“It’s hard to pinpoint, but there’s a soft argument of ‘Well, this is silly, even if he tossed out votes in one state, he lost in these other ones.’ That kind of misses that it would be a far worse crisis if a president tried this in an election with one decisive state. If we’d already gone through recounts and a president was trailing by similar margins in one state, you don’t spot them a free one by weaponizing partisan state/local officials because they can. It would still be a plot to overturn an election. The margins just make it harder. The most dangerous aspect of this is it’s now normalized – in fact something R voters will know to ask and demand of leaders in relevant positions – to try to overturn election results and backfill it with a false conspiracy TBD. That’s extinction-level bad for democracy” – NBC News policy editor Benjy Sarlin.

First time unemployment claims jumped 5% last week according to the Department of Labor weekly report, a sign that the spreading coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the American economy.

The increasing unemployment numbers also demonstrate a predictable fragility for economic stability for millions of American families, as federal pandemic unemployment programs will expire at the end of the month, leading to about half of those unemployment losing vital income.

“The risk of further job and income loss is high now from business operations being curtailed,” Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, a forecasting firm, told the Associated Press. “Also, expiration of federal benefits later this year will put renewed strain on household incomes. Overall, the labor market remains under stress.”

Texas Tribune: “Throughout November, President Trump’s reelection campaign has aggressively solicited donations to support its widely debunked claims of a rigged presidential election. Here in Texas, the president’s team still owes the city of El Paso a 2-year-old debt of more than half a million dollars. In February 2019, Trump held a campaign rally at the El Paso County Coliseum that cost the city $470,000 in security and other related expenses. After that initial invoice went unpaid, city officials tacked on an additional $99,000 in late fees.”

“The city considered, and then decided against, suing the campaign earlier this year to recoup the funds. City Attorney Karla Nieman didn’t explain what led to that decision but said her office is still considering other ways to collect on the debt. ‘We’re on unprecedented territory by having to collect an outstanding invoice from a sitting president,’ she said in a statement. ‘We continue to explore various options.’ The Trump campaign did not respond when asked if or when the debt would be settled. El Paso is one of several Texas cities facing operating budget shortfalls because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected the border area.”

Thousands of uncounted votes discovered in Georgia counties. When the much more important signature match takes place, the State will flip Republican, and very quickly. Get it done! @BrianKempGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2020

Almost ZERO ballots rejected in Georgia this election. In years past, close to 4%. Not possible. Must have signature check on envelopes now. Very easy to do. Dems fighting because they got caught. Far more votes than needed for flip. Republicans must get tough! @BrianKempGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2020

“In the two weeks since Election Day, the clumsiness and turbulence that many voters said drove them to oust President Trump from office has been on full display as the president denies the election results and ignores a rapidly worsening pandemic. From the courtroom to the Oval Office, Trump’s government, campaign and legal team have been plagued by mistakes, oversights, rejections and defeats in a post-election period marked by unprecedented disarray.”

“As Trump has embraced a sense of denial about his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden and the coronavirus crisis surging across the nation, the final weeks of his presidency have been marked by rudderless and haphazard governance. Trump’s campaign has suffered a string of defeats in court as its baseless claims about fraudulent voting have withered under scrutiny. The president’s swift post-election purge of top administration officials has sparked criticism from Democrats and some Republicans. Positive news about potential coronavirus vaccines has been clouded by Trump’s attacks on drugmakers and his own administration for not approving the treatment before the election. Trump has continued to cite debunked claims that dead people voted, days after those claims were proved false” – Washington Post.

Axios: “President Trump’s frantic post-election challenges are having the opposite effect of what he intended: He’s documenting his demise through a series of court fights and recounts showing Joe Biden’s victory to be all the more obvious and unassailable. The president’s push to overturn the election results is dispelling the cloud of corruption he alleged by forcing states to create a verified — and legally binding — accounting of his election loss.”

“‘Each loss further cements Biden’s win,’ says election law expert Richard Hasen. ‘History shows that any leader who constructs a major myth, that is later shown to be false, will eventually fall,’ says Harvard science historian and ‘Merchants of Doubt’ author Naomi Oreskes. ‘The risk is that he takes his country down with him.'”

“The Trump White House blocked the Justice Department from making a deal in October 2019 to pay for mental health services for migrant families who had been separated by the Trump administration, two current and two former senior administration officials told NBC News. Three sources involved in the discussions who requested anonymity said the Office of White House Counsel made the decision to reject the settlement of a federal lawsuit after consultation with senior adviser Stephen Miller, the driving force behind many of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, including family separations.”

“‘DOJ strongly, and unanimously, supported the settlement, but not all agencies involved were on the same page,’ an administration official said. ‘Ultimately, the settlement was declined at the direction of the White House counsel’s office.’ Another administration official said: ‘Ultimately, it was Stephen who prevailed. He squashed it.’ The White House’s refusal to accept the deal ended up costing taxpayers $6 million” – NBC News.

