Politics

• The Pennsylvania Pilfer has been stopped: “Pennsylvanians deserve to have their voices heard, and the worth of someone’s vote is not determined by how long it takes to be counted.” So said sleazy Bob Casey, the soon-to-be former senior senator from Pennsylvania, in a strange non sequitur that signals his ongoing unwillingness to concede an election that was called by the Associated Press nearly two weeks ago. Republican challenger Dave McCormick’s lead had, ahem, mysteriously shrunk from around 26,000 votes to around 17,000 votes in recent days, but now, in a decisive setback for Pennsylvania’s cheaters, Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro is doing the right thing and siding with the high court’s ruling yesterday against counting faulty ballots. As Shapiro put it, “Any insinuation that our laws can be ignored or do not matter is irresponsible and does damage to faith in our electoral process. The rule of law matters in Pennsylvania.” Image that. An elected Democrat standing up for the Rule of Law. Said the McCormick campaign, “Bucks County and others blatantly violated the law in an effort to help Senator Casey. Senator-elect McCormick is very pleased with this ruling and looks forward to taking the Oath of Office in a few short weeks.”

• Wisconsin GOP’s Eric Hovde concedes Senate race to Tammy Baldwin (Just the News)

• Trump naming former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy to be transportation secretary (AP)

• Lame-duck Senate nomination battles: Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently called for a spirit of bipartisanship in the wake of Donald Trump’s landslide election victory and the flipping of the Senate majority to the Republicans. However, with roughly two months left before Trump takes office, Schumer has undermined his “get along” rhetoric by seeking to ram through as many of Joe Biden’s judicial nominees as possible. Soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader John Thune called out Schumer’s gambit and has vowed to lead Republicans in doing everything they can to slow-walk the process. As Thune recently stated, “If Sen. Schumer thought Senate Republicans would just roll over and allow him to quickly confirm multiple Biden-appointed judges to lifetime jobs in the final weeks of the Democrat majority, he thought wrong." Senate Republicans will force Democrats to have roll-call votes on routine procedures, which will drag the Senate’s business to a crawl. The GOP can’t prevent the Democrat majority from confirming judicial nominees, but it can work to limit the total number of confirmations.

• FBI bottlenecks for Trump appointees: In the wake of Donald Trump’s resounding electoral victory, corrupt FBI senior brass were reported to be "stunned” and “shell-shocked.” But now, having taken a few deep breaths, they’re back to conspiring against Trump — in this case, against his cabinet nominees. The Washington Times reports, “An official at FBI headquarters in Washington is warning that the bureau’s security clearance division is politicized and can’t be trusted to screen President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees for top administration jobs. … The official said the security clearance process has been ‘contaminated by the political agendas of [security division] officials and other executives in the FBI.’” The SecD, as The Times adds, has already been credibly accused by whistleblowers of weaponizing its office and of targeting and retaliating against conservative and pro-Trump FBI employees. Nonetheless, the FBI cites the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, which names the bureau as “one of the appropriate agencies responsible for candidate background investigations for Presidential appointees.” Will the FBI obstruct, or will it finally bow to the will of the American people?

• Oprah’s cash haul: Kamala Harris’s campaign shelled out a reported $1 million for a town hall event hosted by Oprah Winfrey, which aimed to pump up Harris in her failed presidential election bid. Oprah pushed back on the claim that she had been paid to shill for Harris, explaining, “I did not take any personal fee. However, the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.” Well, it turns out that the fee collected by Oprah’s production company, Harpo Productions, was not merely $1 million; rather, the total bill came in at around $2.5 million, over double what was originally reported. While it may be technically true that the Harris campaign did not personally compensate Oprah, the fact that her production company was paid a whopping two and a half million dollars for what amounted to a 90-minute infomercial does suggest that some folks were getting a fat payday. Evidently, the Harris campaign was throwing around cash like nobody’s business, and celebrities like Oprah were more than willing to receive it.

