You know what else is over? The election.

This is getting ridiculous.

President Trump has abandoned his plan to win reelection by disqualifying enough ballots to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in key battleground states, pivoting instead to a goal that appears equally unattainable: delaying a final count long enough to cast doubt on Biden’s decisive victory.

On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign wired $3 million to election officials in Wisconsin to start a recount in the state’s two largest counties. His personal lawyer, ­Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has taken over the president’s legal team, asked a federal judge to consider ordering the Republican-controlled legislature to select the state’s electors. And Trump egged on a group of GOP lawmakers in Michigan who are pushing for an audit of the vote there before it is certified.

Giuliani has also told Trump and associates that his ambition is to pressure GOP lawmakers and officials across the political map to stall the vote certification in an effort to have Republican lawmakers pick electors and disrupt the electoral college when it convenes next month — and Trump is encouraging of that plan, according to two senior Republicans who have conferred with Giuliani and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.

But that outcome appears impossible. It is against the law in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin law gives no role to the legislature in choosing presidential electors, and there is little public will in other states to pursue such a path.

Behind the thin legal gambit is what several Trump advisers say is his real goal: sowing doubt in Biden’s victory with the president’s most ardent supporters and keeping alive his prospects for another presidential run in 2024.

Trump is openly trying to corrupt a democratic election in the United States, and he’s shameless about it, and his Republican cronies are turning a blind eye to the whole degrading process. Is there nothing that can be done? Do we just sit back and watch this boob commit fumbling, bumbling crimes that embarrass the country in the eyes of the world, and do nothing? It’s like standing outside the plate glass window of a bank, watching an idiot pound on the vault with a sledgehammer, while Rudy Giuliani stands at the door speed-talking nonsense at the crowd.

Oh, and almost half the crowd is cheering the crooks on.

Can we please put an end to our ongoing national humiliation and frog-march the whole mob of blithering grifters out of their positions of authority now? Can we at least strip Rudy of his license to practice law? It looks like we’re not even capable of that.

Bargain accepted, Brenden Dilley

All right, Brenden. I’ll wear the mask and accept that I look like a stupid dork, and you can point and laugh all you want.

You can die.

Could you please get it over with quickly, though, before you infect others? The whole point of the mask is to protect others from your pernicious vapors, so it really doesn’t help contain the pandemic for you to ramble about spewing in public.

What will the comedians do now?

I was just thinking…with Donald Trump out of office, are the comedians going into mourning? He is such an easy target! I suppose they could milk the aftermath of his failure for humor for a while, but honestly, I’m so tired of the Orange Twerp that I don’t want to see him as the butt of jokes anymore. I just want to see him and his crooked cronies in jail.

I think it’s time for all the internet comics to pivot and start making Biden jokes. He’s an easy target, too, and you know he’s so conservative at heart that he’ll be making all kinds of bad policy decisions that will deserve skewering. Start now, please. We’ll all know the election is settled when the satire swivels to aim at the Biden administration.

The Minnesota Nice version of collegiality

Or, in other words, ratfuckers gonna fuck rats.

A day after it was revealed that GOP state Sen. Dave Senjem tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a Nov. 5 party caucus, news broke that Republican senators and staffers were informed in a Tuesday memo that “a number of [GOP Senate] members and staff have been diagnosed with COVID-19.”

DFLers were not informed of the rash of cases on the other side of the aisle.

I wonder how many of the Republicans saw this as an opportunity to mingle with their Democratic colleagues and spread the virus before the fact that they were plague ratfuckers got out?

Living next door to the worst

I live just a few miles from the North and South Dakota borders. This situation makes me a bit uncomfortable, since if the entire country has been slack about dealing with the pandemic, the Dakotas have been the slackest.

The current rates of infection and deaths per capita in South Dakota and previously restriction-free North Dakota are what Dr. Ali Mokdad would expect to see in a war-torn nation — not here.

“How could we allow this in the United States to happen?” asked Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This is unacceptable by any standards.”

North Dakota’s COVID-19 death rates per capita in the past week are similar to the hardest hit countries in the world right now — Belgium, Czech Republic and Slovenia — according to Saturday New York Times data. That data also places South Dakota’s recent per capita deaths among the world’s highest rates.

