This is juicy. Business Insider reported that Jared Kushner set up a shell company that siphoned off $617 million from the Trump campaign to parts unknown. I wasn’t able to read the Business Insider article because of the popups demanding that I subscribe, but I did pull out some blurbs:

Kushner directed Lara Trump, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman to serve on the shell company’s board, the person told Insider.

American Made Media Consultants became the source of consternation for Trump’s own campaign staff, who were kept in the dark about its operations.

Despite its $617 million spending through AMMC, the Trump campaign publicly disclosed little information about the company, including how it used the money.

Here is a report on what BI reported from Daily Beast:

Mitch McConnell has budged just a tad on a mini-stimulus bill that includes direct payments, and yesterday CNN reported why.

During the call with GOP senators, McConnell noted that direct payments for individuals and families have become a major issue in the race.

“Kelly and David are getting hammered” on the issue, he said, according to a source who heard his remarks, a reference to incumbent GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are both facing off against Democratic challengers.

However, they’re talking $600 instead of $1,200 this time, which might seem like an insult to people who are months behind on house and utilities payments. There is also talk of $300 additional weekly unemployment benefits, but it’s not clear to me what might happen to people whose benefits are ending entirely. Beyond that, the negotiations are moving so fast, while still going nowhere, that it’s really hard to keep track of what’s in and what’s out.

Also, even if Congress manages to pass something before Christmas, there will almost certainly be a lapse in benefits to millions of workers. Emily Stewart writes for Vox:

After months of a will-they-or-won’t-they dance that’s left workers, businesses, and much of the economy in limbo, lawmakers yet again have a potential deal: a $748 billion proposal to help boost the economy as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on. While it may have some shortcomings — Democrats dropped state and local government aid from the main bill in exchange for Republicans dropping corporate liability protections — it’s not the worst deal in the world, and it does have new payments for the unemployed.

But there is a hiccup: Even if a bill passes, millions of workers will likely face a lag in receiving those payments while the regulators and states responsible for distributing them iron out the new process.

An estimated 4 million workers have likely already had their benefits run out, some of them for months, after they maxed out the number of weekly payments to them established by the CARES Act, the first stimulus package. However long it takes to get a new system up and running is how long they’ll have to wait before they get another check. Other programs expanded by the CARES Act are set to expire in December, and given the bureaucratic intricacies of the 50-state unemployment insurance system, the transition will probably be a messy one.

At this point, whether Congress passes its mini-relief bill or not, there will be massive evictions. There already is hunger, and that’s getting worse. Lots of people are probably going to try to get through the winter with the heat turned off.

But McConnell is only giving in to a bill to help Kelly and David. That’s because their opponents, Raphael and Jon, are running ads like this:

Kelly and David are selling themselves to voters as a “firewall” against “socialism,” Greg Sargent writes. If Mitch keeps control of the Senate, you can bet there will be no more relief/stimulus bills passed next year, no matter how many businesses close for good and how many families end up living in cars and shelters. But, by damn, Kelly and David will keep us all safe from socialists and antifa! Let’s remember what’s important!

Elsewhere

The Week reports that Trump still genuinely believes he won the election.

President Trump was privately coming to terms with his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, but he “has now reversed and dug in deeper — not only spreading misinformation about the election, but ingesting it himself,” CNN reports, “egged on by advisers like Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis who are misleading Trump about the extent of voting irregularities and the prospects of a reversal.” One adviser told CNN, “He’s been fed so much misinformation that I think he actually thinks this thing was stolen from him.”

Even the Electoral College formalizing Biden’s win “did not appear enough to shake Trump from his delusions of victory,” CNN says, “but it is adding urgency to a push by several of his advisers to gently steer Trump toward reality.” Discussions of Trump’s post-presidency future tend to go nowhere because Trump “all but shuts down,” CNN reports. “In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, only to be walked down from that ledge. The possibility has alarmed some aides, but few believe Trump will actually follow through.”

Oh, but it would be so much fun to see him evicted.

A food bank in the Cleveland area.

More reporting has revealed that Mitch had a come-to-Jesus meeting with Republican senators yesterday, and he told them they weren’t going to file any challenges to the presidential election results. So that’s that. Unless Ron Johnson or Rand Paul get the nerve to disobey Mitch, it won’t matter what the minority House Republicans might do. Congress will certify the election results on January 6.

Greg Sargent:

The Electoral College vote was another mile marker on the road of the endless election. The one significant development here is that now several Senate Republicans — including Mitch McConnell — have publicly recognized Joe Biden as the president-elect.