Security

• How far will Trump go to carry out mass deportations? “Promises made, promises kept.” That simple phrase has been a mantra for Donald Trump, and it will surely be tested during the next four years as Trump tries to make good on his promise of mass deportations of the Biden-Harris administration’s millions of illegal immigrants. How will the Trump administration undertake such a massive operation? Trump himself gave us a sense of this yesterday when, as Axios reports, he confirmed that he’s “planning to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to carry out mass deportations.” Shortly after the election, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton posted a statement to that effect on Truth Social, to which Trump posted a one-word, all-caps, three-exclamation-point reply: “TRUE!!!” Think about it: Does an unchecked invasion of one’s country by more than 10 million illegal immigrants — many of them military-age males, many of them in need of taxpayer-funded social services, and most of them relatively unskilled — constitute a national emergency? The answer seems obvious. And while the details of such a military operation are as yet unclear — including its accordance with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids the use of the military in civilian law enforcement — Donald Trump ran on a mass-deportation platform, and the American people have resoundingly spoken.

• The Trump Effect: Haitians are fleeing Springfield: The residents of Springfield, Ohio, are getting relief from the Biden-Harris migrant crisis even before Donald Trump takes office. Springfield became the symbol of Biden’s border malfeasance due to the influx of some 20,000 Haitian migrants that inundated the small town, straining its social services and leading to housing and other issues. However, since Trump’s election victory, a number of Haitian migrants in Springfield are reportedly fleeing the town of 60,000 over deportation fears. According to the cofounder of the Haitian Community Alliance, Jacob Payen, “People are fully aware of the election result, and that is why they are leaving; they are afraid of a mass deportation. Several of my customers have left. One guy with his family went to New Jersey; others have gone to Boston. I know three families that have gone to Canada.”

• Biden and Harris bushwhack Israel: The peace-loving citizens of the Jewish state are no doubt pleased that the anti-war candidate won the American presidential election two weeks ago. Unfortunately, Donald Trump won’t take office for two more months — which means that whoever’s calling the foreign-policy shots within the Biden-Harris administration still has plenty of time to make mischief. A case in point would be a recent sanctions regime slapped upon Israel by Team Biden-Harris, coupled with a handsome monetary gift to Israel’s enemies. The Washington Free Beacon reports, “The Biden-Harris administration on Monday unveiled sweeping new sanctions on Israeli Jews, just days after it awarded another $230 million in taxpayer funds to the Palestinians. The back-to-back announcements signal that diplomatic relations between Israel and the outgoing White House will continue to sour until President-elect Donald Trump retakes office next year.” As one senior GOP congressional source put it, “They took a campaign break from scapegoating the Jews, but now that Kamala has lost, the State Department’s intifada caucus is back in charge during the Biden going out of business sale.”

• Undersea cables cut in Baltic Sea; sabotage suspected: The two most recent nations to join NATO, Sweden and Finland, have reported that undersea cables in the Baltic Sea were severed within a day of each other. Sabotage is suspected, with a spokesman for the telecommunications company Telia Lithuania stating, “We can confirm that the internet traffic disruption was not caused by equipment failure but by physical damage to the fiber optic cable.” A Finish cable company, Cinia, also reported that a cable between Finland and Germany had been severed. The CEO of Cinia did not directly blame sabotage but certainly hinted at it, saying, “At the moment, there is no way to assess the cause of the cable break, but such breaks without external impact do not happen in these waters." The prime suspect is Russia, and the U.S. has been warning about Russia targeting undersea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, especially after Sweden and Finland’s entry into NATO. That said, evidence has yet to be collected to make any conclusive determination.

• Ukraine fires first U.S.-made missile into Russia (Daily Mail)

• Putin signs Russia’s nuclear doctrine update into law (Newsweek)

• Satire: In last-ditch attempt to prevent Trump from taking office, Democrats start World War III (Babylon Bee)

Misc.

• "Unknown and unauthorized third party” has gained access to Matt Gaetz depositions (CBS News) | Ethics Committee will meet Wednesday to discuss results of Gaetz probe (Just the News)

• Republican to introduce transgender bathroom ban at the U.S. Capitol (ABC News)

• Wife of prominent trans writer hacked father to death with ice ax after Trump’s election night victory (NY Post)

• DOJ will push Google to sell Chrome to break search monopoly (Bloomberg)

• Forty-five Hong Kong pro-democracy activists are sentenced to jail in city’s biggest so-called national security trial (NBC News)

• Budget travel icon Spirit Airlines files for bankruptcy protection after mounting losses (CNBC) | Humor: Spirit Airlines announces it will tell you why it went bankrupt for an added fee of $50 (Babylon Bee)

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