Georgia on My Mind

Peaches beat Philly Cheesesteak:  Well, I thought this morning’s blog would be titled It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia but then Georgia won the race to the Biden column.  Somewhere around 4:30 this morning, with more Democratic leaning vote dumps still expected, Georgia went Biden blue.   Biden’s 917 vote margin is small, though it will probably grow a bit, with so few votes left to count, it will likely remain under .5%, giving the increasingly unhinged Trump the right to legitimately request a recount, but still Georgia going blue is remarkable.  Stacey Abrams deserves a prize and the pick of positions in Biden’s administration for her work but not before the state’s January Senate runoff election, because she’ll be needed to help keep Democratic voters energized enough to show up for both Senate runoffs, yes both.  With incumbent Georgia Senator Perdue’s percentage of the vote at 49.8%, below the state’s required  50% threshold, to hold his seat he’ll have to beat Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff in a runoff in January on the same day that Raphael Warnock goes up against incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler.  On the Pennsylvania front, things slowed down over night but just about everyone expects Biden to overtake Trump as soon as more of those deep blue votes from Philadelphia are tallied.  That’s significant because regardless of what happens in any of the other remaining states, winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes turns the former VP into President-elect Biden.  As to the other remaining states, a vote dump is expected from Arizona later this morning and though the Biden team, Fox and the AP still believe that Biden will win the state, the former VP’s lead shrunk to 46,000 yesterday after votes from redder areas of the State were counted.  Of the remaining states, Biden is leading in Nevada, only by 11,000 votes but that lead is expected to grow, solidifying his margin of victory after the state’s “in no rush” counters process more ballots. North Carolina is likely to stay in Trump’s column; he is ahead by  76,000 votes and no one expects the counting of the state’s remaining 156,000 ballots to turn the state blue.  To be clear, Trump could still eke out a victory, but few but the truly delusional expect that to happen.  However, it is 2020. 

Crazy and Destructive: Trump went off the rails last night, taking to his podium to deliver a conspiracy laden, deceitful diatribe where he screamed voter fraud while saying “if you count the legal votes, I easily win.  If you count the illegal votes, they can steal the election from us.  If you count the votes that come in late – we’re looking at them very strongly, but a lot of votes came in late.” He even attacked the pollsters, blaming those evil prognosticators for discouraging his voters from showing up to vote.  And that was the coherent stuff.  He’s full of sh-t but he’s still running the country so his absurdly inaccurate assertions are dangerous and damaging to our Democracy but he cares little because he is who he is. MSNBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS cut away as soon as it became clear that he was spewing lies and conspiracy theories but CNN and Fox both covered his whole rant, though both pointed out that he was talking crazy.  He was up all night tweeting more of the same.  A few Republicans, including Senator Mitt Romney, retiring Congressman Will Hurd, former governor/pundit Chris Christie, Congressman Adam Kinzinger and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey pushed back with variations of “all votes must be counted” and “well, there probably isn’t much fraud” but the big guys like Mitch McConnell remained silent, well mostly silent.  Fresh from his South Carolina victory Lindsey Graham defended Trump, calling Philadelphia “crooked as a snake” and donated $500,000 to Trump’s usurp Democracy fight.  As to that legal fight, early yesterday the word went out that son in law Jared was looking for a really good lawyer to head up the Trump team.  Apparently he still hasn’t found anyone competent.  We know that because Rudy Giuliani is still on the case as is former Ambassador to Germany/DNI for a minute Richard Grenell who raged at reporters at a train wreck of a news conference in Nevada when they had the nerve to ask him to show evidence proving his faux assertions of illegal voting activity. Baseless or not, Trump promises to take his fight to his stacked Supreme Court because those judges he appointed are his, aren’t they?   

Viral Musings:  Former FDA Director Scott Gottlieb is sounding increasingly freaked out about the virus.   Yesterday he said that the “acceleration” of current trends is staggering.  He went on to say “rapidly rising hospitalizations, more than 10,500 in ICUs, rising cases in nursing homes and deaths, rising positivity and diffuse spread across America portends rapid growth everywhere.”  There were 121,000 new cases yesterday and more than 1100 deaths.  Trump is still in charge and is too busy fighting imaginary election fraud and the like to care.  Enough said.    

Et Cetera:  Reports are that Defense Secretary Esper has prepared his letter of resignation and is ready to hand it to Trump as soon as he can.  There are also reports that Trump plans to move forward with the firing of FBI Director Wray because he can’t tolerate that Wray has actually been doing his job.  House Democrats held an hours long meeting where the moderates, especially those who lost their seats in Tuesday’s election, ripped into their left wing colleagues, letting them  know  that their advocacy for things like socialism and the defunding of the police was, in their view, responsible for the Democrats House losses. Not surprisingly the Democratic Socialists didn’t embrace that criticism  because they like socialism and do want to defund the police.  And in an indication that 2021 could be 2020 on steroids, if he wants to, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, gets to take over as Chair of the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee.  That’s the Rand Paul who thinks that attaining herd immunity through infection and death is a good thing and who believes that health insurance is so unimportant.