Voter Fraud in Detroit is rampant, and has been for many years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2020

The Atlantic: “Almost a quarter million Americans have died from COVID-19. Some 77,000 are now hospitalized, about a fifth of those in the ICU. The country has been reporting roughly 150,000 cases a day for a week, and the numbers seem likely to rise. Hospitals, and the people who work in them, are overwhelmed. The pandemic has been a catastrophe for months, but it seems to be reaching its worst moment in the United States, despite promising advances in vaccine development. The nation cries out for leadership, yet amid one of the worst crises to face the country in decades, President Donald Trump is nowhere to be found. He is hunkered down in the White House, not giving interviews or speaking to the public except through his Twitter account, where he is mostly spreading misinformation about the election.”

“Before November 3, the question of what Trump might do in the likely event of a loss was a topic of speculation: Would he cling to office, denying the results of the election? Or would he quit and slink away? The answer, we now know, is both: He has abdicated nearly all of the work of the presidency, but without either putting a temporary successor, such as Vice President Mike Pence, in charge, or allowing the formal transition to President-elect Joe Biden to begin.”

“After three hours of tense deadlock on Tuesday, the two Republicans on an election board in Michigan’s most populous county reversed course and voted to certify the results of the Nov. 3 election, a key step toward finalizing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Now, they both want to take back their votes. In affidavits signed Wednesday evening, the two GOP members of the four-member Wayne County Board of Canvassers allege that they were improperly pressured into certifying the election and accused Democrats of reneging on a promise to audit votes in Detroit. ‘I rescind my prior vote,’ Monica Palmer, the board’s chairwoman, wrote in an affidavit reviewed by The Washington Post. ‘I fully believe the Wayne County vote should not be certified’. William Hartmann, the other Republican on the board, has signed a similar affidavit, according a person familiar with the document” – Washington Post.

Politico: “The conservative movement has become handicapped. Organizations can’t sound the alarm about President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda. Conservative reporters won’t take pitches about Biden’s rumored Cabinet contenders, insistent on covering evidence-deficient claims of voter fraud instead. One conservative group involved in policy advocacy backed off from hiring two soon-to-depart Trump administration officials after growing concerned about the consequences. And it’s all because of an unspoken rule set by President Donald Trump: Do not acknowledge Biden’s imminent White House takeover. Those who have run afoul of the dictate have faced swift repercussions.”

“Some have received angry emails from donors accusing them of siding with the ‘liberal media.’ Those who have tried to start revving up the grassroots engine — warning of what could unfold in January, particularly if Democrats win control of the Senate via two runoff races in Georgia — have been likened to turncoats by colleagues. ‘I sent out a weekly email and mentioned something about a potential Biden administration and the fallout was ridiculous,’ said an employee at one prominent conservative nonprofit. As Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration inches closer, this lack of preparation within the conservative movement has some of its top members worried they are unwittingly damaging their joint legacy with the president and creating an opening for the next administration to swiftly pursue a radical agenda. Meanwhile, Trump shows no signs of relenting in his quest to baselessly claim he won the recent election.”

More than 900 workers at two Mayo Clinic facilities in the Midwest have tested positive for the coronavirus in the last two weeks, almost one third of the total amount of positive cases at the two locations recorded since the pandemic began, NBC News reports.

A vast majority of those people exposed at the two facilities, located in Minnesota and Wisconsin, contracted the virus through community spread, not through contact with patients at work.

“Across the Midwest, Mayo Clinic currently has approximately 1,500 staff with work restrictions related to COVID-19 exposures, or are unable to work due to a COVID-19 diagnosis,” spokesperson Ginger Plumbo said in a statement.

The preponderance of racist comments prompted the website TheHill to shut down comments on a story about a police officer who killed two unarmed Black Florida teens who alleged were in a stolen car that was moving toward one of the officers.

Based on the video, two police officers were trailing the reportedly stolen car, which pulled into a driveway only to back out and face the two officers, who had exited their vehicles and unholstered their weapons.  The officers shouted commands to the two boys in the car, and one of the officers fired into the car when, he claims, the driver turned the wheels toward him.

The story on the shooting death of Angelo Crooms, 16, and Sincere Pierce, 18, in Cocoa, Florida sparked an outpouring of racism and bigotry in the comments section, a typical reaction from the denizens of TheHill’s disqus boards.  TheHill rarely deletes hate speech and threats in their comments section, and posters who complain about the irregular moderation of comments typically get their accounts suspended or banned from TheHill. 

Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley lives in a $1.3 million mansion in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC.  His children go to school in local schools.  He pays income and property taxes in Virginia.