This seems to me to be a reasonably clear signal to Donald Trump that these Senate Republicans do not want him to push his overturn-the-election efforts further. They certainly don’t want to get the Senate involved in the scheme floated recently to use Congress to overturn the election results.

One, it’s doubtful Senate Republicans have the votes to overturn the election. After yesterday’s EC vote, several old establishment GOP senators, including Roy Blunt and Majority Whip John Thune, came out and said it’s over; Biden is the president-elect; time to move on. Even before the EC vote, a few senators had already signaled they were not going to get on the overturn-the-results bandwagon.

Two, after watching Proud Boys chant “Destroy the GOP!” on the streets of Washington last weekend, I suspect Mitch McConnell does not want to force any of his senators to go on record being for or against a second term for Trump. Nothing good could come of that for the Republican Party. Mitch may also be worried that the Trumpers are hurting Republican chances in the Georgia runoff elections.  Mitch’s congratulation to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was a big, fat signal to Trump that the Senate would not be dragged into his schemes, and also to Republican senators not to try anything stupid.

Aaron Blake, WaPo:

McConnell’s comments should have the effect of taking some pressure off his colleagues, but they also matter practically speaking. The position of the Senate GOP leader is now clear, pretty much negating any chance that Senate Republicans would participate in some kind of unlikely end-run not to accept the verdict of the electoral college. …

… The Senate was the best shot Trump had to at least gum up the works Jan. 6. If one House member and one senator object to accepting a given state’s slate of electors, Congress has to consider it. If a GOP senator does that now, they’ll be acting expressly in opposition to what their leader says. It might still happen, but McConnell’s statement should let some air out of the balloon. The gambit was never going to succeed, mind you, but it could have created some heartburn in our body politic; McConnell is basically signaling he won’t participate in such shenanigans.

It’s not ending, however. Trump is raving that the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia should be thrown in jail. Yesterday Stephen Miller was on Fox promising that the Trump team supported “alternate” electors who would send their votes to Congress, neener neener, but that seems to have fizzled out.

And, of course, right-wing media are still pushing “stop the steal.” Just today Trump seized on a new claim of fraud involving Dominion voting machines in Michigan. Although Trump is over the “boy who cried wolf” limit for most folks, the True Believers are lapping it up. As the Arizona electors voted yesterday, an Arizona state legislator called on consituents to “buy more ammo.”

Last night in Missouri, a Republican-led state House committee voted to approve a resolution that declared Missouri lawmakers “have no faith in the validity” of 2020 election results in six battleground states President Donald Trump lost this year. Rudy Giuliani was there, virtually.

That testimony drew an angry response from Rep. Peter Merideth, D-St. Louis, who referenced GOP officials who have certified the results of the presidential election. Merideth also cited statements by U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who said there was no evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the national election.

“Are all these Republicans lying?” Merideth asked Giuliani. “Are they complicit? Are they incompetent?”

Well, good on you, Rep. Merideth. I’m glad to see there’s someone sensible in Jefferson City. Just don’t drink the water there, dude. I think it rots brain cells.

Missouri state Representative Peter Merideth, a Democrat who represents a district within the city of St. Louis. His district includes The Hill (Italian neighborhood; home of Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola) and the Botanical Garden.

The resolution carries no weight, and the Republican chair of the state House Rules Committee has already said his committee isn’t going to take it up.

And Vladimir Putin has congratulated Joe Biden already. Maybe Trump will get a clue that it’s over. Melania should be done packing by now.

See also:

Jonathan Last, Everyone Trump Touches Dies: The List

Jonathan Swan: Scoop: Trump’s frenetic, fanciful, bitter final plea

Eric Lutz at Vanity Fair:

Normally, the task of state electors is perfunctory, their work in December going unnoticed by the average citizen, who tends to tune out between Election Day and the inauguration in January. But Trump’s relentless effort to overturn his loss have thrust these anonymous functionaries into the spotlight and made them targets of the harassment that other election officials—from Democrats like Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to Republicans like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—have faced for carrying out their duties against Trump’s wishes.

In swing states, electors are receiving police escorts to the locations where they’ll be casting ballots. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, that location has been kept secret, even from the electors themselves, until Monday, as a safeguard against threats. And in Michigan, where electors will cast their ballots at the State Capitol, “credible threats of violence” have shut down state legislative offices. “This is some scary stuff, man,” Khary Penebaker, a Democratic elector from Wisconsin, told the New York Times. “This is not what America is supposed to be like.”

I’m going to guess that none of these threats are being covered in the right-wing news, including Fox.