And there’s currently nowhere in the U.S. where COVID-19 deaths are more common than in the Dakotas, according to data published by The COVID Tracking Project.

It’s a situation “as bad as it gets anywhere in the world,” Dr. William Haseltine told USA TODAY.

It’s taken getting death rates to the highest in the world for those states to even begin to implement basic procedures to limit the spread. Not to excuse Minnesota, we’ve just been dragging behind on good policy, but not quite as badly as either Dakota. It helps that we’ve got a Democratic governor, unlike Noem (fanatical mad woman) and Burgum (coward).

Haseltine, president of ACCESS Health International and author of My Lifelong Fight Against Disease, blamed politicians — especially South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem — for ignoring public health measures that have been successfully used to curb the spread of the virus elsewhere in the world.

Noem has cast doubt on whether wearing masks in public is effective, saying that she’ll leave it up to the people to decide. She has said the virus can’t be stopped.

Burgum, also a Republican, had pleaded with people to wear masks and praised local towns and cities that have mandated masks. He had avoided requiring masks and refused to enforce limits on social gatherings and business occupancies until late Friday.

The disgraceful thing is that this isn’t even a question of following the will of the electorate — a majority of citizens favor a stronger state response.

A survey in late September and early October by the state health department found that 55% of respondents supported a mask mandate and 68% said they wore masks. Surveys of mask usage show North Dakota lags behind most of the nation — but now has reached about 80%, according to Facebook surveys mapped by Carnegie Mellon University.

We’ve let a fanatical minority of incompetents take the wheel and drive the country into a ditch.

The wrong way to relax

I’m so buried in grading that I shouldn’t take a break, and in particular, I shouldn’t take a break to look at the news…

AAARGH. FUCK! SHIT NO! Do not trust this man ever. I’m seeing all this nonsense about how we ought to be conciliatory now that we won one election, and my rage knows no bounds. I’m just someone who is seeing those MAGA chuds trying to destroy and criminalize mere science, I can’t even imagine how people whose very existence has been targeted for annihilation would feel. No. Just no. No apologies to Republican scum. Their poisonous ideas need to be hounded out of the body politic — they can go join the Nazis in the hall of infamy.

This is how I feel about these people now saying it’s time to make nice.

Give up nothing. Fuck Charles Koch.

I guess I’m going to go play a game of Among Us with people who aren’t toxic assholes, before I get back to grading.

Gladsome tidings!

Could it be…is it possible that QAnon is imploding? Q went silent after the election (and his predictions failed), one of the top administrators at 8kun resigned, and the mob of True Believers is dismayed.

Trump’s loss plunged many Q believers into a crisis of faith. “It’s hard to keep the faith when your wife and daughters have left you and we didn’t get the decisive MOAB [mother of all bombs] win we deserved on election night!!” one representative post on a Q forum read.

Some posts, potentially from trolls, in Q’s home subforum on 8kun this week insisted that the poster had died by suicide.

Other movements on the scene suggested at least one high-profile Q influencer was priming to pull the plug on QAnon—and blame 8kun in the process. NeonRevolt, a pro-Q blogger and author of a book on the topic, shared a “blind item” days after the election, alleging that Q’s 8kun account might have been compromised.

Well, yes, it is difficult to maintain your enthusiasm when you’ve ripped your family apart and discover that all the prophecies of your cult flopped. Unfortunately, that just leaves the QAnon cultists desperate for a rationalization to validate their awful decisions, so that kind of catastrophe never ends the belief, it just squeezes it out into another, equally disastrous body of life-ruining fantasies, as we’ve seen in every doomsday cult that’s ever existed.

Just wait for the emergence of “R” (oh, wait, that cult already exists — S, then). Also expect schisms. It’s going to be fun, but not for the faithful.

Tommy Tuberville needs some remedial civics lessons

Are you smarter than an Alabama football coach? Here’s one who just got elected to the senate. Let’s see if you can spot the errors here.

I wonder if my European readers will see what’s wrong with this story.

Then he accidentally erased the Supreme Court and the entire judiciary, which may not be such a bad thing.

Maybe we need some kind of qualifying exam before you can run for office.