the Orange Satan lost re-election. Now they can just get drunk on Icehouse and yell in agreement with the other MAGA relatives like a usual Thursday night.

Maybe Christmas will work out better. Anyway, thank you all for reading and commenting on this site. In a lot of ways, we’re like the Pioneers who landed on Buick Rock after sailing across the ocean in the Junebug to escape from the Anti-Capitalist tyranny of the Dutch in 1842 or whatever the story of the First Thanksgiving is. It doesn’t matter. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

“The brother of Michael Flynn appeared to thank supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory after Donald Trump pardoned his former national security adviser for lying to the FBI. Trump announced with ‘great pleasure’ on Tuesday that the retired army general has been granted a full pardon. Flynn had previously admitted to twice lying to the FBI about conversations with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak” Newsweek reports.

“Flynn has been seen as a hero in the QAnon movement ever since he tweeted a video in July of him standing in a back yard with his family taking a generic oath of office before ending with ‘where we go one we go all,’ the main slogan of the QAnon theory. It is often abbreviated to WWG1WGA. His tweet included the hashtag #TakeTheOath, which is used by other followers of the QAnon movement when posting similar videos of them expressing their support on social media. Other hashtags used by QAnon supporters include #WWG1WGA #QArmy and #DigitalSoldiers. Flynn has both #TakeTheOath and #DigitalSoldiers in his Twitter bio. Following his pardon, Flynn’s brother Joseph Flynn also thanked the ‘digital soldiers’ who have supported the former national security down the years in a tweet, albeit with a spelling mistake. ‘To all of our friends, extended family, Patriots and #DigitalSoliders we thank all of you from the bottom of our hearts for your moral, spiritual and financial support these past 4 years,’ he wrote. ‘There is no way in Hell we would have survived without you…this Thanksgiving is for you!'”

Bloomberg: “A pro-Trump group that promised to challenge the Nov. 3 election results and expose fraud was sued by a North Carolina money manager who donated $2.5 million to the cause but says he didn’t get his money’s worth. Fred Eshelman, founder of Eshelman Ventures LLC, wants his money back, saying he ‘regularly and repeatedly’ asked for updates on the project but his ‘requests were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises,’ according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Houston federal court.”

“Houston-based True the Vote Inc. had promised a multi-pronged plan to ‘investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election,’ according to the lawsuit. In the weeks after the election, True the Vote filed four lawsuits, but it dropped them all last week. ‘While we stand by the voters’ testimony that was brought forth, barriers to advancing our arguments, coupled with constraints on time, made it necessary for us to pursue a different path,’ the group announced on its website on Nov. 17. Despite numerous allegations of voter fraud and irregularities from President Donald Trump and his supporters, no evidence has emerged of widespread problems that would have changed the results of the election which President-elect Joe Biden won with 306 electoral votes.”

“The small Upper Austrian town of Fucking is world famous because of its name. Quite a few tourists have made the pilgrimage to Fucking in the Braunau district in recent years in order to take photos of themselves in front of the place-name signs. Some even let the signs go with them as souvenirs – in order to put an end to this decline, the signs were then concreted in and welded by the community. In the future, the hustle and bustle is likely to subside, because the town council of Tarsdorf – Fucking is located there – decided last week to change the place name. In future the place will be called Fugging. At the request of ‘Today’, Mayor Andrea Holzner (ÖVP) confirmed the renaming. This should apply from the beginning of 2021” – Der Standard (translated by Google).

Washington Post: “Sen. David Perdue was encouraging a crowd at a gun club south of Atlanta to support him and fellow Republican Kelly Loeffler in their bid for Georgia’s Senate seats, which he called the only thing standing between America and ‘a radical socialist agenda.’ But five minutes into the senator’s speech, a man interrupted. ‘What are you doing to help Donald Trump and this fraud case?’ the man screamed, as one woman said ‘Amen’ and the crowd applauded. ‘What are you doing to stop what’s been going on here and this election fraud?'”