After the Supreme Court once again declined to hear one of the frivolous lawsuits filed on his behalf, Trump supporters took to the streets in Washington, D.C., vandalizing Black churches, instigating street fights, and even threatening violence against the president-elect. “Joe Biden will be removed,” the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said at one point, “one way or another.” As the nation’s simmering political tensions started to boil (four people were stabbed in D.C. Saturday as the Proud Boys turned the demonstration into a riot; a right-wing protester allegedly shot a counter-protester at a separate demonstration in Washington state), Trump kept turning up the heat. On Sunday, he threatened that electors would be charged with a “severely punishable crime” if they made the results official, and at one point suggested that he will sandbag his own party in the Georgia runoff race next month if Governor Brian Kemp doesn’t give him his way.

The Proud Boys vandalized several historic Black churches over the weekend. If left-wing protesters had damaged church property, none of us would hear the end of it for months. But if right-wingers destroy church property, that’s okay. That’s because righties presume religion belongs to them, just like “patriotism” and “freedom” belongs to them, and the flag belongs to them. Violence, though, belongs to lefties. Or else it seems violence only counts as violence when lefties do it.

Trump and his allies, though, remain undeterred. The president said after his most recent Supreme Court humiliation that “we have just begun to fight.” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, one of 126 Republicans who formally endorsed the lawsuit seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans, suggested in a Fox News interview Sunday that he still wouldn’t recognize Biden’s win after the Electoral College vote. And Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Fox & Friends Monday that an “alternate slate of electors from the contested states” would be voting at the same time as the actual electors, and would send those bogus results to Congress to help fuel the next stage of the challenge there. This is all corrosive to democracy, as even a majority in a recent Fox News poll recognized. But if the temperature continues to rise, so too will the risk of things boiling over into something even more dangerous.

Overturning the election in Congress requires several steps, including a majority vote of both houses, which ain’t gonna happen.

See also Assessing the threat from America’s far right at The Economist.

There are plans afoot to mess with the congressional tally of the Electoral College vote on January 5, the New York Times says.

But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress is plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.

Overturning the election at that stage would require a majority vote in both houses of Congress, which isn’t going to happen. But it’s Mike Pence’s constitutionally appointed task to tally the votes of the states and announce the winner. What if he refuses? And if he does his duty, what does that do to his political future? Not that I care about Pence’s political future, but it’s a measure of Trump’s narcicissm that he would ask his vice president to commit political suicide.

Trump has also turned against Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Nobody gave more fawning deference to Trump that these two, but it wasn’t enough. And in yesterday’s street theater in Washington, pro-Trump protesters chanted “Destroy the GOP” and booed the Georgia Republican Senate candidates.

Nick Fuentes speaks to a crowd of Trump supporters and gets them chanting “destroy the GOP!” for failing to protect Trump from not getting a second term. pic.twitter.com/AUAqU402Dz

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) December 12, 2020

This is radicalism worthy of la Terreur. And do not doubt these are dangerous people. If the Republican establishment has any sense left it will back away from Trump and Trumpism, now, to give people a couple of years to get over it before the 2022 midterms. Because there will be no such thing as being pure enough to appease these people. Even Trump may have to be careful they don’t turn on him eventually.

Last night a counter-protester was shot in Olympia, Washington, and several people in Washington DC were stabbed. This won’t stop any time soon.

On the streets in the District of Columbia last night.

Trump is throwing a Pity Party for the Ages on Twitter today. See also Imploding MAGA World Turns to Civil War Fantasies, Secession After Supreme Court Disaster. I understand Milo Yiannopoulos had a psychotic break on Parler.

And the Proud Boys have showed up in force in Washington, DC.

Hundreds of Proud Boys are marching in downtown D.C. Thousands are expected for pro-Trump protests today pic.twitter.com/vohgn8RenA

— Debbie Truong (@debbietruong) December 12, 2020

The leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, claimed to have been invited to the White House. The White House says Tarrio just took the public tour.

Trump swears he will fight on.  According to CNN, “Before the high court rejected his bid Friday, his campaign announced a cable ad buy to further his fraudulent claims about the election, and he clearly intends to try and meddle in Congress’ counting of the Electoral College results in January.” According to several reports, Melania wants to go home and is packing, already.

The Electoral College votes on Monday.

Trump, of course, is using the chaos to raise money and establish a post-presidential role for himself in the Republican Party. What the Republican Party is getting out of the deal isn’t clear. And we need to give serious thought about the 126 Republican members of Congress (listed at the end of this post) and the 18 state attorneys general who signed on to the embarassing Texas court challenge of other states’ elections.

