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@daveweigel Unexpected statement from Paul Ryan: "It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans." More...

The election was two months ago, and I'm still waiting to hear about a Democrat who beat a GOP candidate in a competitive election. On the contrary, none of the Democrats who won in 2020 have a reason to send Joe Biden "a thank you" card.There are many reasons to be skeptical about this election, but the lack of "coattails" tops my list. This is from Victoria Taft:Stories about President Trump's weak coattails were legion before the election. His likability was questioned and still is, but, what ho! Look what actually happened.After the usual midterm 2018 thrashing for the president...

Lin Wood has seen and raised his fellow conspiracy-theorist Sidney Powell in a series of tweets that would make Q blush:My information from reliable source is that Roberts arranged an illegal adoption of two young children from Wales through Jeffrey Epstein. I think we can all agree that Epstein knows pedophilia.If only Jeffrey Epstein was still alive . . . Wouldn’t that be something? https://t.co/DwhgKO3gMp— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 31, 2020A couple of more questions for Chief Justice John Roberts:(1) You are recorded discussing Justice Scalia’s successor before date of his sudden death. How did you know Scalia was going...

What began as a self-righteous crusade to supposedly save the Republican Party from Donald Trump has now morphed into an explicit enterprise for personal profit.What began as a self-righteous crusade to supposedly save the Republican Party from Donald Trump has morphed into an explicit enterprise exposing who they were all along: financial opportunists capitalizing on media-fomented Trump Derangement Syndrome for personal profit while masquerading as white knight Republicans.More than any other culprit — the Bulwarks, The Dispatches, the legacy papers promoting ex-GOP columnists as “conservative” — the vile con artists at the Lincoln Project reveal the left-wing campaign purportedly about...

Millions of COVID-19 vaccines are sitting unused in U.S. hospitals and elsewhere a week into the massive inoculation campaign, putting the government's target for 20 million vaccinations this month in doubt. As of Wednesday morning, only 1 million shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had been given, about one-third of the first shipment sent last week. Over 9.5 million doses of vaccines, including Moderna's, have now been sent to states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While hospitals have started giving out Moderna's vaccine, the CDC has not yet reported that data and there may be...

On Thursday, I had a long phone conversation with a politician in Mexico. Forgive me for using "a source familiar with the situation" rather than giving you his name. Trust me that this guy knows the situation, and I cannot give you his name. We discussed the potential change from President Trump to Biden regarding U.S.-Mexico policies. Let me summarize the conversation by saying my friend is sure that a President Biden is going to get an earful from President Andrés López-Obrador about the border. In other words, Mexico is very happy that they've shut down their southern border and...

CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash said Monday that it is “very scary” people believe President Donald Trump and White House advisor Stephen Miller’s election fraud claims. The panel was discussing comments in a radio interview by Michigan State Rep. Gary Eisen (R) suggesting that he and other protesters plan to disrupt the Electoral College vote at the Lansing state capitol, and Miller saying earlier on Fox News that the battleground states the administration is disputing will have “alternate” electors cast in Congress.

Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat is alarming, but unsurprising. It is Mr. Trump’s character to reject even reality itself when it conflicts with his ego. More alarming is the long list of state and national Republican leaders cravenly falling in line behind his desperate efforts to topple American democracy. On Friday, the Supreme Court rejected a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election, a legal challenge that was as frivolous as it was anti-constitutional. Yet more than 60 percent of House Republicans signed a supporting brief, joining 18 Republican attorneys general who filed their own and embraced entirely...

Senate Republicans are sending a clear message to President Trump: The election is over and Joe Biden won. While Trump is digging in and showing little sign of ending his public campaign despite a long losing streak in the courts, GOP senators - from leadership on down - are signaling they view the election result as settled and want to move on without a messy weeks-long fight. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) publicly congratulated Biden during a Senate floor speech, in his first public acknowledgement of the former vice president's victory. He subsequently urged Senate Republicans during a caucus...

