Pfizer announces that its COVID-19 vaccine -- developed in partnership with BioNTech, though not, contra our Vice President, in any sort of collaboration with our President's "Warp Speed" program -- has achieved 90% effectiveness in phase 3 trials, without significant side effects. We're still several months away from actually getting a vaccine under ideal circumstances (i.e., peer review checks out the Pfizer/BioNTech data), but this is cause for hope. (Of course, it's also cause for our President's son speculating that the big pharma corporations withheld this news until after the election, which is to laugh -- our President made those corporations' executives rich beyond their wildest dreams!)
Janine Jackson at FAIR interviews Steven Rosenfeld about our President's numerous lawsuits aiming to expose "voter fraud." Long story short: "(t)hese lawsuits are incredibly rinky-dink," unlikely to move enough votes in their direction to change results, but they do give right-wing rageheads something to scream about and of course that's the entire point. Our "liberal" media maybe ought to congratulate all of us for the biggest turnout ever during a pandemic, but that'd be like celebrating people power or something, and why should our "liberal" media every do that, when there's a horserace to manufacture?
Apparently at our President's behest or with his encouragement, both Georgia Republican Senators, now heading to January runoffs, demand the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, ostensibly for neglecting his job but more likely for failing to suppress the vote as well as his predecessor, Gov. Brian Kemp. All together now: waaaaaaaaah! It's like they don't remember Mr. Raffensperger announcing back in September that I MIGHTZ CHARGEZ A THOUSANDZ VOTURZ WITHZ TEH DOUBLEZ-VOTINGZ!!!!!, when he knew full well that a) a charge isn't a prosecution, let alone a conviction and b) the vast majority of those "double-voters" very likely followed Georgia law, which among other things allows you to cancel your absentee ballot if you show up at the voting booth.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he expects "a smooth transition" to a second Administration with our current President. He was joking, of course, or perhaps "joking," and I bet even Bret Baier is getting a little tired of being lectured by him about the "process" of our Constitution. I will say that worries about our Administration sabotaging the transition are a bit overblown -- Mr. Hoover did it to Mr. Roosevelt, after all, and if there's any utility to electing a guy who's spent 36 years as a Senator and eight more as Vice President, it's that he likely needs rather little on-the-job orientation.
Let's not make too much of the complete disappearance of Q, the apparent ring-leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory cult, from the interwebs over the past week, because, as we know, the QAnon "theory" can torture any fact into telling its adherents what they want to hear. If we could produce indisputable documentary evidence that our President molested a 12-year-old girl, the QAnon folks would tell us that he was just going undercover (so to speak!) to bring the entire ring down.
Finally, an unnamed Republican official offers this novel interpretation for why Republicans have said little about our President refusing to concede the election he just lost: "(w)hat is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?" Well, I guess I can't answer that for sure, but I can think of at least 245,000 folks who can no longer testify to the "downside" of humoring this asshole for any length of time.
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