The suit amounted to a loaded gun at the head of our democracy, said Chris Hayes.

If there is one potential silver lining to this sorry episode of U.S. history, it’s that a considerable portion of the political and media establishment is publicly recognizing that the Republican Party is no longer acting on behalf of the United States.

No one expressed this better than former Republican political consultant Steve Schmidt: “The Republican Party is an organized conspiracy for the purposes of maintaining power for self-interest, and the self-interest of its donor class.”

See also Paul Waldman, who writes that hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism.

The Republican Party has proved that its hatred of liberals is so foundational that it will abandon any pretense of commitment to democracy, if democracy allows for the possibility that liberals might win an election. They have come to regard Democratic voters as essentially undeserving of having their will translated into power, no matter how large their numbers.  …

… Forget all that inspiring talk about the genius of the Framers and their vision for democracy; if having an election means that the people we hate might win, then the election must simply be nullified.

David Graham, The Atlantic:

It’ll have to be short today, but … this is fascinating. See Aaron Blake at WaPo, The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud.

Executive summary: The Trump Team is still claiming voter fraud, but they admit they have no proof. Get this:

Charles Pierce, Esquire, The Confederacy of Dunces Wants to Disenfranchise Millions of Americans

Today is supposed to be “safe harbor day,” the day states are supposed to have their election results settled and certified and their electors chosen. And I believe all have done so; I can’t find any exceptions. Trump’s lawsuits have continued to crash and burn. One of my Facebook friends quipped that our president-elect has won Georgia so many times they’re calling him Joseph Tecumseh Biden.

Naturally, the Attorney General of Texas has just filed another suit to overturn the election.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing four battleground states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — whose election results handed the White House to President-elect Joe Biden.

In the suit, he claims that pandemic-era changes to election procedures in those states violated federal law, and asks the U.S. Supreme Court to block the states from voting in the Electoral College.

Legal experts politiely call this suit a “long shot.” Others call it a “publicity stunt.” And “bonkers.” Note that AG Paxton is under investigation by the FBI for “bribery” and “abuse of office.”

At least AG Paxton is going through the courts. The Arizona Republican Party is calling for insurrection.

He is. Are you? https://t.co/OY8qxNMPxm

— Arizona Republican Party (@AZGOP) December 8, 2020

There was another Arizona Republican Party tweet that more explicitly called for killing Biden supporters, but that one was removed.

Greg Sargent makes a critical point:

What Republican voters think, or say they think, about who really won matters less than the fact that, as a consequence, they actively want their elected representatives to subvert our democracy and keep Trump in power illegitimately. …

…For instance, The Post reports, protesters have descended on the houses of the GOP state House speaker in Pennsylvania and the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, chanting, “Stop the steal.” Some have been armed.

That Pennsylvania official has received thousands and thousands of voice mails, prompting his office to describe the pressure on him as “intense.” And the Michigan secretary of state has said her 4-year-old child felt threatened.

More broadly, as Reuters reports, “Elections officials across the United States” have described a “tide of intimidation, harassment and outright threats.”

As always, the Republican Party pays no political price for this behavior.

To excuse the right-wing extremism, many have pointed out that Democrats have raised questions about past elections. The 2000 presidential election is a prime example. Yes, a lot of us think Al Gore was the rightful winner of that election. But I don’t recall anyone in the Democratic Party urging us to go out and start killing Republicans. There was some bitching and grumbling, Al Gore conceded, and then George W. Bush was inaugurated.

Michelle Goldberg recalls the nationwide pearl-clutching that went on after then White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was refused service at a restaurant, and after the homeland security secretary who had overseen child separations was yelled at by a customer in another restaurant.

These two insults launched a thousand thumb-suckers about civility. More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election. “The political question of the moment,” opined Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, is this: ‘Can the Democratic Party control its left?’”

Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud.

And in those previous cases, the perpetrators of the outrage were not Democratic Party officials but private citizens. Now actual Republican officials are calling for violence against Biden supporters. We’re supposed to just accept this as normal and justified.

And it keeps escalating.

Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”

So far, what happened to Benson doesn’t appear to be turning into a big cultural moment. There’s no frisson of the new about it; it’s pretty routine for Trumpists to threaten and intimidate people who work in both public health and election administration.

Remember the St. Francois County public health director who was bullied into resigning? (You can read here what she went through.) I take it there has been no effort whatsoever to find out who threatened her. The bullies won.

Back to Michelle Goldberg.