The White House recently hosted a Chanukah party. And the Washington Post was on it, of course: (series of tweets and photos at twitchy)

A Fox News poll released Friday found mixed reviews about President Trump's job performance over the last few years, with a majority ultimately saying they thought the United States was worse off now than it was four years ago. Fifty-five percent of voters in the the poll said they believe the U.S. is worse off now than it was four years ago, while nearly a third — 32 percent — said it was better off and 11 percent said it was the same.

As Kevin Williamson observes, the 1950s still play something of an outsized role in the American imagination:Americans talk about the postwar years — the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years — as though they were a kind of golden age. They weren’t, and damned few of us would be happy with the political settlement that existed then: The Left may cheer the high statutory tax rates of the time, but actual tax collections in those years were almost exactly what they are today, and as much as 80 percent of that Eisenhower-era tax revenue was spent on the military and national...

Rick Wilson, the Daily Beast's editor-at-large, says he and presumably others "won't forget" and "won't forgive" what Trump supporters did to America. In his rant, Wilson also appeared to compare the United States to a cheap hooker that President Donald Trump used and abused. What are the details?In a Sunday night editorial tagged "overdue penalties," Wilson said that it's simply "not enough to merely enjoy their agony and humiliation" as former Vice President Joe Biden is set to be inaugurated in January 2021. "It's not enough to hope they'll be shamed and correct their behavior," Wilson added in his short...

Former Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) said Wednesday on CNN’s “Newsroom” that “enough is enough,” adding that President Donald Trump and Republicans needed to accept former Vice President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. In a video, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) said, “Even after this office request that President Trump try and quell the violent rhetoric being born out of his continuing claims of winning the states where he obviously lost, he tweeted out, ‘Expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia.’ This is exactly the kind of language that’s at the base for a growing threat environment...

"It has no ties to Hugo Chavez, the late dictator of Venezuela. It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections. None of Dominion’s systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack, as any state certification lab could verify."...In the counties in Pennsylvania that were contested, Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh), he noted, Dominion machines weren't even used. "In fact, across the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use Dominion systems, President Trump received 52.2% of the vote," he said.

"Remember, the Trump GOP is shorn of all ideological and philosophical pretense, and even when Trump leaves office, it’s not over," Wilson wrote. "His cultists’ reign of terror will shape elected GOP members as long as he and his foul spawn walk the earth unpunished. Only exposure, pain, humiliation, and (inshallah) incarceration will lead to a moment of reckoning for the GOP. It should start at the top and work down from there."

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger held a press conference Monday in which he tore into “dishonest actors” who he said are misleading President Donald Trump and his supporters on allegations of fraud in the 2020 election. Raffensperger gave an update on Georgia’s recount process and said the results should be announced Wednesday. He further stated that voters should have “confidence that the outcomes are correct” even with what he described as the “massive amounts of disinformation being spread” by some of the president’s closest supporters. “There are those who are exploiting the emotions of many Trump supporters with fantastic...

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that President Donald Trump should "leave quietly," after Georgia certified its election results for Joe Biden last week.In an interview published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Saturday, Raffensperger, a Republican, said he's received threats and angry messages from the president and fellow GOP politicians who disagree with his decision to certify the election."My job as secretary of state is to make sure we have fair and honest elections, follow the law, follow the process," Raffensperger said in the interview. "When you lose an election, you should leave quietly. It's the will of the...

Sen. Joseph McCarthy liked to insist he had evidence of Communists in the government, but he couldn’t show you the names right now. The number of Communist infiltrators on his secret list changed from speech to speech. Listening to President Trump’s legal team claim over and over again that they have voluminous evidence that the election was stolen, it occurred to me that we’re in a kind of repeat McCarthy era. Only this time, to borrow from that old-school Communist Karl Marx, history is repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce. Take Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who...

Max Boot, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, in his latest op-ed Monday warned of what he fears will be President Donald Trump’s legacy for the GOP. Boot wrote of his hope that Trump’s “outrageous” bid to overturn the 2020 election would be “the last gasp of a pathetic presidency in its dying days” but also of his worry “it might represent only a middle chapter in the Republican Party’s transformation” into an authoritarian party. Boot, a vocal critic of Trump, noted how even before Trump’s arrival on the political stage, “Republicans had shown their willingness to use any...