The latest filing by Rudy Giuliani et al on behalf of the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania seeks to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of legal ballots because they were counted at night (gasp!).

According to a tweet thread by Reuters reporter Brad Heath, part of the Giuliani argument is that “Defendants purposely violated the Constitution by unequally and improperly processing hundreds of thousands of ballots of mail ballots under the cover of darkness in an illegal scheme to favor Joseph Biden over President Donald J. Trump knowing that mail ballots in the Counties at issue would favor Biden.”

Soooooo…. Rudy’s upset that the ballots that were counted were cast by legal voters in a legal manner; that the ballots were cast for Biden; and that they were literally counted at night.

According to the Johns Hopkins COVID tracker, the United States passed the grim milestone of 250,000 fatalities due to the coronavirus Wednesday evening.

With the 5:25 p.m. ET data update, the JHU site registered 250,029 deaths and the country was approaching 11.5 million confirmed cases.  At current infection rates, the US will pass the 12 million case mark in the next 3-5 days.

The largest county in Texas, Harris County with 4.7 million residents, used its emergency alert system Tuesday to ask people to cancel Thanksgiving gatherings because the area has seen a 250% spike in coronavirus cases, Newsweek reports.

“COVID-19 is spreading rapidly across Harris County. Stop gatherings. Get tested. Wear a mask,” the alert said.

Texas has averaged more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases daily over the past week, and hospital capacity is nearing its peak in many areas around the state. 

Three prominent ethics experts have called for the Senate Ethics Committee, the only non-partisan committee in the Senate, to investigate the actions of South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham to determine if he violated Senate rules of conduct by attempting to interfere in Georgia’s vote count, CNN reports.

Walter Shaub, a former top ethics watchdog for the federal government; Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush’s administration; and Claire Finkelstein, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, wrote a letter requesting the Committee to look into Graham’s calls to the Georgia Secretary of State to influence the way he counted votes in the presidential election.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has said that Graham contacted him with the desire that Raffensperger discard hundreds of thousands of absentee votes in an effort to give the state to outgoing incumbent Republican president Donald Trump.

Yahoo News: “A former speechwriter fired from the White House in 2018 for attending a conference at which white supremacists were also present has been appointed to a commission tasked with preserving Holocaust-related sites across Europe. The former speechwriter, Darren Beattie, will join the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, according to a press release sent by the White House on Tuesday evening.”

“‘Huge honor and responsibility!’ Beattie tweeted the day after the announcement was made. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The appointment comes shortly after Beattie, in comments made on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, compared supposed efforts to oust President Trump to the ‘color revolutions’ that defeated authoritarian leaders across Eastern Europe. Beattie said those efforts were being engineered by Norm Eisen, an ethics attorney who served in the Obama administration. As he described the case against Eisen, Carlson cut Beattie off, thus concluding the segment.”

“Jenna Ellis has been one of President Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders since joining his campaign as a legal adviser and surrogate a year ago, but in early 2016 she was one of his toughest critics and deeply opposed his candidacy, according to a CNN KFile review of statements she made on her official Facebook page and in local Colorado radio appearances. Ellis, an attorney and former law professor from Colorado, repeatedly slammed then-candidate Trump as an ‘idiot,’ who was ‘boorish and arrogant,’ and a ‘bully’ whose words could not be trusted.. She called comments he made about women ‘disgusting,’ and suggested he was not a ‘real Christian.'”

“In one March 2016 Facebook post, Ellis said Trump’s values were ‘not American,’ linking to a post that called Trump an ‘American fascist.’ She praised Mitt Romney for speaking out against Trump, referring to him as ‘Drumpf,’ – a nickname coined by comedian John Oliver after a biographer revealed Trump’s ancestor changed the family’s surname from Drumpf to Trump. ‘Why should we rest our highest office in America, on a man who fundamentally goes back and forth and really cannot be trusted to be consistent or accurate in anything,’ Ellis said in one April 2016 radio appearance. In March 2016, Ellis attacked Trump supporters in a Facebook post for not caring that the Republican candidate was ‘unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag.’ In another post, she said his supporters didn’t care about the truth.” – CNN.

NY Post: “Scores of President Trump’s supporters rallied outside the Georgia Capitol building on Wednesday ahead of a late-night deadline to recount ballots that are projected to show him losing the state to Joe Biden. The protesters waved American and Trump campaign flags and signs with messages that included ‘STOP THE STEAL,’ according to video clips posted by local TV stations on Twitter. Many of the people visible in the crowd gathered on the sidewalk weren’t wearing face masks to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus, and it was unclear if any were.”

“Unverified clips also reportedly showed controversial talk-show host Alex Jones among a small group of mask-less protesters entering the Capitol in Atlanta. On Monday, Jones urged his fans to “go to the capital of Georgia now and you must surround the governor’s mansion now,” according to the liberal Media Matters website. Biden holds an unofficial lead of about 14,000 votes in the Peach State, where The Associated Press said the recount effort, which began Friday morning, led to the discovery of more than 500 uncounted ballots in two counties. The deadline for completing the recount is 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.”

For the first time since 2001, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” beat Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” in ratings last week, TheWrap.com reports.

For the week of November 9 through November 13, “Morning Joe” saw an average of 1.62 million daily viewers, versus just 1.38 million for “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of outgoing President Trump’s daily schedule.

MSNBC also saw its daytime viewership top Fox News for the week:  MSNBC averaged 1.64 million viewers versus 1.52 million for Fox News.  While MSNBC’s audience increased 30%, Fox News’ audience dropped 33% in ratings from the final week in October.

Incumbent Republican Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler appears to violate federal fundraising law by asking for donations and pitching her campaign website while being interviewed in the Rotunda of the Capitol building.

https://youtu.be/FguAsACEKrI

In an interview on Fox News, Loeffler repeatedly asks for money and entreats people to visit her campaign website.

Such a financial appeal from government grounds is a direct violation of the Hatch Act, which prevents electioneering from government property.  Loeffler is in a run-off election against Democrat Raphael Warnock in a special election for the Senate seat. The election will be held January 5, 2021.

The largest school district in the country will return to all-remote learning Thursday as a new wave of coronavirus cases sweeps through the city, New York City schools chancellor Richard A. Carranza told principals Wednesday, the New York Times reports.

“As of this morning, November 18, the City has now reached this threshold of test positivity citywide and, as a result, the DOE will temporarily close down all public school buildings for in-person learning, Thursday, November 19,” Carranza said in an email.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs released this statement in response to ongoing and escalating threats of violence directed at her family and her office. pic.twitter.com/SzsRxzvOl1

— Governor Katie Hobbs (@GovernorHobbs) November 18, 2020

Department of Justice investigators were told to take “no further action” in an active criminal probe of Caterpillar, a former private-sector client of William Barr, one week after Barr was nominated to be Attorney General, Reuters reports.

Caterpillar was in the middle of a battle with the Internal Revenue Service about an alleged back-tax bill of $2.3 billion.  The Department of Justice was looking into other alleged tax-avoidance schemes by the company, including running profits for parts sales through a Swiss subsidiary.

Upon Barr’s nomination, however, Justice’s Tax Division and from then-deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, instructed via email the investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of Illinois to cease the investigation.

In 2015, 32-year-old New York City entrepreneur Martin Shkreli founded a company called Turing Pharmaceuticals. The business plan was not to build out laboratories and create new drugs, but to buy up the licenses to existing, out-of-patent medicines and inflate their prices to generate profit.

Using water cannon and tear gas, German police in downtown Berlin broke up a major demonstration protesting regulations implemented to stop the rampant spread of the coronavirus in the nation, the Associated Press reports.

Police warned the packed crowd that they must adhere to public health regulations to put on mask and respect social distancing guidelines.  The crowd ignored the order, so police worked to forcibly disperse the demonstration.

The police did not aim the high-powered water cannon directly at the protestors because of children and elderly people in the crowd.  Instead, they drenched the crowd and then slowly worked through the group to break it up.  More than 100 people were arrested.

A part-time deputy in Oakland County, Michigan was fired after posting a photo on social media depicting carved pumpkins of outgoing president Donald Trump, outgoing vice president Mike Pence and President-elect Joe Biden, but a carved watermelon for Kamala Harris, the Vice President-elect, mlive reports.

The unnamed fired deputy was fired the same day the county sheriff’s office was made aware of the post, Sheriff Mike Bouchard said.

The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Vice President-elect Harris is the first Black woman to be elected to the Executive Branch of the United States government.  Trump is reported white under a layer of orange make-up.  Pence is a nearly-translucent glowing white.  President-Elect Biden is white.

Having canceled its annual all-star game because of the coronavirus, the NFL will hold the 2021 Pro Bowl virtually, using the EA Sports Madden NFL 21 video game to simulate the showcase game, ESPN reports.

NFL games have been played this season in empty stadiums or with just a few thousand fans in the stands due to local ordinances responding to the coronavirus pandemic.  More than a dozen games have been rescheduled as teams deal with outbreaks among players and staff, and players continue to test positive for the virus.

The Pro Bowl, an essentially meaningless game designed to honor the league’s best players, is held the week before the Super Bowl, but this year, the league determined that players and coaches would not be interested in traveling to participate in the game.

Axios: “Nancy Pelosi was re-elected Tuesday as Speaker of the House, preserving her role as the key Democratic player in Congress and solidifying her power alongside a future Biden administration. Pelosi’s re-election, which took place remotely via voice vote, follows a disappointing election for House Democrats, who lost several seats, undercutting the party’s major gains from the 2018 midterms.”

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to halt a policy in which border agents would immediately expel unaccompanied children who cross the southern border, a rule that has resulted in thousands of children being sent to Mexico alone, the Associated Press reports.

The US government has expelled approximately 8,800 unaccompanied children since March, following an emergency declaration that, it claims, allows such a policy because of the coronavirus pandemic.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the policy violated the migrants’ right to request asylum and seek other protections under US law.  Sullivan issued an immediate injunction to stop the practice.

Nearly half of the guests at an Ohio wedding, including the bride and groom, contracted coronavirus during the October gathering, highlighting the risk of indoor gatherings during a spike in COVID cases nationwide, the Washington Post reports.

The couple had provided masks for guests to wear, but most declined to wear them.  “I’m walking down the aisle,” Mikayla Bishop said this week. “We can’t do anything now.”

In all 31 guests who have tested positive so far, including three of the couple’s grandparents, who wore masks except when they were eating or drinking at the reception, where people were seated closely at tables.

“I didn’t think that almost half of our wedding guests were gonna get sick,” Bishop said. “You’re in the moment. You’re having fun. You don’t think about covid anymore.”