Yet, according to the Kansas City Star, Hawley registered to vote using his sister home address in Christian County, Missouri, on his voter registration.  His sister, Lesley Hawley, pays the property taxes for the home at that address.

On television and in emails to his constituents in Missouri, Hawley has frequently ranted against the “coastal elites” who, he claims, run Washington and who think Missouri is flyover country, yet Hawley doesn’t live there and hasn’t since he was elected.  Incidentally, Hawley went to college at Stanford, which is in California, and law school at Yale, which is in Connecticut; his alma maters are on two separate coasts.

“Getting nowhere in the courts, President Donald Trump’s scattershot effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is shifting toward obscure election boards that certify the vote as Trump and his allies seek to upend the electoral process, sow chaos and perpetuate unsubstantiated doubts about the count. The battle is centered in the battleground states that sealed Biden’s win.”

“In Michigan, two Republican election officials in the state’s largest county initially refused to certify results despite no evidence of fraud. In Arizona, officials are balking at signing off on vote tallies in a rural county. The moves don’t reflect a coordinated effort across the battleground states that broke for Biden, local election officials said. Instead, they seem to be inspired by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric about baseless fraud and driven by Republican acquiescence to broadsides against the nation’s electoral system as state and federal courts push aside legal challenges filed by Trump and his allies. Still, what happened in Wayne County, Michigan, on Tuesday was a jarring reminder of the disruptions that can still be caused as the nation works through the process of affirming the outcome of the Nov. 3 election” – AP.

The United States continues to experience a startling spike in coronavirus cases, logging another day with more than 160,000 new COVID cases and at least 1,600 fatalities due to coronavirus on Wednesday, according to two aggregators.

On the day where the Johns Hopkins University registered the 250,000th death due to the coronavirus in the United States, the COVID Tracking Project recorded more than 164,000 cases throughout the United States, along with 1,869 fatalities.  The nation also hit a new high in hospitalizations at 71,410, an all-time high.

At Worldometers, the numbers were a bit higher, as they typically are between the two data trackers.  Worldometers logged more than 173,000 new cases Wednesday, the second highest number during the pandemic.  The site’s 7-day moving average of new cases on Worldometers continued its upward climb, hitting a new high just shy of 165,000.

Daily Beast: “Right before he was put in charge of a powerful Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over the U.S. Navy, Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) began buying up stock in a company that made submarine parts. And once he began work on a bill that ultimately directed additional Navy funding for one of the firm’s specialized products, Perdue sold off the stock, earning him tens of thousands of dollars in profits. In January 2019, Perdue was named as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower. It was good home-state politics for Perdue: Georgia is home to one of the most important Naval facilities on the East Coast, the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base. And his appointment was seen as a win for the submarine segment of the Navy, with trade publications calling it a ‘coup’ for submariners.”

“But in the month before he took over the job, Perdue did something unusual: he acquired up to $190,000 worth of stock in BWX Technologies, a company he had never invested in before. The Virginia-based firm had lucrative contracts with the U.S. Navy to develop high-tech components for its fleet of nuclear submarines—and it was looking to expand that business when lawmakers took on the 2019 version of the sweeping annual legislation that sets funding benchmarks for the U.S. military, called the National Defense Authorization Act. Perdue would have a key role in shaping the NDAA as Seapower chairman, and later as one of the few lawmakers hand-picked by party leadership to hammer out the final version of the bill between the House and Senate. By the time the bill passed the Senate in June, Perdue touted several wins—one of which was securing $4.7 billion for Virginia-class submarines.”

President Barack Obama’s new memoir, “A Promised Land,” sold nearly 880,000 copies on its first day of distribution Wednesday, skyrocketing it to the top of the Best Seller lists, CNN reports.

The 700-page book, which covers Obama’s life through the elimination of Osama bin Laden, also assesses some of the problems facing a highly divided nation.

While the first-day sales were a record for its publisher, Crown,  an imprint of Penguin Random House, it’s not a single-day sales record for a book, even in his home.  That honor belongs to another member of the Obama household:  Michelle Obama’s 2018 book “Becoming” sold 1.1 million copies on its first day.

The publisher has printed more than three million copies for sales, expecting a large holiday sales cycle.

By comparison, Donald Trump’s ghostwritten book “The Art of the Deal” has sold an estimated 1.1 million copies since its 1987 publication.

“Under Election Code Section 417(b), poll watchers may observe the election process from the time the first polling place official appears in the morning to open the polling place until the time the polls are closed and the election returns are counted and posted at the polling place entrance. 25 P.S. § 2687(b). However, until the polls close, only one pole watcher representing each political party and its candidates at a general, municipal, or special election can be present in the polling place outside the enclosed space…” – Page 15 of the Trump campaign legal team’s complaint in the Pennsylvania ballot lawsuit, filed by august legal mastermind Rudy W. Giuliani.