For some unknown reason, reports The New York Times: Trump Calls Georgia Senate Races ‘Illegal and Invalid’
ATLANTA — President Trump took to Twitter Friday evening to make the unfounded assertion that Georgia’s two Senate races are “illegal and invalid,” an argument that could complicate his efforts to convince his supporters to turn out for Republican candidates in the two runoff races that will determine which party controls the Senate.
The president is set to hold a rally in Dalton, Ga., on Monday, the day before Election Day, and Georgia Republicans are hoping he will focus his comments on how crucial it is for Republicans to vote in large numbers for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the state’s two incumbent Republican senators.
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Portrait of Magdaleine Pinceloup de la Grange and kitty.
But Mr. Trump has continued to make the false claim that Georgia’s election system was rigged against him in the Nov. 3 general election. Some Republican leaders are afraid that his supporters will take the president’s argument seriously, and decide that voting in a “corrupt” system is not worth their time, a development that could hand the election to the Democrats.
Some strategists and political science experts in the state have said Mr. Trump’s assault on Georgia’s voting system may be at least partly responsible for the relatively light Republican turnout in the conservative strongholds of northwest Georgia, where Dalton is, in the early voting period that ended Thursday.
Mr. Trump made his assertion about the Senate races in a Twitter thread in which he also made the baseless claim that “massive corruption” took place in the general election, “which gives us far more votes than is necessary to win all of the Swing States.”
The president made a specific reference to a Georgia consent decree that he said was unconstitutional. The problems with this document, he argued further, render the two Senate races and the results of his own electoral loss invalid.
Mr. Trump was almost certainly referring to a March consent decree hammered out between the Democratic Party and Republican state officials that helped establish standards for judging the validity of signatures on absentee ballots in the state.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to ignore the racing coronavirus pandemic.
CNN: US surpasses 20 million Covid-19 cases while experts foresee tough times in January.
The US surpassed 20 million total recorded Covid-19 cases on Friday, hours after the country ushered in 2021 and left behind its deadliest month of the pandemic.
The nation also has set a Covid-19 hospitalization record for four straight days. The high counts are a grim reminder that even with 2020 behind us, the pandemic continues to ravage parts of the country. And some leaders warn the worst is still ahead.
“We are still going to have our toughest and darkest days,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told CNN on Thursday.
More than 125,000 coronavirus patients were in US hospitals Friday, Covid Tracking Project data shows.
‘Psyche’, a White Persian Cat by Francis Sartorius I, 1787 (c) National Trust, Fenton House
Don’t miss this devastating piece on Trump’s epic failure at The New York Times: Trump’s Focus as the Pandemic Raged: What Would It Mean for Him?
It was a warm summer Wednesday, Election Day was looming and President Trump was even angrier than usual at the relentless focus on the coronavirus pandemic.
“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”
Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate. But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.
And on that day he was especially furious after being informed by Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, that it would be days before the government could give emergency approval to the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment, something Mr. Trump was eager to promote as a personal victory going into the Republican National Convention the following week.
“They’re Democrats! They’re against me!” he said, convinced that the government’s top doctors and scientists were conspiring to undermine him. “They want to wait!”
Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?
The result, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and others in contact with the White House, was a lose-lose situation. Mr. Trump not only ended up soundly defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr., but missed his chance to show that he could rise to the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge of his tenure.
Read the whole thing at the NYT link.
The cat’s lunch, Marguerite Gerard
More stories to check out today:
Axios: Trump, the GOP arsonist.
The Washington Post: Judge dismisses Gohmert lawsuit seeking to stymie Biden electoral college count.
The New York Times: As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm.
The New York Times: In Abrupt Reversal of Iran Strategy, Pentagon Orders Aircraft Carrier Home.
Times of Israel: Iran says killers of top general Soleimani, including Trump, ‘not safe on Earth’
ABC7 Los Angeles: Nancy Pelosi’s home vandalized with graffiti, fake blood on New Year’s Day.
The Los Angeles Times: Coughing, sneezing, vomiting: Visibly ill people aren’t being kept off planes.
Jay Rosen at PressThink: The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd.
Lois Beckett at The Guardian: Facts won’t fix this: experts on how to fight America’s disinformation crisis.
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Sky Dancing 
Have a nice weekend, everyone!! Next week will be wild.
A good kind of wild, I hope! I plan to dance around the house in ecstasy to my favorite music.
It all depends on the outcomes in Georgia. Either Dems will control the Senate or they won’t and they’ll be in danger of losing the House in 2022. If they win in Georgia, Biden will be able to get his appointments approved and get important legislation through. If they lose, McConnell will block everything Biden tries to do.
Yes, that’s why I’m hoping for a good kind of wild. Democratic turnout in GA appears to be high.
Fingers crossed!
It’s high in traditionally Dem areas, including those with high %ages of Black voters. Let’s hope the Georgia repudiation of Trump in November carries momentum!
The Beckett piece at The Guardian on Disinformation is great!
Excellent term! “Participatory disinformation”
“Participatory disinformation” = “bullshitting yourself.” Willful contagion of mental disorder.
I read it as meaning more than that. Participating in disinformation to yourself, yes, but also helping to spread the disease to others.
“Disinformation” is a dangerously neutral-sounding euphemism for “lies.”
The Chuck Todd confessions article is similar.
Which makes it all the more strange that KellyAnne’s husband could right this and not see it in his wife’s eyes …
I’m pretty sure he sees it. They are not actually living together as far as I know. He lives in NYC mostly. He says she drives him crazy with the Trump cult stuff.
Isn’t that the truth!
From the LA Times article:
I hope Biden changes this.
Since the vandalism of Pelosi’s and McConnell’s homes including this grammatical and spelling gem: “WERES MY MONEY” I suspect MAGAts.
He doesn’t need to explain — we know why he’s doing that.