“The Republican candidates in Georgia’s dual Senate runoff campaign are navigating a highly unusual political labyrinth — caught in the middle of an intraparty war that has erupted since President Trump narrowly lost the state to President-elect Joe Biden and has turned his fire on the Republican leadership there. The infighting now threatens to turn off the very Republican voters Perdue and Loeffler need to stave off challenges from their Democratic rivals, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock. Trump and his allies have repeatedly, and falsely, accused Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, of presiding over a fraudulent election. Trump has pushed the baseless claim that the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia were rigged as part of a global conspiracy, and Perdue and Loeffler have called for Raffensperger’s resignation. But therein lies the conundrum: Perdue and Loeffler are traveling the state pleading with Republican voters to turn out on Jan. 5 — effectively asking Trump supporters to put their faith in the same voting system their president claims was manipulated to engineer his defeat.”

Just saw the vote tabulations. There is NO WAY Biden got 80,000,000 votes!!! This was a 100% RIGGED ELECTION.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2020

AP: “Monday seemed like the end of President Donald Trump’s relentless challenges to the election, after the federal government acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden was the ‘apparent winner’ and Trump cleared the way for cooperation on a transition of power. But his baseless claims have a way of coming back. And back. And back. By Wednesday, Trump was phoning into a local Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers’ meeting that had been orchestrated by his campaign to assert falsely, again, that the election was tainted. ‘This election was rigged and we can’t let that happen,’ Trump said by phone, offering no specific evidence.”

“The 2020 presidential race is turning into the zombie election that Trump just won’t let die. Despite dozens of legal and procedural setbacks, his campaign keeps filing new challenges that have no hope of succeeding and making fresh, unfounded claims of fraud. It’s a strategy tolerated by many Republicans, most notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who are clinging to Trump as they face a test of retaining their own power in the form of two runoff elections in Georgia in January. ‘This really is our version of a polite coup d’etat,’ said Thomas Mann, senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. ‘It could end quickly if the Republican Party acknowledged what was going on. But they cower in the face of Trump’s connection with the base.'”

Read more at the Kraken’s online lair.

Slate: “Republicans have a standard recipe for winning elections: They preach law and order, and they smear their opponents as anarchists. That message worked for them in 2020, and it’s central to their final push of the year: the campaign to hold Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, which, in a runoff election on Jan. 5, will determine control of the upper chamber. But President Donald Trump’s defeat, and the refusal of his supporters to accept that result, have turned the Republican narrative on its head. The anarchists aren’t on the left anymore. They’re on the right.”

“The new anarchists don’t smash windows or loot stores. They scream ‘Stop the Steal.’ Hundreds of them gathered in Atlanta on Saturday to demand the overthrow of the incoming Joe Biden administration. They claimed that Trump won Georgia (he didn’t) and that Democrats, by ‘stealing in every way you can imagine’—fabricating ballots, impersonating voters, digitally manipulating the tally—had rigged the outcome. (All these fantasies have been debunked.) They threatened to purge the state’s ‘traitor’ Republicans—Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—for refusing to triple-investigate and block certification of the results. The new anarchists pretend to support law enforcement. But when the law doesn’t go their way, they threaten violence. ‘Victory or death!’ the crowd in Atlanta chanted. One speaker at the rally vowed to ‘fight for Donald Trump until our last dying breath.’ Another warned, ‘If they seat an illegitimate government, we’ll remove them.’ A third said Trump would stay in power because ‘the Deep State doesn’t have the military on their side.’ When police asked the rally’s leaders to finish up and end the event—after letting them rant for two hours without a permit—a speaker shouted at the cops: ‘We backed the blue. Thank you for nothing!'”

“Hey Joe Biden!… Americans want to know if you’ll commit to a peaceful transition from the office of ‘President Elect’ once you’ve lost this election, are arrested for fraud and half of the DNC is sent to prison for treason!!? …oh wait… There IS no ‘Office’ of the ‘President-Elect…!'” says “Patriotic Entertainer” Dave Bray.

And here’s a picture of Trump at a press conference on January 11, 2017.

“President Trump on Wednesday shared a tweet from Rep. Matt Gaetz urging him to pardon himself. The Florida Republican had posted a clip of an interview he did with Fox News where he said Trump should pardon ‘everyone from himself, to his admin, to Joe Exotic if he has to.’ Although the Trump Organization is under scrutiny by investigators in New York, Trump has not been charged with anything in order to grant himself a pardon, so it was not immediately clear what Gaetz had in mind. The Trump ally went on to say, ‘You see from the radical left a bloodlust that will only be quenched if they come after the people who worked so hard to animate the Trump administration with the policies and the vigor and the effectiveness that delivered for the American people'” – Daily Beast.