Democrats have just won the popular vote in the seventh out of the last eight presidential elections. In the aftermath, analysts have overwhelmingly focused on what Democrats, not Republicans, must do to broaden their appeal. Partly, this stems from knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland. But it’s also just math — only one of our political parties needs to win an overwhelming national majority in order to govern.

I like that “knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland.” You don’t get any more “heartland” than St. Francois County, Missouri. Even the bullied county health official said “I know in my heart these are good people.” Oh, hell, no, they are not. They are ignorant thugs who get off on being thugs and who are allowed to get away with being thugs. This national myth of the virtuous all-American “heartland” versus the alien and corrupt “elitist coastal cities” has got to stop. I’ve lived among so-called heartlanders and in New York City, and while individuals vary on the whole I’ll take New Yorkers in a heartbeat.

Republican officials remain buffered from the consequences of their rhetoric. They continue to at least wink at, if not openly encourage, violence and lawlessnes, and they don’t have to answer for it. I believe all Democrats running for office this year were pushed to publicly state they don’t condone violent protests, but Republicans get a pass from news media and the general public at intimidation and threats of public officials.

If Republicans are facing consequences, it’s within their own ranks.

State party chairs are tearing into their governors. Elected officials are knifing one another in the back. Failed candidates are seizing on Trump’s rhetoric to claim they were also victims of voter fraud in at least a half dozen states.

If Trump’s attempts at overturning the election — which are ongoing, I should note — had succeeded, there would never be another normal election in this country again. However, it’s also the case that Lou Dobbs and Stephen Miller had a screaming fit at each other, which is worth something, I suppose.

But when’s it going to stop? Members of the Trump Administration are still dragging their feet at cooperating with the transition. Congressional Republican leadership is still refusing to acknowledge that Biden won the election. The election was five weeks ago. News outlets called it a month ago.

All kinds of excuses have been made for the GOP’s spineless deferral to Trump’s attempts at a coup. We’re all supposed to give them time to adjust. And for some reason only Democrats are ever held accountable for the bad actions of their supporters; that’s been true for a long time. But the Republicans are playing with fire, and we are not at all out of danger yet. We won’t be for a while.

We’re being slammed by the pandemic and are about to get slammed harder. Lots of states and cities are reinstating restrictions on businesses, especially bars and restaurants. Every day on the teevee news I see interviews of tearful small business owners who are on the edge of losing, or who have already lost, their businesses. And millions of Americans are heading into the holidays unemployed and over $5,000 behind on rent.

The business owners are angry at whatever government official ordered the restrictions, but they ought to be angry at Congress. People in the same fix in other countries are getting life support funds, but not here.

There is a stimulus bill in Congress. There is also an urgent need to pass a spending bill this week to avoid a government shutdown. It’s expected Congress will pass a one-week extension to that negotiations can continue.

If Congress doesn’t act by Friday, thousands of government workers considered nonessential would again be furloughed or forced to work without pay until the shutdown ends. A shutdown would likely have ripple effects, affecting everything from air travel to government health agencies handling the coronavirus pandemic.

National parks may close, airport operations could slow as workers are furloughed, and the paralysis could affect the economy, which has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated tax revenue was down $2 billion in 2019 because the IRS had halted some operations during the shutdown.

So what’s holding it up?

Some of the biggest sticking points, according to a Democratic aide, revolve around immigration, as they have in years past – with funding for a wall along the southern border and immigrant detention beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement – at the center of the dispute. Another hurdle is possibly adding language on police reform after a summer of protests over the killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Both sides then would have to agree come to an agreement on COVID-19 relief. The biggest hurdles revolve around money for state and local governments, a key item Democrats have insisted on, and liability protections for businesses, something Republicans have required in any relief bill. Though there is optimism growing on passing relief, Democrats and Republicans will have to quickly come to a deal so both chambers can pass a bill before Friday’s deadline.

The current stimulus bill under negotiation does contain $288 billion in assistance for U.S. businesses, it says here. This includes another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program. Another portion of the $288 billion is being set aside for restaurants. The bill also provides “another $300 per week from the federal government on top of their existing state unemployment benefits, assuming those have not been exhausted.” But what if those have been exhausted?

And then there’s the money for state and local governments, which Republicans have opposed, on the theory that only those bad Democrat states would get the money. Greg Sargent wrote last week:

Right now some of the states hurting the worst are red states. Whether Mitch McConnell cares, I do not know. What Mitch McConnell mostly cares about is liability protection for businesses, and that’s a sticking point for Democrats.

Here’s something I didn’t expect: